Nicolas Véron

The UK / EU Separation: How Fast Does It Happen?

This post was published yesterday by the Peterson Institute, and this morning by Bruegel.

Up until the British rebuff on Thursday, the European Union had always been in expansion mode, also known in EU parlance as enlargement. The UK vote to leave the EU marks the first-ever case of this process being reversed.

In the past, there have been a number of situations where a country could be outside the union legally, but inside politically. It was common practice in the early 2000s to invite ex-Communist candidate countries to attend votes in the Council of the EU in anticipation of their formal accession in early 2004. Yet in this case, a country, the United Kingdom, is inside the EU legally, but now firmly outside of it politically. From now on, the EU will routinely hold substantial intergovernmental discussions without the UK being represented, even though the formalities of membership will be maintained in parallel.

An additional layer of complexity derives from the fact that two component parts of the UK, Northern Ireland and Scotland, seek to remain politically inside the EU even though, for the moment, they remain legally tied with England and Wales. Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, declared immediately after the Brexit vote, that “Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU” and that “Scotland faces the prospect of being taken out of the EU against our will. I regard that as democratically unacceptable. (…) Starting this afternoon, [Scottish] ministers will be engaged in discussions with key stakeholders – particularly in the business community – to emphasise that as of now we are still firmly in the EU. (…) Scotland has voted to stay in the EU – and (…) I intend to discuss all options for doing so.”

In a strictly legal sense the referendum of June 23 is binding neither on the UK nor on the EU. In the UK, Parliament has supreme authority, but it is highly unlikely to reverse the mandate delivered by the voters. In the EU, the procedure for separation is set out in some detail in Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union (TUE), and places the responsibility for initiating the process in the hands of the relevant member state’s government: ”A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention.”

Article 50 TUE further implies that the government’s notification to the EU sets a clock ticking, which incentivizes the parties to find an agreement on the terms of separation within the following two years. If no such agreement is found after those two years, and in the absence of unanimity of all EU member states to extend the negotiation period, the EU membership of the member states is terminated automatically, which would be so disruptive for the country concerned that any sane government is expected to work hard to find mutually acceptable terms.

A key question for the UK, therefore, is this: when does its government notify its decision to withdraw under Article 50 following the vote on June 23? Prime Minister David Cameron explained in February at the House of Commons that “the British people would rightly expect that to start straight away” after a vote to leave. In his resignation speech, however, Mr Cameron made it clear that he would leave that notification on the to-do-list for his successor, probably not before the end of summer. “In my view we should aim to have a new prime minister in place by the start of the Conservative Party conference in October,” he declared. “A negotiation with the European Union will need to begin under a new prime minister and I think it's right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger Article 50 and start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU.”

By contrast, a joint statement of the heads of all relevant EU institutions on June 24 asked for the negotiation to start quickly: “We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be. Any delay would unnecessarily prolong uncertainty. We have rules to deal with this in an orderly way. Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union sets out the procedure to be followed if a Member State decides to leave the European Union. We stand ready to launch negotiations swiftly with the United Kingdom regarding the terms and conditions of its withdrawal from the European Union.”

Among other concerns, the EU institutions’ leaders want the consequences of leaving to be clear and unambiguous to all. They understandably fear that a membership referendum may be pressed in other member states on the questionable premise that exit can be almost painless, as the UK Leave campaign has argued. They thus desire to establish the actual precedent as quickly as possible. It is too early to prejudge the outcome of such negotiation, of course. One may expect the EU stance to be not punitive, but unforgiving.

In practice, there is little the EU can do now to force an acceleration of the notification process. Article 50, as quoted above, leaves no room for interpretation as to how the process will be triggered. So the EU will have to wait until the domestic political consequences of the vote are sorted out in the UK before the actual business of negotiation can actually start. Just as during the referendum campaign, the EU institutions and all other member states must for the moment remain the spectators of a dramatic development in which they have a huge amount at stake.

European Banking Supervision: The First 18 Months

Bruegel yesterday published this report, which I co-edited with Dirk Schoenmaker, in its Blueprint series. To our knowledge, it is the first in-depth study of how European Banking Supervision (also known as the Single Supervisory Mechanism, in place at the European Central Bank since early November 2014) works in practice. It includes a euro-area overview and overall assessment, and nine country-specific chapters by local experts that bring anecdotal color and a sense of the lingering diversity of experiences and perceptions across member states. 

Dirk and I summarized key findings of the report in a Bruegel blog post which was also republished by Vox. 

In case of a Brexit, London would lose business as a global financial center

This text was first published in a slightly abridged version by The International Economy in its Spring 2016 issue, and republished by the Peterson Institute and by Bruegel.

There are multiple sub-scenarios in the aftermath of a No vote on June 23. In almost all of them, however, London would lose business as a global financial center. Part of its unmatched position as a hub for international financial services is linked to its membership of the European Union and corresponding access to the EU internal market. Non-European banks, especially US ones, use London as a beachhead into the single market, and many euro-area banks centralize their EU wholesale markets activities there. The EU “passport” concept of mutual recognition among supervisory authorities works smoothly for investment banking activities. The EU framework provides strong legal protection against regulatory fiat, as was illustrated when the European Court of Justice in March 2015 rejected the European Central Bank’s “location policy,” intended to force clearing houses to move their euro-denominated operations from London to the euro area. The access and protections would disappear if the UK was to withdraw from the internal market.

Most non-UK-headquartered large financial institutions are actively working on post-referendum plans, and take the possibility of a No vote seriously. For understandable reasons they do not communicate about this planning work and its conclusions. But early indications suggest that their moves following a No vote could be quick and significant, given the likelihood that the United Kingdom would enter a prolonged period of high uncertainty. An order of magnitude of one-third of activity potentially relocated outside of the United Kingdom does not appear far-fetched.

The next obvious question is about who would win the business that London would lose. Inside the European Union, some have expectations that, since Germany and France would be the largest remaining countries, Frankfurt and Paris would be best placed to gain. But this ignores the incentives for financial firms to go to the most finance-friendly places, and there are a number of them in Europe. A rule of thumb of finance-friendliness is provided by the European Commission’s ill-starred proposal of a Financial Transaction Tax, whose adoption only a minority of EU member states are considering. FTT doubters such as Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden are more likely to attract business from London than FTT supporters including France, Germany, or, for that matter, Belgium.

But even bigger transfers could happen outside the European Union, and specifically to the United States. On almost any measure, London and New York are by far the world’s two largest financial centers. U.S. authorities have acknowledged London as a preferred entry point into the European Union for American financial firms, and have built strong working relationships with UK financial regulators over the years. But once the bilateral link with London is no longer part of the larger relationship between the United States and the European Union, one can expect a more competitive stance to favor New York as the best place to do international financial business.

Even more difficult to assess, but arguably also even more substantial, is the opportunity cost of a Brexit. London would have a lot to gain from the continuation of EU financial integration. Banking Union, even in its current halfway form, will lead to the opening of more financial business to cross-border competition across the European Union, and so will any concrete moves in the direction of the European Commission’s vision of a Capital Markets Union. But if the United Kingdom is no longer in the European Union, it will not be able to reap as much advantage from these future developments as it has in the past steps of EU integration.