Rishi Sunak’s government has succeeded in renegotiating the Protocol, despite EU insistence that this could not and would not be done. That there is a Windsor Framework is proof of that. A new geopolitical reality in Europe required Western unity, it is true, but there was more than that.
The UK found a way to persuade the EU of the moral, political and legal case for a renegotiation — overturning the significant moral, political and legal impediments that held the EU back from any ‘renegotiation’. This was due to an intellectual transformation of the understanding of the relationship of the Good Friday Agreement and the Protocol — one promoted by the UK rather than Ireland.
Instead of the intellectual arguments being lost, as they had been in late 2017, culminating in the UK commitment to alignment of Northern Ireland with large swathes of the EU’s acquis, the UK was able to seriously challenge the EU’s position by demonstrating the inherent weaknesses in the intellectual basis upon which its position was built.
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