It could be said the EU was never going to offer Britain a Switzerland-style deal
It is often said that Britain is a nation divided by our relationship with Europe, but British people are in fact united in their disinterest as to how the European Union works. To most it will always come across as a byzantine mixture of commissions, councils, and competencies presided over by a rather grey cadre of foreigners, of whom, a suspiciously large number get to call themselves President.
The purest expression of this ignorance is the repeated failure by nearly everyone within the Brexit debate to argue for the relationship they want with Europe from first principles. Instead, other nations are used as a crude shorthand for the type of relationship that they believe is best for Britain. As Brexit Secretary, David Davis championed the EU’s free trade deal with Canada as an example of how you could secure close economic ties without staying in the Single Market. Likewise, Theresa May would often be said to be trying to pursue a Swiss-style relationship with the EU, one where Britain would get to pick and choose which bits of the European project it participated in. Meanwhile those who wanted to stay inside the Single Market would talk about following Norway’s example.
The problem with all this is that the EU wasn’t willing to offer those countries’ deals to Britain. Alarmingly that is clearest with respect to Switzerland, which makes the angst over suggestions Jeremy Hunt is pursuing a route to follow Geneva all the more bizarre. Brussels hates the thicket of bilateral deals and basically sees a “Swiss-style deal” as code for wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
Great Britain arguably ended up in a relationship with the EU that looks like Canada’s, with an emphasis on maintaining the trade in goods whilst doing relatively little to support services or broader political cooperation. The problem of course is that the trading block would not allow Northern Ireland to be party to such a deal, because it would create a hard border on the Island of Ireland. Even now, three years and two Prime Ministers after it came out of the oven, negotiators are still struggling to make Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal fully edible.
But what is nearly always overlooked by Johnson’s critics is that a Norway-style deal would fall foul of the same problem. Just like Canada, Norway is not part of the EU’s Customs Union, so there would still be the issue of the Irish border to contend with. Likewise, no deal that the EU offered the UK mimics the incredibly threadbare institutional structure of Norway’s deal, nor provides the same ability to walk away with no reason on a year’s notice.
And this brings us to the subtext of our frequent invocation of various countries and their relationship with the EU; that if they got this type of deal, then surely that should be on offer to Britain. But the British economy isn’t the same as any of these countries, it’s a lot closer to the EU than Canada, and a lot bigger than all of them. That increases the potential risks any deal presents to the Single Market, which in response causes the EU to insist upon greater safeguards against non-compliance. Such worries are of course magnified by Britain having been an awkward partner for decades, always looking to walk back things it had agreed, or seeking exemptions to what everyone else wanted to do.
But it’s not just about us, it’s about them too. Europe’s deals with Norway and Switzerland can be traced back to the 1970s and were codified in their current form in the 1990s. The EU is in a very different place than it was back then. Thirty years ago, it only represented a fraction of Europe, having more than doubled its membership since 1992. But not only is the EU more powerful, it is less optimistic. Switzerland and Norway were offered these sweetheart deals, in the expectation that they would gradually move towards Brussels and become full members. Instead, they are stuck in the same place as they were back then. At the same time, many Eastern European countries have failed to follow through on promises on issues such as adopting the Euro or adhering to Western standards on human rights, corruption, and political freedom. The EU is simply more cautious and cynical when agreeing deals with external countries, as can be best seen in its recent treatment of candidate countries from the Western Balkans.
So no, Britain will never get a deal like what Norway or Switzerland got from the European Union. But nor would they if they were negotiating with the Europeans today.