Negotiating Brexit: national governments, EU institutions and the UK

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The negotiation of the UK's departure from the European Union will be complex, historic and transformational for all the involved parties -- the UK, the member states and institutions of the EU and possibly the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Although the UK's negotiating stance will be a key element in the process, the positions taken by other member states and the EU institutions -- the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament -- will be instrumental in shaping the outcome. 'Negotiating Brexit' examines those positions. It will monitor, track and explain the changing political context and positions taken by the UK's negotiating partners, use this understanding to explore the negotiating possibilities available to the UK, and examine the implications of the outcome for the UK, the future of the EU, and the UK's relationship with the EU. For each member state and institution, it will explain who is in charge, how the negotiating position was defined, the main trade-offs made, and responses to relevant pressures.Focused on the importance of understanding the practicalities of the UK's departure, 'Negotiating Brexit' will involve new short-term research activity, research synthesis, and user engagement. It will deliver research that is important, ambitious, and innovative, and outputs of lasting significance. The project is important, because it will deliver an authoritative account of negotiations that will fundamentally recast relations in Europe and shape the UK's economy, security and foreign policy for years to come. A key part of the research will be to assemble a unique collection of primary and secondary texts that will be made available to future generations of researchers. The project is ambitious in terms of its coverage and impact. As well as collecting data and reporting on 16 EU member states, EU institutions, the UK, and Norway (as the largest member of EFTA), it will test the main theoretical approaches applied in the study of international negotiations, which highlight variously the importance of interests, ideas and institutions. A project of such a scale can only be carried out collectively by a team of specialists with detailed knowledge not only of the EU, but of national political contexts or EU institutions, and with experience in engaging with non-academic audiences. 'Negotiating Brexit' is also innovative, first because by tracking the development of negotiating positions in real time, it departs from the tendency in the existing literature to explain the positioning of negotiating parties retrospectively in the light of the final outcome of the negotiations, and second, because by focusing on the politics of position formation in the member states, it does not attempt to proceed deductively from the potentially misleading assumption that actors are rational.The research team will actively engage with users throughout the project's duration. It will deliver research syntheses, reports, blogs, and other material that are easily accessible to policy makers, businesses, journalists, civil society organisations, educational institutions and the general public who are interested in the UK's relationship with the EU. These analyses will be made available via the 'UK in a Changing Europe' knowledge hub at King's College London, especially through its website at http://ukandeu.ac.uk, and highlighted in its weekly newsletter. Drawing on the model of the texts published by 'The UK in a Changing Europe' senior fellows in 2016, the team will produce in electronic form two collective publications that will describe and explain the positions taken by other EU member states and the EU institutions. Two conferences will be arranged in London in June 2017 and September/October 2018, which will offer decision makers, interested groups and individuals, journalists, and members of the public the opportunity to discuss and debate the negotiating positions adopted by the UK's partner