Description
This paper develops the argument that the hard EU exit entailed by the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) reflects the performative nature of the UK’s post-Brexit trade policy. Drawing on the work of J.L. Austin, we see the emphasis on the UK’s trade policy independence as a ‘self-enacting’ performance of Brexit focused on automatic sovereignty gains. We focus on three key aspects of the EU-UK negotiations and TCA. The first is the choice of an agreement model which sacrificed market access for regulatory autonomy and an independent trade policy. The second is that this trade-off between market access/growth and sovereignty was also reflected in the UK Government’s opposition to provisions on a level playing field. The same can be said of the third aspect we focus on: the UK’s tactic of holding out to the very end of the negotiations and then presenting the TCA as a set of hard-fought concessions to the UK policy position, on matters such as the level playing field, the role of the European Court of Justice or access to UK fishing waters. We argue that the UK obtained performative gains, with the Government able to claim it was making ‘sovereign’ choices, but at an economic cost to key economic sectors like finance, which it has downplayed. We conclude by arguing that, in contrast to its free trade discourse elsewhere, the UK Government has adopted a particularly strident and zero-sum conception of sovereignty in its relations with the EU.
