The announcement by British Prime Minister Theresa May to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty before the end of March 2017 went down particularly well with the Europeans.
The president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, took to Twitter to hail it as a statement that provides welcome clarity over the start of talks on Brexit, the process by which the UK will leave the EU.
In an ironic twist of history, this could coincide with a meeting of the EU27 in Rome to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, an event marking the conclusion of the roadmap adopted in Bratislava aiming to give new meaning to the European project (see EUROPE 11626).
However, at the start of the Conservative Party Conference on Sunday, May also made a fairly robust speech about future negotiations with the EU, suggesting that negotiations may well be difficult. "We are going to be a fully independent, sovereign country", she said. "A country that is no longer part of a political union with supranational institutions that can override national parliaments and courts."
Although the prime minister does not want these negotiations to turn into conflict, she reiterated that the aim of the country leaving the EU was to return to "the freedom to make our own decisions on a whole host of different matters, from how we label our food to the way in which we choose to control immigration". She added that the UK was not leaving the EU to give up its control over immigration again, and that it was not leaving just to return to the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice. According to the British prime minister, the only thing London and the EU will have to discuss will be how the two sides will continue to trade with each other.
European positions toughening.
Tusk returned to Twitter to stress that "once Article 50's triggered, the EU27 will engage to safeguard its interests". May had a telephone conversation on Sunday 2 October with the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the two officials will meet on the sidelines of the forthcoming European Council of October, said Margaritis Schinas, the spokesperson for the institution, who declined at this stage to specify the nature of their discussions.
The Commission will work constructively with the United Kingdom on the basis of the notification and not of the speech, the spokesperson added, stressing once again that there would be no negotiations before notification.
In this way, the Commission swept aside May's proposal for preparatory discussions ahead of the triggering of Article 50, as she suggested in an interview on 2 October. These preliminary discussions, May argued, could smooth the way for the negotiation process.
The Maltese prime minister, Joseph Muscat, whose country will take over the Presidency of the Council of the EU at the beginning of 2017, told an interview with Politico that the United Kingdom would find itself in a position of inferiority towards the EU, as with what has happened with Greece. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)