Nine tumultuous months after Britons voted to leave the European Union, the real Brexit process is at last under way. Theresa May’s dispatch of a letter to the European Council on March 29th, invoking Article 50 of the EU treaty, marked the point at which Britain’s withdrawal from the union became all but inevitable. For half the country’s population this was a moment to celebrate; for the other half, including this newspaper, it marked a bleak day. The future of both camps—and of the EU itself—now depends on what Mrs May does next.

在全民公投决定脱离欧盟之后的九个月里，英国国内局势动荡不已，现在脱欧程序终于正式启动。3月29日，英国首相特雷莎·梅致信欧盟委员会，启动《里斯本条约》第50条，标志着英国脱欧已成既定事实。对一半的英国民众来说，这一天的到来值得庆贺；而对包括本刊在内的另一半英国民众而言，这一天则愁云密布。脱欧与留欧两大阵营以及欧盟自身的未来发展完全取决于特雷莎·梅的下一步行动。

The negotiations are sure to be difficult. Time is short, since Article 50 comes with a two-year deadline. The task of unwinding Britain’s membership of the club is fearsomely complex. Neither side is well prepared. In Britain, where Brexit increasingly resembles a faith-based initiative, voters have been given wildly unrealistic expectations of the Utopia ahead. Their first contact with the reality of losing preferential access to their main market will be traumatic. Unless Mrs May can persuade the Brexiteers on her own side that they must accept concessions, Britain may end up flouncing out of Europe without any deal at all.

可以肯定的是，脱欧谈判会进行地十分艰难。首先，《里斯本条约》第50条规定谈判周期只有两年，时间很短。其次，要解开英国与欧盟间千丝万缕的联系异常复杂。而且，不论英国还是欧盟，任何一方都没有完全做好谈判的准备。另外，英国政府给选民的乌托邦式承诺完全不切实际，脱欧正日益演变成一场基于信念的倡议。失去主要市场的优先准入权将是现实对英国的第一重打击，而这打击必将痛苦不堪。除非特雷莎·能够说服其支持者接受经济衰退，否则英国可能从脱欧谈判中捞不到任何好处。

Cruising for a bruising

自寻麻烦

The timetable is tighter even than it looks. The sides may spend weeks arguing over process. The EU wants to fix the terms of the Article 50 divorce, covering such matters as the rights of citizens resident in other countries and Britain’s multi-billion-euro exit bill, before starting work on a future trade deal; Mrs May wants to negotiate on everything at once. Nothing much will be agreed on before the German election in September. At the end of it all, ratifying the deal will take six months. That leaves little more than a year for the talks themselves.

谈判日程会比表面看上去还要紧迫。首先，双方争论流程就可能耗时数周。欧盟希望在着手谈判新的贸易协定前先敲定脱欧的谈判条件，包括确保彼此居住在对方境内公民的权利以及支付数百亿的脱欧费用；特雷莎·梅则希望立即开始所有事项的谈判。可是，在九月的德国大选前，谈判不会有什么实质性进展。协议敲定后，还需要六个月时间批准。因此，真正留给谈判桌上的时间也就只剩下一年左右。

Mrs May’s priority is to fulfil the Leave campaign’s promise to “take back control” by ending the free movement of EU citizens to Britain and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). She has acknowledged that this means leaving the EU’s single market. But leaving would be a mistake. Even if it takes control of immigration, Britain will not be able to cut the numbers much without damaging the economy, as ministers are slowly realizing. And the government is wrong to claim that there exists some relationship with the single market that has all the benefits of membership with none of the costs.

特雷莎·梅的首要任务是叫停欧盟公民自由出入英国以及脱离欧洲法院的司法管辖，以此来兑现脱欧宣传时承诺的“夺回控制权”。她承认此举意味着放弃欧盟单一市场准入。但是，放弃欧盟市场将铸成大错。英国政府会慢慢意识到，即便英国重获移民控制权，无法在不伤害经济的前提下削减移民数量。英国政府声称仍会与欧盟市场维持某种形式关系，能享受到欧盟成员同样的权利，且不必付任何代价。这种论调也是错误的。

It is true that many Britons backed Brexit because they wanted to cut immigration and regain sovereignty, but they did not vote to make themselves poorer—as Mrs May’s “hard Brexit” will. Her government has been characterized by u- turns and her letter this week was more emollient than some of her earlier statements. Even so, in thrall to Brexiteering backbenchers and the Eurosceptic press, she is unlikely to change course now.

的确，很多英国民众支持脱欧就是希望政府能削减移民数量，重掌国家主权，但是，没人希望以牺牲经济为代价——就像特雷莎·梅的“硬脱欧”政策会带来的后果那样。不过，特雷莎·梅政府以善于“发卡弯”著称，本周提交欧盟的信函与她本人之前的言论相比措辞就缓和不少。即便如此，在脱欧派后排议员和欧洲怀疑主义媒体的影响下，她现在不太可能转变脱欧大势了。

Mrs May is not just making the wrong choices, but also downplaying awkward trade-offs. By promising barrier-free access to the single market while stopping EU migrants and ending the ECJ’s jurisdiction, she is still telling Britons they can have their cake and eat it. Although she concedes that exporters to the EU will have to obey EU rules, the more Mrs May insists on controlling EU migration and escaping the ECJ, the less barrier-free will be Britain’s overall access to the single market. This is not just because free movement of people is a condition for the EU, nor because it will be hard to secure tariff-free access for trade in goods, something both sides can readily agree on. It is because the biggest obstacles swept away by the single market are not tariffs or customs checks, but non-tariff barriers such as standards, regulations and state-aid rules. Unless Britain accepts these, which implies a role for the system’s referee, the ECJ, it cannot operate freely in the single market—as even American firms trading in the EU have found.

