What can Brexit Britain expect from a trade agreement?

Will United Kingdom universities increase their activities on the Continent as a reaction to Brexit? Questions about partnerships with European Union universities and branch campuses have been raised regularly since last year’s referendum in the UK. Since last year, we are now clearer about the possible options for the UK after leaving the EU, or at least we are clearer about defining better what it is that we do not know.

What are the future possibilities for UK universities to be active on the Continent and vice versa? Very little is certain, but we can at least identify questions and look at examples of how things work now.

How can UK universities continue to cooperate with the EU?

Before the UK formally leaves the EU – probably in March 2019 – activities will be governed by the rules within the Single Market. Universities in the EU have the ‘freedom of establishment’ in other member states. However, if a member state can argue that universities’ activities are connected to an official authority, they can set various limits, such as prohibiting for-profit institutions or insisting on local accreditation for all programmes.

In terms of collaborations, the UK participates fully in the common research and student mobility programmes, Horizon 2020 and Erasmus+.

As the British government has clearly stated that it wants to leave the Single Market, negotiations are likely to end with a Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. This is at least what the UK has been requesting.

Prime Minister Theresa May has also made it clear that the UK would be willing to pay for EU programmes that are in the interests of the UK, and the recent position paper from the UK government regarding research collaboration strongly hints at the possibility of an association with EU research programmes in the future.

Both Horizon 2020 and Erasmus+ are open to non-EU countries, and there is no sign that the EU is going to make the next programmes more restrictive. On the contrary, the discussions in Brussels are more about how to have more non-EU countries participating in the EU research programme.

Even in the event of a breakdown in the Brexit negotiations, there is still an opportunity for the UK to be part of individual programmes. After all, Israel, Tunisia, and Armenia are associated with Horizon 2020 and Macedonia is part of Erasmus+.

Other relations between higher education in the UK and the EU will be affected by international trade agreements.

Even if large parts of the higher education community prefer to think about higher education in terms of spiritual and professional development or as a basic human right, it is – from a legal point of view – a commodity to be traded everywhere, if it is traded somewhere. As such, it is implicitly or explicitly part of free trade agreements.

What role in a trade agreement?

Should negotiations break down (which is perfectly possible), World Trade Organization rules would apply. Higher education does feature here, but as in the Single Market, there are significant ways in which individual countries can limit access to foreign providers if they see their higher education sector as a function of a government authority.

If the UK leaves the EU with a Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement, what can we expect? The least likely scenario will be a clear and uniform agreement. Within the Single Market, the degree of openness towards foreign providers is already largely up to the political decisions of individual member states.

There is little reason to expect that an EU-UK trade agreement will offer more than the Single Market does; it would be clearly against the EU’s negotiation principle that conditions cannot be better once outside the EU.

Considering the recent trade agreement between the EU and Canada: there is a general reservation which states that “any member state of the EU may adopt or maintain any measure relating to the nationality of senior management or members of the boards of directors, as well as any measure limiting the number of suppliers” (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA, Annex I).

In addition, individual member states have made a number of specific reservations, often requiring member state approval of Canadian institutions wanting to establish themselves in the EU.

Clearly, a number of EU member states want to be actively in control of who delivers higher education within their borders. This does not mean that establishment abroad will be impossible, but if the CETA agreement is anything to go by, conditions will be likely to vary considerably between different EU member states.

It should be underlined, however, that it will take a very long time until we know for certain what the EU-UK agreement will concretely say about higher education.

A back door to EU funding?

If UK universities are able to establish themselves on the continent, they could possibly apply for EU funding, for example, through the research programmes. However, the application would have to be made by the legal entity in the EU and the staff paid by the grant would have to work at that university.

While this might be feasible for highly individualistic disciplines, it is hard to see how whole laboratories with technicians, doctoral candidates and post-docs could be transported back and forth between two legally independent institutions according to where funding is available. With regard to the Erasmus programme, students could obviously not go to the UK, but to the EU institution instead.

The easy solution remains a UK association with these specific programmes, something that could be done independently of the outcome of the ongoing negotiations on separation and the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

For the time being, it would be prudent for all parties to expect conditions to change; it could well be that any deal reached in terms of establishing branch campuses, for example, before Brexit, would have to be re-done after Brexit according to a new and possibly stricter set of rules.

It would be beneficial to all parties to retain as strong ties as possible between the UK and the EU university sectors after Brexit, but at this point much is still unsure about what these ties will look like.

Thomas Jørgensen is senior policy coordinator at the European University Association or EUA, the collective voice of approximately 800 universities across Europe and 33 national rectors’ conferences. Howard Davies, senior adviser at EUA, provided substantial input to this article.