Beyond Brexit – a new European political architecture

Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the UK’s Brexit referendum. A recent YouGov survey indicates that a significant majority of Britons, around 8.1 million more than in 2016, now favour rejoining the EU. Yet the current political reality does not presage a simple return to the status quo ante.

Instead, the UK and the EU are engaged in negotiating a new kind of partnership, one that seeks to transcend the disruptive politics of Brexit while preserving the strategic autonomy each side claims. This evolving relationship suggests a novel, pragmatic architecture of cooperation, shaped by shared challenges ranging from economic instability to geopolitical insecurity.

From withdrawal to “reset”

The watershed moment in this trajectory came on 19 May 2025, when UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and leaders of the European Commission and European Council agreed on a Joint Statement establishing a new UK-EU strategic partnership.

This was the first summit of its kind since the UK’s withdrawal, marking an explicit shift from transactional negotiation to sustained strategic engagement. This shared framework, building on the 2019 Withdrawal and Trade and Cooperation Agreements, envisages structured cooperation across a widening arc of policy areas within people-to-people links.

The Common Understanding agreed at the summit outlines areas of future collaboration and codifies mechanisms for regular dialogue at the ministerial and summit levels – a procedural innovation that institutionalises engagement and ensures continuity.

However, the EU-UK relations agenda now explicitly embraces negotiations on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) alignment to facilitate agrifood trade and linking emissions trading systems (ETS) to support shared sustainability goals. If concluded, these arrangements would ease trade frictions, reduce costs for businesses on both sides and help mitigate carbon leakage as a critical concern amid intensifying climate imperatives.

Resilience in a turbulent world

The broader context for this reset is a world marked by geopolitical turbulence. In this environment, security cooperation is no longer a peripheral concern but a central pillar of European stability. The strategic partnership includes a Security and Defence Partnership, aligning the UK with EU defence initiatives alongside NATO cooperation. This marks a symbolic and substantive reconnection in areas of shared interest.

This recalibration resonates with wider European diplomatic initiatives that seek to integrate the UK into frameworks like Weimar+, a cooperative forum linking EU member states with the UK on foreign policy and security issues. Such platforms underscore the mutual recognition that collective responses to global challenges demand broad cooperation rather than unilateral action.

Political realities in the UK

Internally, British politics reflects a complex interplay between public sentiment and governmental strategy. While the poll numbers on rejoining the EU are striking, the current UK government has firmly ruled out returning to the customs union or single market, citing a desire to maintain the UK’s independent trade policy.

Keir Starmer has argued that such a return could jeopardise beneficial trade deals with partners like the United States and India. Yet parliamentary dynamics suggest growing divergence within the UK’s political class. A symbolic House of Commons vote in early December 2025 saw a motion in favour of rejoining the customs union pass narrowly, albeit without government backing, highlighting cross-party unease with the post-Brexit arrangement.

Initiatives such as potential youth mobility schemes allowing tens of thousands of EU citizens to live and work in the UK also signal incremental moves toward greater integration in areas of mutual benefit. Such steps, while modest relative to full membership, could serve as building blocks for deeper cooperation and reconciliation.

Rethinking European integration

From an academic perspective, this evolving EU-UK relationship invites us to reconsider the linear narratives of integration and disintegration. Brexit was framed as an endpoint – a radical departure – but what we are witnessing now is not simply a reversal nor a return to the past. Rather, it is the emergence of a hybrid model of European cooperation, one that accommodates sovereignty concerns while entwining interests across economic, security and social domains.

This hybrid model may offer a template for 21st-century Europe: one that acknowledges diversity of institutional preferences while sustaining a core of shared commitments. The challenges Europe faces cannot be addressed effectively in isolation. In this sense, the UK remains an indispensable partner in shaping the continent’s future, not despite Brexit but beyond it.

Inspiring a shared future?

For scholars and policymakers alike, the current moment presents an opportunity to transcend binary framings about Brexit and rejoining. Instead of asking whether the UK should re-enter the EU, a pressing question is how new forms of cooperation can be designed to deliver resilience, prosperity and security in practice. The YouGov polling underscores a profound democratic signal: electorates across Europe increasingly see value in collaboration, if not in formal institutional membership.

