The UK-EU trade deal prioritises sovereignty over economics. Politicians will soon be talking about how to improve the deal. Very little about the UK’s long-term relationship with the EU has been settled.
Rather than obsessing about services exports, UK policy-makers should focus on investment and ensuring the UK remains an attractive destination for multinational services firms to operate out of.
At the CER's Ditchley economics conference, participants discussed the global role of the EU in the aftermath of the pandemic, with faltering trade and investment and growing strategic competition between the US and China.
The international role of the US dollar is deeply entrenched. To change that, Europe – and Germany in particular – would need to rethink some core economic policies.
The EU's liberal model of shared sovereignty is under threat. Europe cannot afford to remain a pure soft power. It has to reform and learn how to play power politics.
The EU’s new foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, may struggle to co-ordinate the Union’s external activities in the face of rival European commissioners and unruly member-states.
Greenhouse gas emissions from Europe’s farms have been flat since 2005. The Common Agricultural Policy, which consumes 37 per cent of the EU’s budget, subsidises a sector that needs to clean up its act.
An EU carbon border tax would be tricky to design, costly to implement and sure to provoke legal challenges. But if done properly there are reasons to think it could succeed.
A new Iran nuclear crisis is brewing. Europeans should seize the opportunity to re-establish a common position with the US and try to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement that Donald Trump abandoned.
The EU and the UK will find an agreement on extradition and Europol. But both parties are further apart on data protection than it may seem. Data transfers will be a problem in the future relationship.
The EU risks being caught between an increasingly hostile US and China. It must manage relations with both in order to protect the rules-based global order.
There was never any doubt who would ‘win’ Belarus’s presidential election. But the country is undergoing profound changes – which pose dilemmas for both Russia and the EU.
