{"id":4170,"date":"2019-09-17T05:34:58","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T05:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=4170"},"modified":"2019-09-17T05:34:58","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T05:34:58","slug":"europe-looks-on-with-dismay-as-brexit-disarray-deepens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=4170","title":{"rendered":"Europe looks on with dismay as Brexit disarray deepens"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Laura King \/London<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Friday\u060c 13 September 2019 12:19 AM<\/span><\/p>\n

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Watching the growing disarray unfolding in Britain, the rest of Europe is worried.
\nWith British Prime Minister Boris Johnson battling his own party and parliament over Brexit, smashing political norms as he goes, the prospect of Britain \u201ccrashing out\u201d of the European Union on October 31 is still seen by many as a real possibility \u2013 even though British lawmakers have passed a bill meant to preclude that scenario.
\nBritain\u2019s parliament \u2013 suspended early Tuesday by Johnson amid a raucous outcry from the opposition \u2013 is now in a five-week hiatus that ends just two weeks before the Brexit deadline.
\nThe prime minister says he still wants to make a deal with the EU, but there\u2019s been no sign of significant progress on the major points of contention, including how to deal with what will be a new EU-UK land border on the island of Ireland.
\nEconomists generally agree that if Britain departs the 28-nation bloc with no withdrawal accord, the British economy will suffer a far greater shock than will its European counterparts.
\nBut repercussions will be felt across Europe and beyond, with fears in several EU states that Brexit could help nudge a prospective economic slowdown towards full-blown recession.
\nThe EU, which never wanted Britain to leave, is still likely to grant an extension of the October 31 deadline, although Johnson swears he won\u2019t seek one, and the bloc is increasingly pessimistic that Britain can find a way out of its conundrum.
\nThe EU is also unsettled over continuing uncertainty about the fate of its 3.6mn nationals living in Britain, many of whom are discovering, to their dismay, that decades of working and paying taxes in the UK are no guarantee they will be allowed to stay.
\nAnd while Brussels is accustomed to worrying about anti-democratic tendencies in member states like Hungary and Poland, and about far-right inroads being made there and elsewhere, EU officials have been alarmed by the spectacle of emerging constitutional stresses and strains in Britain, one of the traditional pillars of the postwar order.
\nHere\u2019s a look at some of the major EU players and how they view the latest developments:
\n* IRELAND
\nIreland might have the most to lose. It views Brexit \u2013 especially a no-deal departure \u2013 as a threat to both peace and prosperity.
\nFor nearly two decades, the border with Northern Ireland has been open, and that invisibility is considered a crucial element in reversing decades of sectarian strife that killed thousands in the three decades leading up to 1998\u2019s Good Friday accord.
\nWith the looming prospect of a \u201chard\u201d frontier between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, there are worries that barriers and checkpoints would become a magnet for extremist attacks.
\nThe EU has been adamant in its insistence that the border stay open; Johnson has demanded the scrapping of a withdrawal-accord provision meant to ensure that.
\nThe prime minister travelled to Dublin on Monday, where his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, said he hasn\u2019t yet seen any concrete British proposals to address the border quandary \u2013 and added pointedly that a no-deal departure would only be the beginning of tortuous new negotiations over the Irish frontier.
\n\u201cThere is no such thing as a clean break,\u201d he told Johnson.
\n* GERMANY
\nAs the continent\u2019s economic powerhouse \u2013 but one seeing fiscal storm clouds on the horizon \u2013 Germany wants to help ease Britain\u2019s path out of the EU, if it insists on going.
\nChancellor Angela Merkel last month appeared to try to throw Johnson a lifeline when she suggested during a Berlin meeting with him that Britain try in the next 30 days to come up with some concrete new proposals for an accord that the EU previously said was not open to renegotiation.
\nBut three weeks have already elapsed, with no new Johnson talking points disclosed.
\nGermany\u2019s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said this week that \u201cwe remain in principle ready to talk\u201d about Brexit terms, but that that \u201cultimately requires clear decisions and proposals from London.\u201d
\nBrexit is already depressing German economic projections.
\nThe Federation of German Industries, the main umbrella group for industrial trade associations, says a no-deal departure by Britain would bring already weak growth forecasts for the year down to zero.
\nBut business uncertainty brought on by a new delay would also dampen economic prospects, said the head of the German Institute for Economic Research, an independent research group. Meanwhile, powerful German companies are already preparing for the possibility of a no-deal break with plans to reduce their footprint in the UK.
\nBMW, the automaking giant, said it would curtail production at its plant in Oxford as the deadline approaches.
\n* FRANCE
\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron has shown some willingness to play the EU\u2019s disciplinarian in dealings with Britain, while remaining supportive of an orderly departure if one must take place.
\nThis week, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian signalled impatience with Britain\u2019s inability to either move towards a definitive break with the EU, strike a deal with the bloc or call the whole thing off.
\n\u201cThe British must tell us what they want,\u201d Le Drian said exasperatedly in a weekend radio interview, referring to the polarisation and deadlock that have prevailed since the 2016 Brexit referendum, which won narrow approval.
\n\u201cFor three years, the UK\u2026 has found no way forward.\u201d
\nAny Brexit extension requires unanimous approval by EU members, and France is unlikely to use its veto power. But the country is preparing for no-deal contingencies, getting ready for a weeks-long \u201crehearsal\u201d by customs authorities at airports, train terminus points and ports, especially Calais, the gateway to the tunnel under the English Channel.
\nFrance, like Germany, has been taken aback by Johnson\u2019s take-no-prisoners style on Brexit, but has stressed that Britain, not France or the EU, would bear the economic brunt of a no-deal departure.
\nHowever, Macron has already seen his popularity dented by months of \u201cyellow vest\u201d populist protests, and can ill afford bad economic news.
\n* THE NETHERLANDS
\nHolland is a relatively small player among European economies, but Britain looms large in its financial relationships as a main trading partner and its biggest international investor.
\nThe Dutch port of Rotterdam, Europe\u2019s largest, now enjoys seamless intra-EU trade with Britain, but will be burdened by the need for customs checks and goods inspections if Brexit goes ahead as scheduled.
\nStill, the Dutch position on Brexit is hardening.
\nHolland is working to woo companies that are abandoning Britain to relocate operations within the EU.
\nDutch Minister for Trade Sigrid Kaag told the financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad last week that there would need to be a \u201cgood reason\u201d for granting a new Brexit delay.
\nThe Netherlands, like Britain, once bestrode a far-flung empire.
\nAs the Brexit crisis intensified earlier this year, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte offered some succinct advice about the global standing of former colonial powers.
\nBritain, he told the Guardian newspaper, \u201cis going to become an economy of middling size in the Atlantic Ocean. It is neither the US nor the EU. It is too small to appear on the world stage on its own.\u201d
\nPolicymaking in the Netherlands tends to be influenced by a strong pragmatic streak, but Johnson\u2019s seeming loss of control over the Brexit process has dumbfounded some influential Dutch politicians.
\n\u201cWe thought the Brits were rational pragmatists,\u201d said Anne Mulder, a Dutch lawmaker who leads the country\u2019s Brexit planning in parliament, told the Financial Times.
\n\u201cWell, they aren\u2019t.\u201d \u2013 Tribune News Service<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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