Donald Tusk is a pot-half-full optimist. Brexit a disaster? "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," was the response of the European Council president on Friday, citing Friedrich Nietzsche. It's the sort of can-do spirit that may be needed to help to lift the gloom tomorrow when shocked EU leaders gather to hear David Cameron "explain" the decision of the British voters to leave their ranks.
No doubt they will be interested in his insights into a phenomenon that is also rattling the cages in their capitals, but there will certainly be a desire to talk usefully about the practicalities of the most complex divorce settlement in history. No-one has an interest in prolonging the uncertainty but Mr Cameron has already long-fingered the process by suggesting that there would be no need to trigger the treaty’s article 50 procedure, which provides a two-year road map to the way out, until his successor is in place. Tusk is expected to urge leaders not to rush Cameron.
For the first 50 years of the EEC/EU, there was no treaty means of divorce, a lacuna that France unsuccessfully sought to put right in 1957 and was finally agreed in 2007. No one had yet tried simply to walk away – and there are such matters as residual legal obligations, budget contributions, or transition arrangements for expats and cross-border companies, all of which could be resolved in article 50 talks within two years. Some of the Brexiters suggest that the UK should simply declare Universal Declaration of Independence, but reaching an amicable arrangement about access to EU markets in the aftermath of that approach might be problematic.
What may also prove difficult is the UK’s wish that such “extraction” talks should take place alongside, in parallel, to the technically and politically more problematic talks about access to EU markets, and which are expected to take as much as five years. Some Brussels officials have suggested – to London’s dismay – that those should only start when the article 50 matters have been disposed of in two years, entailing a potentially difficult further discussion on transitional arrangements. A further discussion track about arrangements for future relations on security or law enforcement is likely.
The leaders may also take the opportunity to have an exchange on the broader issue of EU integration, seen by some as an imperative in response to Brexit. Foreign ministers of the six founding states were meeting over the weekend on the issue. "It's an explosive shock [Brexit]. At stake is the break up pure and simple of the union," French prime minister Manuel Valls has warned. "Now is the time to invent another Europe." And, of course, the single biggest impediment to integration until now, the UK, will hardly be in a position to veto it as it prepares to leave. Perhaps one bright side to Brexit.