Why Brexit is about much more than Britain

THE EU began on Monday its first full week without the United Kingdom as a member. Yet, while much attention has focused on what this means for London, how the Brussels-based club will itself change because of Brexit could be the key, but often overlooked, outcome of UK withdrawal.

As the bloc now enters a crucial few months in 2020, there are at least two key domestic and foreign debates about the EU's future underway. The first one concerns the internal rebalancing and reform of the union, a debate that will now speed up.

Until last Friday, the UK had remained an EU member with all the same rights and powers as any other member state with the sole exception, understandably, of not being allowed to take part in discussions among the remaining members about how to handle exit negotiations.

Following the UK withdrawal, Brussels will now begin a two year "conference" about the future of Europe, a two-year soul-searching exercise aimed at reforming the Brussels-based club to "reach out to the silent majority of Europeans, empowering them and giving them the space to speak up is essential for our democracy". One key moment in this process will be in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which currently holds the bloc's rotating presidency, on May 9, which is Europe Day.

Areas of focus of the new two-year conference include how best to realise the EU's headline policy ambitions such as equality, digital transformation, and "shoring up" the EU's democratic foundations. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to follow up on what is debated and agreed during the conference, including potential treaty changes.

Beyond this big picture issue debate, there is important procedural reform also underway. With withdrawal of one of its largest member states, this change process is as much a necessity as a virtue, including restructuring EU budgets.

More broadly, the union's centre of power may shift significantly, with as-yet unclear consequences for policy direction. Here there were initial fears expressed by some after the 2016 referendum that larger member states would reach an agreement with the UK, signalling a potential shift away from the EU's supranational institutions towards a more intergovernmentally-run union.

While those fears didn't materialise, a broad range of EU policy could yet change markedly, in the years ahead, altering the political economy of the union. The UK's influence over the EU can often be overlooked, not least by its own populace, thanks in part to its reputation as an awkward partner. This sometimes confuses popularity and effectiveness.

ENLARGED UNION

The UK has pushed for an enlarged union where deregulation and free-market economics are the norm. Attempts to move away from this, for example in tax harmonisation, could take a step forward without the UK now as a blocker. Beyond these important domestic issues, there is also a critical foreign policy debate underway over the role of the Brussels-based club in a more complex, multipolar Europe and world.

Brexit has created a new non-EU power in Western Europe and this development is already changing the EU's relationship with other non-EU European countries, namely Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey, Lichtenstein and non-EU states in the Balkans. Each has developed relations with the EU that, most obviously in the case of Norway and Switzerland, but also to a lesser extent Turkey and Ukraine, were intended as a means to the end of eventual EU membership or at least closer relations with the EU.

Brexit has not (yet) thrown these processes into reverse, with eventual accession to the Brussels-based club remaining an option, but it does, however, open up new possibilities for future relationships centred on continued non-membership.

Decision makers in these states have used the Brexit vote as an opportunity to raise questions about the future of their relations with the EU. There has been some limited discussion as to whether Brexit might open opportunities for a radical overhaul of Europe's institutional architecture, with one such proposal calling for a new "continental partnership". Such ambitious plans have faded, however, partly because the complexities of the Article 50 negotiations were perceived to tarnish Brexit, but they do point to opportunities for future change.

Such reform may be needed not only to deal with the changes that the UK's exit brings to European geopolitics, but also to deal with wider global trends of which Brexit is only one. Europe already feels the pull of different world powers, especially the United States and China, and it also struggles locally with the geopolitical disruptions of Turkey and Russia.

This new multipolarity has brought greater uncertainty to Europe, and with Brexit making Britain another pole, the geopolitical terrain becomes all the more complex. If population projections hold, it is Russia, Turkey and the UK that look set to be the most populous countries in Europe by mid-century, thereby leaving the EU in the middle of large, assertive states.

From the perspective of decision makers in states such as Russia, where sovereignty and hard power matter, Brexit is seen as an especially significant loss of power for the EU. Europe's long history of struggling to overcome internal problems is one the world is also accustomed to dealing with. A period of introspection with resources and time spent dealing with internal issues means the EU may be more distracted from key international matters which others will take the lead on.

THREE STATES

Three states in particular will be crucial to shaping how Brexit plays out vis-à-vis Europe's changing global geopolitical landscape and a fast-changing multipolar world: Europe's hegemon Germany, the US and Russia. Other powers such as France and China will influence Brexit, but it will be the choices of the first three - whether to engage, exploit or ignore - that will shape the context of European and international politics in which the UK's exit unfolds in the 2020s.

What these debates showcase is that, important as Brexit is, it will not solely define the future of the EU. Instead, the UK's exit is just one of several first order challenges confronting the bloc that include ongoing pressures facing Russia relations, the future of Nato and ties with the US. How the Brussels-based club responds to them all will not just frame its future relationship with the UK, but also determine its wider place in the world to boot.