Thread by @Usherwood

Since everyone else is pitching into @anandMenon1 on his article yesterday, here's a couple of thoughts

tl;dr hard to succeed if you don't know what you want, and EU has much clearer idea of that than the UK

ft.com/content/69edfc…

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@anandMenon1 The purpose of negotiation is to achieve an outcome that serves parties' interests fairly and durably

That in turn requires parties to know their interests and to have a sense of how those can be achieved

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@anandMenon1 In the broadest sense, both EU and UK want the same thing: a stable future relationship to replace the current relationship

But at any other level of specificity there is obvious divergence

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@anandMenon1 For UK, the uncertainty about what Brexit is for is much discussed (you can read my article for Political Insight on just this: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…)

But EU is also chasing some varied objectives too

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@anandMenon1 Recall that Brexit has both short- and long-term implications

Short: challenge to integrity/value of EU membership
Long: potential addition to sources of instability around EU's borders

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@anandMenon1 Both are substantial issues and both have weighed heavily in EU's calculations

BUT short-term effects weighed more heavily, because they were right there, whereas the possibility of the long-term problems was a, well, possibility

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@anandMenon1 Thus the EU did focus on managing the short-term challenge to membership much more than the long-term

But it didn't neglect the latter

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@anandMenon1 As various people have noted, the EU did flex to try and build space for UK to get to a ratified Withdrawal Agt (most evidently on the backstop), because that was Route 1 to getting into a settled future relationship

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@anandMenon1 (note also that the backstop might have been a big problem for the Internal Market, but it also pushed UK towards a closer future relationship)

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@anandMenon1 But EU has also been constrained by the lack of consensus about what the future relationship should be, other than cordial

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@anandMenon1 If Commission did concentrate on Art.50 element of Brexit, then it's partly because MS unity raised more chance of building out into more consensus about the next stage

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@anandMenon1 I wrote last spring about how the EU has handled Art.50 (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…) and was rather positive (in terms of negotiation theory)

But there's a big 'but' now

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@anandMenon1 It one thing to follow theory in your practice, but still the test remains one of whether you reach an outcome that serves your interests

At present, the UK's failure to ratify the WA means the EU is far from where it wants to end up

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@anandMenon1 I'll end by noting that theory suggests a 'good' outcome is also one that improves the relationship between the parties.

Regardless of whose fault it is, that looks really unlikely now, which in turn raises Qs about the durability of any outcome

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@anandMenon1 So to pull it all together: process matters, but so do outcomes. Neither EU nor UK is succeeding in both right now

/end