Ashamed to ask as an EU citizen, but did UK have some kind of special founding member privileges or something before? Didn’t think we had that in the EU, only the vote by population size stuff.
We do, and Ireland, Denmark and Poland have gotten opt-outs, too (link). The United Kingdom, however, was so extreme about it, that Wikipedia dedicated an entire article just to their opt-outs.
The UK was no founding member of the EU by choice, if I remember correctly. And later on, they only joined due to the financial prospects, not the underlying idea(ls). They always acted as though they were special when they were part of the union (see aforementioned opt-outs) and completely lost it during the Brexit negotiations, when they acted as though they had some sort of leverage over the entire EU. I quite like CGP Grey’s video on the topic: youtube.com
In my opinion, the French were right when they didn’t want the British to join the union; most of their initial reservations did come true, after all. So, if the UK rejoined the common market without joining the EU, like Norway, for example, that would be fine by me. But no more.
As long as the British do not change their overall stance to the EU much more (and come to terms with their non-specialness), anyway.
The UK joined later.
And yes they did have special concessions (namely a currency opt-out, like Denmark, and a Schengen opt-out, like Ireland and I believe others), although the UK were far from the only ones that had special concessions. E.g. France has a roughly the same sized economy to the UK yet contributed billions less to the budget.
I’m not really sure why people act like the UK is the only country who had concessions. Various countries have all kinds of concessions, and the wealthiest ones typically had more, because they had the most political leverage.
The UK is the only country that got a discount on their payments.
Edit: I stand corrected. One of a few
Literally not true at all. France and the UK have a practically identical economy size, but France consistently paid billions less.
You are mistaken if you think countries had leverage to make demands but chose not to use it out of charity.
A major point the others fail to mention is that they got a special discount on their contributions to the EU Budget.
This reduction amounts to roughly 66% of the difference between the UK’s contributions to, and receipts from, the EU budget
