Britain tells an EU summit its price for staying in

But it is not clear what deal David Cameron can get, nor that British voters will back him when he gets one.

The Economist

December 18, 2015

IT WAS described as a “make-or-break” moment for Britain and the European Union. Yet, on the face of it, little happened at last night’s summit of EU leaders to advance Britain’s renegotiation of its membership. There was no breakthrough or compromise. The meeting shifted no one’s position. The summit’s conclusions merely noted that a “political exchange” of views had taken place, and pledged further work before the next get-together, in February. Still, for David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, it was a modest success.

For weeks Mr Cameron has been arguing that officials conducting technical talks on Britain’s demands had got bogged down in details. Britain’s renegotiation, he thought, particularly over migration of EU workers, needed a political energy boost, and he would provide it. At meetings in recent months he has pressed his requests on other European leaders. But last night offered the first chance to speak to them all at once.

Over dinner Mr Cameron presented his 27 fellow heads of government with a lengthy speech crafted for him by advisers in Brussels and London. He traced the many changes in Britain since it joined the EU in 1973. He pointed to growing unhappiness with membership among British voters, and his fear that, in the referendum he has promised, they might vote to leave. And he urged those in attendance to understand that a confluence of factors—the EU’s freedom-of-movement rules, Britain’s open labour market, and its unusual “non-contributory” welfare system, which provides generous top-up payments to low-paid workers—was drawing an unsustainable number of European migrants to Britain.

The point of this element of the renegotiation, says one senior adviser to Mr Cameron, is radically to reduce the last of these pull factors. That explains the prime minister’s preferred solution: a ban on in-work benefits for migrants until they have toiled in Britain for four years. The trouble is that almost everyone else in Europe sees that as nakedly discriminatory, and therefore unworkable. Mr Cameron’s team insists that the four-year option remains on the table. But in reality he knows he needs another way to meet his goal of cutting immigration.

The difficult job of finding it will be left to the diplomatic “sherpas” who must now get to work so that a deal can be struck at February’s summit. (Donald Tusk, who as president of the European Council will broker the final agreement, pledged last night to issue a formal negotiating text before that meeting.) Many possibilities are doing the rounds. One idea floated by a European Commission official is an “emergency brake” to be yanked (with commission permission) when migrant inflows reach a certain level. This is modelled on a decision that allowed Austria temporarily to stop German students from flooding its universities.

Migration is the most vexing part of Mr Cameron’s renegotiation. But Eurocrats point out that none of Mr Cameron’s three other “baskets” (sets of demands) is easy. Britain’s call for clarity on the position of non-euro members, for instance, raises eyebrows among euro-zone members who fear handing London a veto over their own integration. The long-standing desire of countries like Belgium to move towards stronger federal European governance conflicts with Britain’s push for a greater role for national parliaments in EU lawmaking, as well as with its desire for a carve-out from the treaty commitment to “ever-closer union”. Even Mr Cameron’s motherhood-and-apple-pie call to boost European competitiveness will be hard to translate into law.

Mr Cameron’s counterparts are pleased that he has displayed little of the diplomatic bullheadness to which he is sometimes prone. The line he presents is, at bottom, a simple one: help me keep Britain inside the EU. Behind it lurks a flintier assertion sometimes trotted out by British officials: that their demands on migration are far milder than the absolute cap on migrant numbers Mr Cameron came close to demanding last year. (As Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, told him at the time, such a proposal would have been dead on arrival.) Moreover, they note, discrimination on national grounds is widespread in the EU, from limitations on voting rights to Denmark’s restrictions on house-buying. Why should Britain’s problem not justify special treatment?

Mr Cameron may be winning a little understanding for this view. But at home opinion polls suggest a tight race, even if most British voters will only start paying attention once the referendum campaign begins. Eurocrats in Brussels speak of a “terrible trio” of EU-related referendums: a Danish vote on justice and policing, lost by the government two weeks ago; a Dutch vote in April on an EU treaty with Ukraine; and Mr Cameron’s in/out referendum, which will probably take place next year. Officials fear, probably rightly, that such votes will become opportunities to express generalised discontent.

The precise nature of whatever compromise over migration emerges is unlikely to swing large numbers of British voters (though Mr Cameron's failure to deliver on his promise of a four-year benefits ban will expose him to attacks from Conservative backbenchers). Nor should it. Mr Cameron’s adviser admits that even the four-year proposal might not lead to a big drop in immigration. But that does not mean Britain’s renegotiation is entirely chimerical. If he is to win his referendum, Mr Cameron will have to demonstrate to British voters that the EU, despite its many problems, remains a club inside which they can feel comfortable. That case would be easier to make if he had fought hard for a deal and got his way. The substance may not amount to much. But the prime minister is a talented salesman.

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Britain tells an EU summit its price for staying in

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