European Union leaders have reached a deal that will keep Britain in the EU, tweeted UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.
Cameron tweeted late Friday that the UK has gotten special status within the EU. “I have negotiated a deal to give the UK special status in the EU. I will be recommending it to Cabinet tomorrow. Press conference shortly,” he said.
Tusk tweeted: “Deal. Unanimous support for new settlement for #UkinEE.”
Details of the deal were not immediately known.
The announcements came after tense and difficult talks regarding Britain’s continued participation in the European Union — and, indeed, the future of the EU — dragged on for a second day.
The heads of government of the 28 EU countries — from Finland to Portugal and from Ireland to Greece — converged Thursday on Brussels, Belgium, for meetings that could set the course of the continent for decades to come.
Konrad Szymanski, the attache for the Polish minister of European affairs, told CNN that Poland and the UK were compromising on benefits and getting closer to a deal on limiting child benefit restrictions to the UK.
Here’s the bottom line: Britain wants to play by special rules — not paying some benefits to migrants from other EU countries, for example, and tossing aside any commitment to the EU’s long-cherished goal of “ever-closer union.”
The stakes are high: Britain’s desire to play by special rules leaves some other EU leaders cold. On the other hand, there is no great appetite to see the UK leave the European Union in a British exit — or “Brexit,” as it has come to be known.
It’s had been possible that EU leaders would do once again what they have done so many times before — defer a decision, kick the can down the road and announce they will reassemble at a later date to try to reach agreement then.
A deal in Brussels was needed for Cameron to campaign among his people for a yes vote — perhaps as early as June — to stay in the EU.
Britain’s departure would have left the EU diminished. It would have lost its second-largest economy — behind that of Germany — and one of its two permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. (France holds the other.)
So what is at stake?
Any deal must be approved unanimously — a steep hill for anyone to climb. The European Parliament also must approve.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Britain’s demand not to pay benefits to migrants from other EU countries remains a sticking point.
“All of the different baskets of the requests of Britain on the agenda were discussed, and it is true that not each and everyone around the table had it all that easy to agree to those requests, but there is a will,” Merkel said Thursday.
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told reporters that leaders hoped to reach an agreement as quickly as possible.
“Everybody says that we want to reach an agreement. … It’s a big country. It’s an important country,” he said. “We do not need a European Union that cannot hold together now, so we are determined.”
A report Wednesday in The Guardian newspaper said four Eastern European countries — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — have rejected Britain’s proposals to limit benefits for migrant workers. The report emerged a day before the Brussels meeting started.
The EU sprang from the ashes of World War II as a free-trade zone. Its signal achievement has been to allow free movement of goods and people in the hope that economic integration would prevent a new continental war.
Britain has opted out of both those EU provisions, and it views with skepticism the EU’s effort to branch into new fields, regulating everything from pesticides to human rights, and creating a unified foreign policy, too.
What is Cameron trying to achieve?
In essence, Cameron is trying to thread the needle. He wants to be able to say the he negotiated firmly with the pesky bureaucrats in Brussels, who are sometimes known derisively as “eurocrats.” He wants to opt out of the standard EU commitment that its members must work toward “ever closer union” — a goal that has animated the European project for decades.
He wants Britain exempted from having to give various social benefits to newcomers — even from other EU countries — until they have lived in the UK for several years.
In the end, Cameron wants to say he has dealt strongly with the unpopular EU — and, then turn around and say, hey, let’s stay in that fine organization because of course it’s in our interest.
Why do many in the UK want to quit?
Part of the European question relates to migration, and the large numbers of people fleeing the civil war in Syria have only increased that fear. There is a feeling that new arrivals sponge off British taxpayers or take their jobs, perhaps for less pay than would a native Briton, driving wages down and unemployment up.
There seems a whiff of cultural bias as well among a few opponents of British membership in the EU. While there is no outcry about immigration from the United States or Australia, for example, some members of the main anti-EU party, UKIP — the United Kingdom Independence Party — have made remarks that seem tainted by prejudice.
And there is an element of nationalism. There is reluctance to cede sovereignty to the EU, which is part and parcel of membership, to some degree.
Have there been problems before between EU and UK?
Oh, yes, indeed.
Britain has always stood apart from the EU, displaying a bit of the island mentality.
While much of the EU involves passport-free travel between member countries, not so with Britain. And when many EU countries scrapped their national currencies in favor of the euro, Britain said no thanks, we’ll stick with the pound.
The country’s difficult relationship with the EU is nothing new. In the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle not only opposed Britain’s entry into what was then called the Common Market, he also opposed any negotiations on the topic. In other words, he wouldn’t even discuss it.
Britain didn’t join the European Community, as it was then called, until 1973, by which time de Gaulle was dead.
And in the 1970s and ’80s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher railed against what she saw as the excessive powers of Brussels. She negotiated a rebate for Britain on its contributions to the EU and opposed having “a European super state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Is there a chance Britain will leave the EU?
Certainly. National referendums can go either way. The British press is largely hostile to the EU, and sometimes presents a distorted picture of it.
Reading the local papers, for example, one might think the EU has a massive bureaucracy. In fact, the EU employs about 23,500 people to look after its 28-nation area. By contrast, there are about 6 million government employees in the UK alone.
The historic number of people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa — most of them bound for Europe — only increases the chances that Britons, fearful about their jobs and their national identity, will try to pull up the drawbridge and go it alone.
Furthermore, while Cameron expects to campaign for Britain to stay in the EU, his Conservative Party is divided on the issue, with some senior members favoring an EU exit.
Still, analysts say it is generally harder to vote for change than for the status quo. Leaving the EU would be change. And that engenders its own fears.
Leaders in some other countries favor an EU with Britain in it. It makes dealing with Europe easier, gives Europe a stronger voice in the world and allows for coordinated European sanctions to be imposed — for example, against Russia for its annexation of Crimea, or against Iran for its nuclear program.
For his part, President Barack Obama has urged Britain to stay in the EU. The UK as a member of the EU “gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the trans-Atlantic union,” Obama said in July.