Regulatory alignment and divergence after Brexit

ABSTRACT

The United Kingdom (UK) has launched the process by which it will terminate its membership of the European Union (EU). A key research question concerns the extent to which UK regulatory policy will align with, or diverge from, EU policy after decades of delegation to, and dependency upon EU rules and regulatory structures. While we ought to expect that UK regulatory policy will continue to align with the EU in the short-term, the scope for future divergence requires further analysis. Whether exiting the EU will lead to regulatory alignment or regulatory divergence is evaluated in light of existing literatures on Europeanisation, in general, and the EU’s external governance, in particular. It is contended that the dynamics of alignment/divergence between the UK and EU will be a function of the operation – and interaction – of different modes of governance: hierarchy, markets, coordination and networks/community. However, the study cautions against assumptions that the dynamics of UK regulatory policy post-membership are reducible solely to EU influences. More specifically it contends that the global regulatory context in which both the UK and EU are situated constitutes an important factor that will mediate EU influence over UK policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• hierarchy
• competition
• coordination
• networks
• community
• Europeanisation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Simon Bulmer and Lucia Quaglia for their invitation to contribute to this special issue and for their advice and support throughout the writing and editorial process. The author is also extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the care with which they read and commented on earlier drafts. This article is an early attempt to develop a framework for analysis of future regulatory alignment/divergence issues in the context of Brexit. A more detailed empirical analysis will be pursued under the auspices of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship running from 2018–21. Comments to the author are very welcome and can be sent to [email protected].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kenneth Armstrong is Professor of European Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He tweets @profkaarmstrong.

Notes

1 EUCO XT 20011/17 (15.12.2017).

2 TF50 (2018) 33 (28.2.2017)

3 TF50 (2017) 19 (8.12.2017), para 49.

4 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-our-future-economic-partnership-with-the-european-union