Benjamin Martill (University of Edinburgh) and Tobias Wille (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Trust and Cooperation
Cooperation is near impossible to achieve without a basic level of underlying trust. If would-be partners expect each other to abrogate agreements or engage in non-cooperative behaviour, then the risks of cooperation will appear too high to them. By reducing uncertainty to tolerable levels, even though only in their minds and not necessarily in reality, trust enables cooperation in international negotiations.
This was understood well by both sides in the Brexit negotiations. Theresa May and Michel Barnier sought to convince each other early on of their commitment to a negotiated outcome that would protect the interests of citizens on both sides, in other words: of their trustworthiness.
While the Commission nonetheless expected certain noncooperative actions on behalf of the UK right from the beginning – like competitive deregulation – and built these possibilities into its negotiating strategy, it also trusted that the UK would stand by its agreements, providing a baseline of cooperation sufficient for the talks to proceed.
The actions of the Johnson government changed this expectation in many ways. Whilst negotiating the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) in 2020, Johnson sought to up-the-ante on Britain’s hard bargaining by following a ‘madman strategy’ based on unpredictability and threats to abrogate previous agreements.
Johnson’s strategy played well to pro-Brexit domestic audiences and subverted the Commission’s preferred sequencing of the Brexit negotiations, which relied on banking withdrawal issues before moving on to the future relationship. But it also brought about a precipitous decline in trust, with Commission actors questioning the UK’s commitment to the rule of law and to any agreements signed with the Union.
What role for lost trust?
How did the loss of trust affect the outcome of the negotiations? And how were both sides able to reach eventual agreement nonetheless? In a recent article we address these questions, looking at key moments in which trust in the Johnson government was lost.
Drawing on a series of interviews with Commission officials from 2019-22, we look in turn at:
(1) the abandonment of commitments in the Political Declaration, (2) the introduction of the Internal Market Bill (IMB), and (3) the unilateral decision not to undertake regulatory checks in the Irish Sea.
We argue that trust functions as a way of reducing uncertainty. By deciding to trust other parties, actors can omit certain non-cooperative possibilities from their calculations about the future, thereby reducing complexity to tolerable levels. When trust is broken, actors revise their expectations and with it their negotiation strategies. They then resort to alternative ways of reducing uncertainty, such as increasing control and reducing discretion.
Political Declaration
The first major blow to the Commission’s trust in the UK occurred in February 2020 when the Johnson government informed the EU negotiators that it would be diverging from the Political Declaration in several areas, notably removing the mooted security agreement and the level playing field commitments.
While the Political Declaration was a non-binding document, the Commission had trusted that it represented a clear statement of the UK’s negotiating aims, and felt aggrieved that the Johnson government was seeking unilaterally to move away from areas that were already sorted.
The UK decision did not alter the Commission’s insistence on a level playing field in the TCA, but it did make officials doubt the sincerity of the UK’s stated aims. Officials questioned whether the UK was negotiating in good faith, and became warier of stated UK intentions, as well as keener to tie Britain into strong commitments as part of the agreement.
Internal Market Bill
A greater challenge came from the IMB, which was unveiled in September 2020, and which would effectively abrogate commitments made in the legally binding Northern Ireland Protocol appended to the Withdrawal Agreement. The challenge was deliberate, and was seen both as a way for the UK to gain leverage in the talks and to avail itself of an agreement it did not appreciate the terms of.
The IMB shocked the Commission, which had anticipated hard bargaining, but had trusted that the UK would stand by its legal obligations. Rather than walk away from the talks – and forego an agreement – the Commission rather opted to increase its emphasis on strong governance commitments in the TCA.
Now that the Commission anticipated non-cooperative UK actions, it sought alternative means of reducing uncertainty than trust, which included tying the UK into dispute resolution mechanisms that would allow the Commission to retaliate rapidly in the event of UK non-compliance, up-to-and-including the suspension of the agreement.
Checks on the Irish Border
The final challenge to the Commission’s trust in the UK came from the UK’s unilateral decision in March 2021 to extend the grace period for checks on the regulatory border between the UK and Northern Ireland, which under the terms of the Protocol remained in the single market for goods.
Because the Commission no-longer trusted the UK, it was unwilling to give the UK greater discretion operating what was in effect the EU’s external border. The Commission considered the unilateral extension a further breach of trust and responded by threatening infringement proceedings and also suspending cooperation in other areas, including research funding and accession to the Lugano Convention.
The issue remained intractable politically until a change of government resulted in Johnson’s departure and his replacement by, first, Liz Truss, and then Rishi Sunak. Both new leaders precipitated a ‘reset’ in political relations, with Sunak going on to negotiate the Windsor Framework with the Commission, removing many obstacles to cooperation and possibly even rebuilding a modicum of trust.
The value of trust
The Johnson government’s ‘madman’ strategy might have appeased domestic audiences, but in breaching the Commission’s underlying trust that the UK would negotiate in ‘good faith’, it ultimately increased the price of an agreement for the UK. In forcing the Commission to revise its approach to the negotiations and calculate the increased risk of UK defection, Johnson’s strategy forced a reliance on more onerous monitoring and incurred the costs of retaliation in other areas of cooperation.
The loss of trust did not prevent cooperation from occurring, but it did alter the distribution of benefits and the ways in which the Commission managed uncertainty. Our research thus helps understand the course of the TCA negotiations, as well as how a loss of trust more generally comes to influence the prospects – and the shape – of international cooperation.
The views expressed in this blog reflect the position of the author and not necessarily that of the Brexit Institute Blog.