Ольга Кравцова - Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1

If Britain walked away entirely — the most extreme scenario — it would quickly see some benefits. The country would no longer have to transfer funds to the EU to subsidise farm incomes or poorer regions. Treasury figures suggest it would be £8 billion ($13 billion) better off each year. Food could become cheaper. Under WTO rules, countries may slash import barriers unilaterally as long as they do not favour some countries over others. Britain could do this for agricultural produce. It would regain control over fishing rights around its coast.

Some irksome regulations could be ditched, too. First to go (if the Tories are in power when Britain leaves) would be the working-time directive. This limits how long people can be at work without a break or a holiday and caps the working week at 48 hours. The scrapping of the EU's agency-worker directive, which gives temporary staff the same rights as regular employees, would be cheered by business, too. Britain would be free to set itself a less exacting target for green-power generation than it is bound to under the EU's renewable-energy directive. That could mean cheaper power.

London's financial district would look to past glories. It thrived as an offshore centre for deposit-taking and loan-making in dollars long before Britain joined the EU. Outside the club, it would be freer to market itself as a freewheeling hub for emerging-market finance — a sort of Singapore on steroids. Free of the obligation to abide by ever-changing EU rules on alternative investments, hedge funds that have left London might be lured back. The burden of impending European Solvency 2 regulations on the insurance industry would become less onerous.

Yet a bonfire of regulations would smoulder rather than blaze. Domestic and global commitments to greenery constrain Britain's energy policy, for example. And EU regulations bite less hard than is commonly supposed. Britain already has one of the most flexible labour markets in the rich world (employees can opt out of the 48-hour week). This helps to explain why the unemployment rate is as low as in America or Canada, despite a more sluggish economy.

Product regulations would be harder to junk than labour laws. The British suppliers to Airbus, the Franco-German aircraft manufacturer, have to comply with exacting standards. But these exist not because of meddling by Brussels, but to ensure aircraft are safe. Similarly, a minimum standard of food safety stops a race to the bottom by competing firms. British ones would still have to observe Europe's product regulations in order to export there. A separate set of regulations tailored for the home market would only add to red tape.

That goes for the City, too. Global finance favours common standards, such as the Basel accords on bank capital. And, far from racing to the bottom, countries with large financial sectors are now as likely to create even tougher rules. The Bank of England has hinted that Basel is not strong enough.

And some immediate gains would evaporate as special-interest groups redirected their attention from Brussels to Westminster. British farmers would lose £2.7 billion in EU subsidies once Britain left. They are a noisy lobby group, and it is unlikely that the government would hang on to all that cash. The farming lobby would also try to stand in the way of lowering tariffs on food imported from beyond Europe, potentially depriving the government of a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with big emerging markets such as Brazil and India.

If the benefits of leaving the single market are qualified, what of the costs? The price of exclusion is much smaller than when Britain joined in 1973. Tariff barriers across the world have been steadily lowered in trade deals brokered by GATT and its successor, the WTO. If import tariffs are weighted by the volume of trade in each product, the average faced by exporters from outside the EU into the single market has fallen to around 3%. Exporters routinely have to absorb cost increases of this size caused by a surge in the oil price or a jump in the exchange rate.

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Even so, the impact on industries such as food and textiles, where tariffs are much higher than the average, would be far from mild. British dairy exports would incur an import tax of 55% to reach the EU market, with tariffs on some items of more than 200%. Cheddar cheese would face a tariff of €167 per 100kg; the mark-up on Stilton would be €141. Average tariffs on clothing would push up their price in European markets by 12%.

Parts of Britain's car industry would move out. British-based producers would face a 4% tariff on car-equipment sales to the EU, and there would be pressure to impose tariffs on components imported from it. Factories owned by carmakers with plants and supply chains in other parts of the EU would be most at risk. Vital car components might be held up by customs as they leave the continent. A cheap pound and a flexible workforce may not be enough to keep GM in Britain, for instance, even though it sells many cars there.

The calculation would be slightly different for other carmakers. Only a small fraction of the 300,000 cars Jaguar Land Rover makes in Britain are destined for the EU market. A lot of Minis, made in Britain by BMW, are also sold outside Europe, where they attract an import tariff anyway. Much of what distinguishes a Jaguar from a Mercedes is that it is designed and made in Britain (as are lots of components). There would be little benefit, but huge costs to the brand, in shifting production elsewhere. Japanese carmakers would suffer: most of their British output is sold in the EU, says John Leech of KPMG, a consultancy. But they cannot easily switch production to continental factories, and many of their supplies come from Japan. They would stick around longer than many think.

