In Brussels, Paris and Berlin, in Rome and Warsaw, the clocks will be striking midnight on 29 March 2019 and history will be made: for the first time in Europe’s post-war integration story, a country will leave the European Union.

As the EU counts down to Britain’s departure, Brexit has proven to be an unexpected unifying force.

Alexander Stubb, a former prime minister of Finland, says he has never seen the bloc so united. After the Brexit vote and the election of the US president, Donald Trump, in 2016, “a lot of European leaders realised that we can’t continue to bash the EU as we have over the last 25 years”, he tells the Guardian.



It was not only the seismic votes of 2016 that shocked the EU into togetherness: the political turmoil in the UK and the vast bureaucratic quagmire of Brexit offer their own lessons. One senior official says diplomats often end their Brexit meetings musing on how difficult it is to leave the EU. “We often end up saying, ‘It’s cold outside.’ ”

Anyone immersed in the hard slog of negotiations might forget that Brexit remains a deep blow to Europe’s geopolitical pride. “Brexit is very bad, painful and traumatic, not only for the UK, but also for the European Union,” says Luuk van Middelaar, a historian and former adviser to the previous European council president, Herman Van Rompuy. “It is going against the self-image that Europe has of being a club of basically all European states – give or take Norway or Switzerland.”



Brexit was “seen as a frontal attack” on the EU and for this reason, the historian predicts the task of keeping Europe together means a hard Brexit, because it is “by far the easiest one to negotiate”. Sweeping concessions to the UK risk eroding the value of EU membership. “The political price of a soft Brexit is higher than the economic price of a hard Brexit,” he says.

Stubb, a veteran of EU negotiating tables, makes a similar point when he argues that the UK is unlikely to succeed in splitting member states by appeals to narrow interest. “What will keep a lot of the member states at bay from having bilateral type of arrangements is the fear the UK will be better off outside the European Union.”

Brexit is the unlikely glue bonding the EU together, but there are plenty of other divisive issues.

In Brussels, at least as much attention is devoted to the next EU budget and filling the €10-€14bn gap left by the UK’s departure, at a time when more demands are being made to open Europe’s wallet.

This time, the usual tug of war between net payers and net beneficiaries will be overlaid by deeper conflicts about the nature of the union. Some countries, such as Italy, want to tie EU funds to accepting refugees; others like France favour linking them to greater tax harmonisation. Several would like EU funds frozen when a country breaches democratic values – a point with increasing resonance amid alarm about backsliding on the rule of law in Poland, Hungary and Romania.



“If there is one big issue that will cause a real crisis in the EU it is the degree to which member states will agree to forms of peer review over their democratic status,” says Rosa Balfour, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “If the EU wants to have a long-term future, this is something it must address.”



More immediately, the EU is trying to reform migration rules and overhaul the eurozone to prevent a repeat of past bailout dramas.

Italy’s recent election showed how both issues offer fuel to anti-EU parties. Voters rejected the ruling Democratic party, as many felt abandoned by the EU on migration after 455,000 people arrived over the Mediterranean sea in three years. Tensions over migration rose against a backdrop of inequality that the outgoing prime minister Paolo Gentiloni described as “intolerable”.

For Balfour, recent elections show that effective policies do not always translate into electoral success. “It is not about performance, it is about whether the government is seen as the establishment, in other words, as something to get rid of.” Across Europe, she sees the success of anti-EU populists as an expression of something “not functioning in our democracies, where people do not feel represented”.

Despite a small uptick in pro-EU sentiment, the public remains far less enthusiastic about the European project than at the end of the cold war. Only 40% of Europeans had a positive image of the EU in 2017, compared with 70% in the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The public is far less likely to support the EU than people in positions of influence.

In Britain’s final year of membership, restoring confidence in the EU will be an overriding priority for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and other EU leaders – especially as European elections fall in May 2019.

“If you are Merkel or Macron and you are facing anti-European populists you want to be able to say clearly that it makes a difference whether you are in or out,” says van Middelaar. “That will also have an impact on the Brexit dynamic.”