The path forward involves harnessing this sentiment through creative policy design, evidence-based negotiation and sustained civic dialogue. The reset of EU-UK relations is not merely an adjustment of trade quotas or diplomatic protocols; it represents a broader affirmation of shared destiny in an era of uncertainty. Brexit may have redrawn the map of European institutional geography, but it need not sever the deeper connections that bind European societies.

By advancing a pragmatic, strategic partnership rooted in both autonomy and interdependence, Europe including the UK can chart a course that honours diversity while strengthening unity. As academics, policymakers and citizens, there’s a task to conceptualise and enact this shared future with clarity, rigour and optimism. This shift merits serious academic reflections not as a call for immediate reversal, but as evidence of a deeper reassessment of Britain’s place in Europe and the role of Europe itself.

Yet the present moment cannot be understood as a simple return to pre-Brexit arrangements. The political, economic and geopolitical context of Europe today is profoundly different from that of the early 2010s. What is emerging instead is a new configuration of EU-UK relations, one that moves beyond the binary logic of membership versus non-membership to establish an updated political form of co-belonging in Europe.

This configuration points toward the gradual construction of a new European political architecture in which the UK and the EU are connected through structured cooperation, shared strategic interests and institutionalised dialogue. Most notably, the partnership includes a Security and Defence Partnership, formalising cooperation in areas such as foreign policy coordination, crisis management, cyber and hybrid threats, maritime security and defence industrial collaboration.

In a context defined by war on the European continent and increasing global instability, this step reflects a shared recognition that European security cannot be compartmentalised along institutional boundaries.

Parliamentary signals and societal connectivity

Political dynamics within the UK further reinforce this trajectory. While the government has ruled out rejoining the single market or customs union in the short term, parliamentary debates increasingly reflect concern about the economic and administrative costs of the current settlement. Symbolic parliamentary votes and cross-party discussions illustrate a growing openness to alternative models of economic and regulatory cooperation.

At the societal level, renewed attention to people-to-people links underscores the importance of social infrastructure in sustaining long-term cooperation. Alongside discussions on youth mobility, current negotiations also include the re-association of the UK with the Erasmus+ programme, which would restore structured student exchange and academic mobility between the UK and EU, reinforcing educational, cultural and scientific ties disrupted by Brexit.

The emerging “ode to reunion”

Taken together, these developments suggest that the EU-UK relationship is entering a new conceptual phase. In this sense, the current reconfiguration may be understood as an ode to reunion, not a sentimental appeal for institutional restoration, but a measured affirmation of shared purpose.

Much like the symbolic role of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in expressing unity without erasing difference, today’s evolving partnership gestures toward cooperation grounded in pluralism, mutual recognition and democratic values rather than political absorption.

This kind of metaphor captures a substantive transformation in how European cooperation is now conceived: less as a linear process of integration and more as a pluricentric system of alignment capable of accommodating institutional diversity while sustaining collective action.

These developments invite a reassessment of what political union means in the 21st century. Strategic councils, regulatory coordination, defence partnerships and mobility frameworks together form a hybrid model of political unity that prioritises functionality, resilience and legitimacy over uniformity. Such a model may prove instructive beyond the UK case.

A stronger Europe

What is unfolding today is neither a reversal of Brexit nor a return to the pre-2016 status quo. Rather, it is an ode to reunion in political form: a recognition that Europe’s strength lies in its capacity to reconnect without coercion, to align without erasing difference and to cooperate without denying democratic choice.

The evolving EU-UK relationship demonstrates that unity need not be synonymous with uniformity. In an era of global uncertainty, climate urgency and security threats, Europe faces a shared responsibility to innovate institutionally and act collectively.

The success of this new political architecture will depend not only on negotiations and treaties but on sustained intellectual engagement, democratic legitimacy and a willingness to imagine cooperation beyond inherited binaries. Most importantly, it will depend on listening to people’s need for a stronger and united Europe.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.

Image credit: European Union.