The paper will analyse the relationship between the EU and the UK in the cybersecurity domain post-Brexit. The UK has been among the most important negotiators on the very first EU cybersecurity law – the NIS Directive, negotiating for a more powerful member states (MS), supported by the EU. The EU has also pursued a the leadership role, supported by the MS. Scholarship has not agreed on who has lost more from Brexit: while some focus on the EU losing the UK’s knowledge and capabilities in the field, others focus on the UK losing the access to the valuable intelligence data shared among the MS.

Since 2020, both parties have taken steps to strengthen their cybersecurity legal frameworks. The EU has adopted the Cybersecurity Competence Centres Regulation 2021, the NIS2 Directive 2022, and proposed a Cyber Resilience Act. The UK, instead, has decided to review its NIS Regulations and its telecoms security legislation. At the same time, the UK has been much more vocal than the EU when it comes to attribution of malicious cyberattacks to foreign states such as Russia and China. It has been seeking a partnership with the U.S. when attributing attacks, rather than with any of the EU cyber powers such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, Estonia or the EU itself. The EU has not used its Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox since 2020 and has been reluctant to further develop its cyber diplomacy approach, mainly because of diverging MS’ interests in the domain. The UK and the EU are hence pursuing different goals in cyberspace, with the EU focusing on the strengthening of the internal market and the UK pursuing a leadership role in attribution.

The paper will hence analyse whether the EU and the UK can find a common denominator - align their diverging legislative and strategic objectives and pursue an effective and productive cooperation, or whether they will become competitors. It will ultimately aim at concluding what the potential role of the “third country” UK will be for an increasingly powerful and influential EU in cybersecurity.

While the May and Johnson governments put much stock in ‘getting Brexit done’ (Boris Johnson) ‘come way may’ (Theresa May), the temptation to declare Brexit complete has been overshadowed on multiple occasions by the desire to instrumentally identify threats to Brexit as justifying continued Conservative and/or Brexiteer engagement. Precisely because the potential outcomes for Brexit are so multifaceted – covering varying degrees of integration – the scope for declaring withdrawal incomplete is possible right up until the ‘no deal’ outcome. This article explores these tensions in the delivery of Brexit, which have been under-studied within the now dense scholarship on the politics of British withdrawal. Drawing on research on issue-ownership, political entrepreneurs and externalisation, we argue that keeping Brexit on the agenda produces electoral gains for the Conservative right whilst also preventing other parties from criticising the Brexit agenda. Empirically, we examine the changing discourse of governments since the 2016 referendum, including those of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. We show how successive leadership candidates have sought to challenge their predecessor’s delivery of Brexit, and how incumbents have sought external impediments to the delivery of Brexit. Understanding the tensions between delivering Brexit and keeping the issue alive helps us understand the motivations of British politicians during these crucial years as well as the evolution towards a harder Brexit between 2017-21. Methodologically, we draw on interview data from over 50 interviewees as well as biographies, speeches, media articles and the recent literature.

June 2023 marks the start of the Unitary Patent (UP) and Unified Patent Court (UPC). The UP/UPC-system results from enhanced cooperation between a large majority of EU-MSs and brings an end (?) to more than 70 years of controversies over common patent protection within the single market.

Most of the recent analyses of the UP/UPC focus on the enhanced cooperation schemes, on UPC-jurisdiction, on language and cost issues, and other implementation issues. This paper approaches «patent integration» from the perspectives of (internal, external) differentiated integration, alternative and competing integration regimes, and international regime complexity. It concentrates on how uncertainty regarding the UK seriously impacted decision-making on common patents within the EEC/EU and -more generally- the choice of the appropriate patent regime in Europe. This happened both in the context of UK-accession (1960s-1970s) and in the context of Brexit (2016 onwards).

The paper is structured as follows. After the introduction (section 1), section 2 provides the theoretical background for the paper. This includes work on differentiated integration, alternative integration, and international regime complexity. A typology of potential governance regimes will be developed (single regime, parallel exclusive regimes, overlapping regimes, and nested regimes). This typology will be used to analyse developments in patent governance in Europe since the end of WWII.

Section 3 deals with the period up to 1973, during which two parallel regimes were developed: a Council of Europe regime (proposed in 1949) and an EEC-regime (proposed in 1962). The CoE-regime centred around a “European Certificate of Invention”, based on which national authorities would grant patents, with domestic litigation. The EEC-regime involved a unified EEC-patent, centrally granted, immediately valid throughout the EEC, with patent litigation by a specialised ECJ-chamber. Different, partly overlapping memberships of the CoE and EEC, as well as uncertainty about the position of the EFTA-states and especially about the possible accession of the UK to the EEC, resulted in the choice for the CoE-regime (European Patent Convention, 1973).

Section 4 looks into the development of the UP/UPC. The EEC/EC/EU never gave up on the idea of a common patent and in 2012 agreement on unitary patent protection was reached. Brexit and the withdrawal of the UK from the UP/UPC-agreements did however create ratification issues for the EU. Moreover, it adds to the fragmentation of the regime complex: the UP/UPC-system will be partly overlapping with and partly nested in the EPC-regime.

Section 5 discusses, section 6 concludes.