THE UK'S HARD BARGAINING ANALYSED

As I mentioned yesterday, I stumbled across an academic paper about Brexit and looking at at the negotiating strategy of the UK from a high-level perspective. The title, Cultures of negotiation: Explaining Britain’s hard bargaining in the Brexit negotiations (HERE). Written by two academics for The Dahrendorf Forum, a joint initiative by the Hertie School of Governance, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Stiftung Mercator,  it covers Britain's stance relative to the EU, something it describes as a 'puzzle'.

The academics are foreign so their bafflement at the way we've gone about the withdrawal is understandable. Like Brexit itself, it probably doesn't make any sense to a rational thinker.

You have to have lived here for a very long time to get your head round it. The paper, released in September 2018, argues that "the UK’s bargaining strategy comes with a high risk of immediate failure, as well as longer term self-harm".

I confess some of it is heavy going, written in a convoluted academic style and described as a working paper not to be cited. Nevertheless, it sets out precisely where we are going wrong and it's not difficult to see why.  This is the introduction:-

"The Brexit negotiations present a puzzle for scholars of international bargaining. Received wisdom has it that hard bargaining strategies make sense only when accompanied by a significant advantage in bargaining power—conceived in terms of material capabilities, viable alternatives, and credible domestic constraints. When such conditions do not obtain, it is argued, hard bargaining creates reputational costs, diminishes credibility, and decreases the chance of a deal. Yet, the United Kingdom has undeniably pursued a hard bargaining strategy from a position of relative weakness.

"While the UK is a major economic and political actor, it is weaker in every measure of material capability compared to the EU27. Its alternatives to a trade deal with the EU—likely to have fewer and certainly not immediate advantages—are limited and, while domestic constraints are high, they are neither sufficiently unified nor credible to afford leverage to Britain. In spite of this, the UK position shows all the hallmarks of hard bargaining: a negative portrayal of the ‘other’, unwillingness to make concessions, the issuing of unrealistic demands, frequent threats to exit the talks, zero-sum assumptions, the absence of argumentation, and minimal communication. The UK’s hard-bargaining stance is thus difficult to explain from the perspective of existing theories of negotiation behaviour".

The authors make a stab at why this should be and come up with three main strands:

• The dominance of an ideology that regards the threat of force (or the application of other forms of power) as the best way to influence other actors.
• The Westminster model of the first-past-the-post electoral system that makes adversarial politics the norm. 
• Britain, they argue, is more weakly ‘socialised’ into prevailing European politics, because of its late accession to the then European Economic Community and its self-identity as an Atlantic (or global) power.

They talk of 'nostalgic conceptions' of Britain’s global, imperial past and its influence in many parts of the world. Because it is believed that Britain is a powerful international actor, "it is also assumed that its capabilities—military, economic, cultural—may be brought to bear on the negotiations. The greater the assumption of British power and prestige, which is itself, unsurprisingly, correlated with Eurosceptic attitudes, the greater the tendency to overstate the UK’s capabilities vis-à-vis the EU and the greater the corresponding propensity to see hard bargaining as a workable strategy".

This is what you and I know as British exceptionalism, that somehow we should be top dog even when it's clear that we aren't.  This is BoJo always claiming we are 'world-leaders' in one thing or another when we're nothing of the sort, often not even close to world-leadership. Those clinging to dreams of empire find this almost impossible to reconcile with our struggle for relevance.

Written from a series of interviews on both sides of The Channel in 2017 and published in September 2018, the paper ably demonstrates why the negotiations went desperately wrong, not only because we overestimated ourselves but that we overestimated the EU's perception of us. We are simply not the global power we were 50 years ago although many older people don't seem to realise it.

Of course, the authors do not cover events after September last year so they include the caveat that, "While there is every chance that history may vindicate Theresa May and her Brexit strategy, this will not negate the puzzle outlined at the beginning of the article". And they say, driving a hard bargain from a weak position risks damaging the reputation and credibility of the UK as a diplomatic actor. 

Mrs May might succeed but at the moment it looks very unlikely.

I leave you with a few interesting quotes from the paper:

One interviewee noted how unusual the UK is “in the extent to which the media…is not really representative of any political party, [with] The Sun and The [Daily] Mail much further to the right of British politics than even the sort of centre right within Britain, which skews political dialogue which does not really reflect the political elite, or even the majority views of the British populations”

How true.

Moreover, interviewees noted that there was little effort on behalf of the UK government to level with the domestic audience. This has led to a situation where “the elite understands each other, but on other levels [the] public never really understood how the EU worked…and no one has ever tried to explain [it to] them…the difference is that [in France and in Germany] you have politicians and you have governments who have always tried to explain [to the public] why it’s in France’s interest and Germany’s interest to be part of the EU”.

And how even more true.