然而，特雷莎·梅不只是错误地选择了脱欧，英国在谈判中处于劣势这点，她也在极力掩饰。她一方面向公众承诺英国可以毫无障碍地自由出入欧盟单一市场，另一方面又禁止欧盟移民自由流入、反对欧洲法院的司法管辖，通过这些手段，她告知英国民众仍然能享受原先的权利。虽然特雷莎·梅承认，对欧盟出口的英国企业未来可能要遵守欧盟法律法规，她越是坚持要管控欧盟移民数量、摆脱欧洲法院管辖，英国在欧盟市场的全面准入障碍就越大。这不仅是因为欧盟开出的条件之一就是确保人员自由流动，也不仅是因为难以确保零关税商品交易准入——这些问题双方其实很快就能协商一致。真正原因在于，单一市场为自由贸易清除的最大障碍既非关税也非海关检查，而是各类标准、法规和国家支持的法律法规。除非英国全盘接受，而这离不开欧盟体系的裁判，即欧洲法院，否则英国无法享受单一市场的自由贸易，甚至不如那些与欧盟贸易的美国企业。

Boxed into a corner

陷入绝境

The most dangerous of Mrs May’s illusions has been her claim that no deal is better than a bad deal. Her letter this week steps back from this notion, but only a pace. To revert to trading with the EU only on World Trade Organization (WTO) terms would cause serious harm to Britain’s economy. It would mean the EU imposing tariffs plus a full panoply of non-tariff barriers on almost half Britain’s exports. No big country trades with the EU only on WTO terms. An acrimonious break-up would make it harder to co-operate in such areas as foreign policy and defence. And it would surely increase the risk of Brexit triggering Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom.

特雷莎·梅描绘的幻景最危险之处在于她所宣称的不达成协议好过糟糕协议。不过，她本周提交欧盟的信函倒是稍微跳出了这一观念。重新采用世界贸易组织规则与欧盟开展贸易将对英国经济造成严重破坏。这意味着英国出口到欧盟的商品中有近一半将被欧盟征收关税并设置大量非关税壁垒。没有任何大国仅依照世贸组织条款与欧盟进行贸易。硬脱欧会让英国与欧盟在外交政策和防御等领域的合作变得更难，也更易诱发苏格兰独立。

Mrs May needs not merely to soften her tone, as she has started to do this week, but to lower expectations. Instead of threatening to undercut her European partners by building an unregulated Singapore-on-Thames (something that, despite its appeal to free-traders, would horrify most Brexit voters), or hinting that Britain might co-operate less fully on security, or claiming that the EU needs Britain more than the other way round, she should accept that in these negotiations she holds the weaker hand. She should hence be more flexible over payments into the EU budget, a subject her letter skates over.

本周特雷莎·梅的言辞已开始有所软化，但是，她需要的不仅仅是缓和言语，还要降低期许。不要拿英国脱欧后的经济会和新加坡脱离马来西亚后的经济一样成功的说法（虽然这对自由贸易者很有吸引力，但会给多数脱欧支持者造成恐惧）来威胁削弱欧盟，或者暗示英国将减少与欧盟在安全领域的合作，或宣称欧盟对英国的依赖要比英国对欧盟的依赖更强，而是应当接受事实，明白在这场谈判中是英国处于劣势。因此，在处理欧盟提出的脱欧费用时她应当更加灵活，而脱欧信函中并未提及此话题。

Because negotiating a full free-trade deal is certain to take more than two years—no country has concluded one with the EU in so short a time—she should accept another consequence: that transitional arrangements will be needed to avoid “falling off a cliff” in March 2019. Her letter talks airily of “implementation periods”, but does not acknowledge how hard these may be to sort out. A proper, time-limited transition might mean prolonging free movement of people and the rule of the ECJ, but that price would be worth paying for a better Brexit.

达成完全自由贸易的协议谈判时间肯定会超过两年，因此，目前尚未出现其他国家在这么短的时间里与欧盟达成此项协议，特雷莎·梅应该接受另一后果：需要进行过渡期安排以避免2019年3月英国大选来临时英国“跌落悬崖”。她在脱欧信函里提及“实施期”时很是轻松，却并未承认划分出“实施期”可能会很困难。要想在有限时间里顺利完成过渡，这可能就要延长人员自由流动和欧洲法院的司法管辖权，不过，为了达成更有利的谈判结果，这是值得作出的牺牲。

The softer tone of Mrs May’s letter might, with luck, encourage her EU partners to be more accommodating. So far they have reacted to threats from London in kind, talking up the exit bill, insisting that Britain ends up being worse off outside the club than inside and digging in over terms for co-operating in foreign and security policies. There is a possibility of a deal between Britain and the EU that minimizes Brexit’s harm. Unfortunately, in a negotiation against the clock where both sides start so far apart, there is also a big risk of one that maximizes harm instead.

如果幸运的话，特雷莎·梅在信中态度的软化可能促使欧盟方面采取更为通融的态度。目前为止，面对英国的威胁，欧盟方面从来都是以牙还牙，开出天价脱欧费用，坚称脱欧后英国经济将会恶化，坚持外交和安全政策的合作条款。脱欧谈判仍有希望将英国损失降到最低。不幸的是，谈判日程如此紧张，谈判双方分歧又如此之大，最终的谈判结果还有可能让英国遭受最大的损失。

编译：覃思晓

审校：郭娜

编辑：翻吧君

英文来源：经济学人