Hmm, the alternative of being a second class participant in trade with your biggest trade partners seems to be worse though. Britain is finding out just how bad Brexit was for them.
This is the underlying truth for all international trade.
Most countries don't have unique industry/resources in a globalized trade world.
Consequently, population size and economy are the final arbiters of relative trade power. The EU blocking up to create something of comparable negotiating power to the US and China is critical.
Nobody is ever thrilled with the sausage making of treaties and trade agreements -- that's the definition of compromise. But scale does give countries the best chance to strike the best deal possible.
This is a nice theory, but we can now see this is not how it played out in the EU. EU does have better bargaining power, but not everybody has gained. The larger states have been able to extract even more value from the growing bargaining power, while smaller states have lost all their ability for negotiation.
One can argue that this is a consequence of EU punishing Britain for Brexit to scare other nations from exiting the EU. Which means that if Iceland joins, it will have hard time leaving the EU. If you need to punish members from leaving, it does not give a very good impression. Iceland is better of by deepening their trade agreements with the EU without joining as a full member.
Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.
The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.
We cannot know what really happened, but we can look at the end result. Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade. Britain has worse trade agreements than before joining the EU.
This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.
This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.
EU is much more than a trading union, to these people EU represents giving up on the sovereignity of your nation. I have not read that anybody would be opposed to trading. They were and are opposed to giving up on sovereignity, and against the laws passed as a consequence of that, but not against trading with other EU countries.
There are other trading unions and agreements that are possible besides EU, and it seems like EU has prevented UK from re-establishing the trading unions and agreements it had prior to joining the EU.
We can only speculate why, but it seems plausible and rational that EU is doing this as kind of a punishment and warning to other nations considering leaving the EU. UK benefits more from these agreements, while EU benefits less from these agreements.
On the other hand, EU is under an existential threat, and will disintegrate if other nations follow Brexit. So it is kind of rational (albeit only for the short term) for the EU leaders to think that EU benefits from preventing these agreements from happening if it prevents or hinders the disintegration.
