Dalibor Rohac on Brexit

While I do perhaps naively believe that Boris Johnson is the right man to put lipstick on a pig, that is: to trim some sort of agreements between the EU and the UK, Dalibor Rohac thinks that we should prepare for a No Deal Brexit. Dalibor has lived in England and is a fine observer of European matters.

There are several interesting points in his piece but let me highlight a couple. On the one hand, he thinks the European Union has no margin to work a new agreement out for "geopolitical" reasons: "The current era of great-power competition requires the EU, especially if weakened by Brexit, to build credibility and a reputation for a certain degree of ruthlessness for being able to make decisions and stick with them even when it is temporarily inconvenient". On the other, he maintains that Johnson will be able to extract political value out of a hard Brexit, basically because it is not going to be as disastrous in the short term as Remainers have so far prophesized: "Will Brexit be disruptive and costly? Of course it will. However, if it is expected and planned for, the disruption will not take the form of unmitigated chaos on October 31. Planes will continue to fly, there will be food on the shelves of supermarkets, and the Eurostar will not come to a standstill halfway between Dover and Calais."

I recommend the whole piece.

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