Take it and leave it! A postfunctionalist bargaining approach to the Brexit negotiations

Abstract

At first sight, the Brexit negotiations appear erratic. The UK and the EU invested two years in negotiating an agreement, which failed three times in the British parliament. How to explain this? This article argues that Brexit is a case of an overarching trend, and offers a rationalist, situation-structural approach to analysing politicised bargains. In this new European reality of a constraining dissensus, governments must ensure domestic support and international assertiveness in parallel. Politicised bargains play out as nested games, in which tied hands are not a strategy but rather a necessary given. Theresa May was forced to play such parallel and overlapping, nested games as she was pressurised by both the EU and Brexiteers. Negotiations unfolded in two phases, corresponding to two situation structures: the negotiation phase resembled a nested chicken game. The preliminary Withdrawal Agreement was a game-changer and the subsequent ratification phase, structured as a nested Rambo game, presented May with irreconcilable demands.

Keywords:

• Brexit
• postfunctionalism
• politicisation
• international negotiations
• nested games

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants of LMU Munich’s IR Research Colloquium as well as those of the Panel I9 of the 2020 IR research section conference of the German Political Science Foundation for their helpful comments. Moreover, we are grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose constructive criticism helped improve this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Together with postfunctionalists, we conceptualise politicisation as a certain context in which decision-makers take decisions, namely in the arena of mass politics and confronted with identity concerns. Hooghe and Marks (2009) claim that in this context political manipulation such as priming, framing and cuing might take place but their effects on governmental decisions are not endogenous to their theory. We are grateful to one of our anonymous reviewers who pointed out that discursive institutionalists (DI) go beyond postfunctionalism by endogenising politicisation. For DI scholars, politicisation is not analysed as a certain context of political competition and decisions but as a process, in which politicisation is socially constructed and public opinion as well as preferences are formed, stabilised or altered through discourse (Schnapper 2020). Therefore, while building on DI’s highly valuable insights, we have a different focus: we investigate how – exogenously given – politicisation and consequently diverging domestic preferences (the constraining dissensus) affect the structure, process and outcomes of international negotiations.

2 In Table 1, x₁’s payoff is indicated in bold letters. To make it more intuitive, the column player is assigned the first, while the row-player is assigned the second payoff.

3 In Table 2, the UK government’s payoff is indicated in bold letters. To make it more intuitive, the column player is assigned the first, while the row-player is assigned the second payoff.

4 Only 18% approval contrasting 52% refusal (see YouGov 2019).

5 This can be demonstrated by amendment a) to the withdrawal agreement ruling out a no-deal Brexit at any time (see The Guardian 2019b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felix Biermann

Felix Biermann is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the LMU Munich Political Science Department. His research interests cover European integration (crisis politics, European defence policy), inter-state bargaining and international regime complexity. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of European Integration.

Stefan Jagdhuber

Stefan Jagdhuber is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department, LMU Munich, and lecturer at the Munich International Summer University (MISU). His research focuses on differentiated integration in the European Union and the EU in international negotiations and has appeared in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy and Politique Europénne.