Enlargement and exit: The origins of Article 50
| Author | Martijn Huysmans |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519830202 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Enlargement and exit:
The origins of Article 50
Martijn Huysmans
School of Economics, Utrecht University, Utrecht,
The Netherlands
Abstract
Many international organizations and the vast majority of federations lack exit clauses.
Existing theoretical explanations of this stylized fact focus on issues of credible commit-
ment, signaling, and the risk of strategic exploitation. However, such accounts are unable
to explain the adoption of Article 50 by the European Union, which allows unilateral
withdrawal. I theorize and demonstrate empirically that in the case of the European
Union, an exit-voice logic lies at its origin during the 2002–2003 European Convention.
As a protection to undesired policy changes post entry, countries of the 2004 Eastern
accession demanded an exit right. Underlying the fear for policy changes was their much
lower level of economic development and corresponding differences in policy preferen-
ces. As a mirror image, rich outliers like the United Kingdom and Denmark also supported
Article 50, which likely contributed to its final adoption through the Treaty of Lisbon.
Keywords
Enlargement, exit, secession, withdrawal
Introduction
The European Union (EU) first adopted an exit right during the 2002–2003
Convention on the Future of Europe. The clause came into force with the
Treaty of Lisbon as Article 50 of the Treaty on EU (Athanassiou, 2009). On 29
March 2017, the United Kingdom (UK) triggered Article 50 and set in motion the
process of its withdrawal from the EU, known as Brexit. Clearly, Article 50 mat-
ters. This article provides a theoretical and empirical account of its origins.
Corresponding author:
Martijn Huysmans, School of Economics, Utrecht University, PO 80125,3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Email: m.huysmans@uu.nl
European Union Politics
2019, Vol. 20(2) 155–175
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519830202
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Temporary escape and withdrawal clauses are present in many but certainly not
all international treaties (Helfer, 2005; Koremenos, 2016; Rosendorff and Milner,
2001). In contrast, the vast majority of federations lack exit clauses.
1
Existing
theoretical explanations focus on issues of credible commitment, signaling, and
the risk of strategic exploitation. However, such accounts are unable to explain the
adoption of Article 50 by the EU, and even less its timing.
Regarding international agreements, Koremenos (2016) demonstrates that
when exit clauses are present, they have longer notice and wait periods in the
presence of enforcement and commitment problems. Extending this logic, given
the importance of stability and credible commitment for the EU’s success, it should
lack an exit clause. From this perspective, the timing of its adoption is even more
striking. As the EU became further integrated and adopted a common currency,
commitment should have become more important – and hence the adoption of an
exit clause less likely rather than more.
A similar argument regarding federations is developed into a formal model by
Bordignon and Brusco (2001). They find that even in the presence of exogenous
shocks, constitutions may optimally avoid exit clauses. The reason is that the
benefits of a union may depend on its perceived stability: ‘By not introducing
these rules, the federation raises the exit cost for its members, thus reducing the
probability of a break-up in the future’ (Bordignon and Brusco, 2001: 1812).
Again, following this argument, one would expect the EU not to have an exit
clause and expect the probability of adoption to decrease with further integration.
As pointed out by Spier (1992) and Rainer (2007), contracts may lack exit
clauses because of signaling. Parties committed to the success of cooperation
may want to signal this by foregoing exit provisions. Finally, exit clauses may
be avoided because they may be exploited strategically for blackmailing the rest
of the union into concessions, especially in the presence of incomplete information
(Chen and Ordeshook, 1994; Sunstein, 1991). In order to explain the adoption of
Article 50 based on these arguments, one would have to take the tenuous position
that concerns of signaling or strategic exploitation in the EU have gone down
rather than up.
To conclude, none of these theoretical arguments can explain why the EU has
an exit clause, and even less why it was only adopted later in its institutional
development. This is the contribution of this article. It is, to the best of my knowl-
edge, the first to address theoretically and empirically why and when the EU
adopted an exit clause.
2
The empirical focus of this article is on the EU’s 2002–2003 Convention on the
Future of Europe. At the time of the Convention, 10 Candidate States were
expected to join in 2004. The heterogeneity-veto argument developed later is
shown to be able to account for the timing of the EU’s adoption of an exit
clause, since these Candidate States were the first new Member States to both
differ significantly from the existing Member States and to enter when the EU
had moved from unanimity decision-making to qualified majority voting (QMV).
156 European Union Politics 20(2)
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