Quote:
Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
I think these are the points that are really the sticking points on the EU side.
3. Is fair enough, there should be differences between trade/movement deals and full membership.
2. Is what is at the nub of the situation for the EU side. If we can leave the club but still trade and have some degree of movement then the whole club can become a non-entitiy as others would want the same.
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The UK is not trying to negotiate anything close to 'loose membership' status. Norway and Switzerland style arrangements (so-called 'EEA-plus') were dismissed very early on.
The problem is that the EU is philosophically unequipped for the reversal of the irreversible, which is represented by the UK's departure. We have contravened the grand narrative of ever-closer union, and while the institution may pay lip service to respect for the referendum result, they simply don't have the intellectual resources to understand what that actually looks like.
Thus, we have become stuck on symbols that echo all the way back to the earliest days of European empires. Who rules the waves? For the UK side, sovereign control over territorial waters and appropriate control of the exclusive economic zone as recognised in international law is a given. For the EU side - for which read, the French in this case - the old imperial power is up to its old tricks, and worse, is seeking to exclude French trawlers from parts of the sea that didn't even sit within the UK's economic zone at the point the UK joined the EU (the relevant UN agreement not having come into force until 1982). Plus, French trawler men are militant and Macron is justifiably worried about what will happen if the UK gets its way on this.
We have ended up in an impasse and one side or the other is going to have to give way, if not now, then in a year or two once everyone is fed up with the additional complexities of carrying on business without a trade deal. Personally, and I know I speak as a Brexit supporter, I can't conceive of this ending without the UK controlling its waters outside the CFP. It is a basic issue of sovereignty, which is the very thing the EU as an institution is hard-wired to think of as negotiable, but there are pragmatic voices in the member states who are going to have to find a way to talk Macron down, and I believe they will do so. Eventually.