Over time, though, the general drift of business investment would be away from Britain and towards the continent. That goes for finance, too. If London wants to be the regional hub for trading China's currency, it will need to retain its position as the main centre for settling trades of cash and derivatives in euros. Some in Europe resent this: the governor of France's central bank complained this week that euro deals should be done in euroland. Without the shield of single-market rules, London could lose out to rival EU centres.

Financiers from today's rising economic powers, in Asia and Latin America, are keener on access to a European market of 500m than on the light regulation that drew American banks to London in the 1950s and 1960s. TheCityUK, a lobby group, studied 147 siting decisions between 2006 and 2012. It found that more than two-fifths of finance firms gave access to European markets as a core reason for choosing London. Although the single market in financial services is still a work in progress, “passporting rights” entitle investment firms, banks and insurers based in Britain to establish branches or provide services throughout the EEA.

Aerospace is another industry that relies on frictionless trade with the rest of the continent. Britain has the world's largest industry outside America, but it would lose ground to France. The high-tech bits of production, such as the making of carbon-fibre wing spars, could not speedily be replicated elsewhere. But suppliers of basic parts, such as metal brackets, would be vulnerable. Big manufacturers like Airbus prefer to keep supply chains simple. They might sponsor entry by new suppliers in the EU to avoid a customs barrier.

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These reallocations of fixed capital would take years or decades. By contrast, Britain and its erstwhile EU partners would have to decide quickly how people on the wrong side of newly erected barriers to the free movement of labour should be treated. Around 2.3m people from EU countries were living in Britain in 2011, up from 1.1m in 2004; around 1.7m Britons have gone the other way. The rights of residency for such migrants would no longer be automatic. Forced repatriation would be damaging to all countries.

The simplest solution would be to offer citizenship to all those resident in Britain at a particular date, in return for a similar offer to Britons living in other parts of Europe. Anticipation of such an amnesty would spur a rush to and from Britain in the run-up to its exit. As the drawbridge eventually rose, businesses would suffer. London's growing tech cluster, as well as the City, relies heavily on the free flow of young workers from other parts of Europe.

Another huge disruption would be to trade beyond Europe. Britain would swiftly have to negotiate bilateral deals with dozens of countries. The experience of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, which make up the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), a club of European refusers loosely linked to the EU, suggests it is usually possible to obtain similar terms to those won by EU negotiators. The EFTA countries tend to rush in behind the EU, though in some cases — South Korea, for example — they go first. But the bigger club can win slightly better terms. “The EU is more powerful than we are,” says Didier Chambovey of Switzerland's state secretariat for foreign affairs. A deal with Britain would be top of few countries' priorities.

Britain would have less diplomatic and military clout, too. For the Americans, a Britain that is disengaged from the rest of Europe would be a much less useful and influential ally. For NATO, a Britain that is semi-detached from Europe would weaken the ties that bind the continent and its defence to the United States at a time when those ties are already under strain because of slashed defence budgets and America's strategic “rebalancing” towards Asia. Another likely casualty would be the budding Anglo-French defence treaty, seen by both countries as a way to help themselves continue to punch above their weight.

Although a complete exit from Europe is certainly possible, few British Eurosceptics want it. They view the common market as a pearl surrounded by a dismal encrustation of European bureaucracy and regulation. What they would really like to do is pull back until Britain's relationship with Europe becomes one based on free trade, with the minimum necessary regulation. In effect, they want to create the kind of Europe that British Conservatives fought to join in the 1970s. Once it became clear that Britain was falling out of the EU, they could grab at two halfway options: a Norwegian one and a Swiss one.

Together with Iceland and Liechtenstein, oil-rich Norway is about as close to the EU as it is possible to be without actually becoming a member. It simply belongs to the EEA. The EU is broadly happy with the arrangement, partly because Norway pays into its coffers (indeed, it pays slightly more per head than Britain). A similar arrangement might well be obtained.

Many businesses would hardly notice the difference. But a few would suffer minor irritation. Although EEA countries are part of the single market, businesses must complete customs and VAT forms when goods are shipped into and out of the EU. For big companies serving big customers, this is no problem. For smaller ones it can be a nuisance. Moods of Norway, an echt-Norwegian fashion company (its logo is a tractor), has solved the problem by setting up a small subsidiary in Sweden, which is a member of the EU. The subsidiary handles customs clearance for the European boutiques that carry Moods of Norway's clothes. Small, export-oriented British businesses would end up doing the same.

If Britain were to join the Norwegian club, though, it would remain bound by virtually all EU regulations, including the working-time directive and almost everything dreamed up in Brussels in future. Once out of the EU, the country would have little say in the regulations and laws that would continue to bind its industry. It would be consulted by the European Commission but would have no voice in the increasingly powerful European Parliament, and no vote. In Euro-jargon, it would be a decision-shaper, but not a decision-maker.