The European Union

Quite obviously, the prospects of the UK embarking on a road back to Europe depend not only on the UK, but also on the EU. On the EU side, there are four sets of variables that seem likely to affect the prospects of the UK embarking on this road, namely, how the EU itself develops (and therefore how it is perceived from the outside); the formal process for re-joining (and therefore the legal criteria the UK would have to meet in order to re-join); the attitudes of EU policymakers to the UK and to the prospects of its readmission (and therefore the presence or otherwise of supportive actors at an EU level); geopolitical developments affecting the EU (and therefore the strategic/security interests of the UK). In this chapter, we therefore consider the implications for the prospects for re-joining of each of these sets of variables in turn.