Christmas came early for Brussels lawyers and policy wonks who relish nothing better than a brain-teasing multidimensional constitutional puzzle to while away the dark days of winter.
After a “make-or-break” summit dinner with Prime Minister David Cameron, the political leaders of the European Union agreed there must be a compromise to keep Britain in the bloc and passed the tangled parcel of British demands to their technocratic minions to sort out the details within 2 months.
“The mood is much better. Now we can go away and work on the alternatives,” one of those now charged in Brussels with taking on the negotiations said in the early hours of Friday.
Cameron got what he needed -- as a British government source put it, “more top down” orders to negotiators to cut through the legal detail: “Political leaders saying: ‘This is an issue. We want to fix it. We value Britain’s place in the EU.
“And so now go away and solve it.”
An official said gleefully that EU lawyers were already on top of the issue and could now find a way out by February.
Although Cameron insisted he was not dropping a touchstone demand for EU workers to wait four years to claim benefits in Britain, fellow leaders were confident of his readiness to consider other ways to reduce immigration from Europe that did not clash with treaties on equal treatment of all EU citizens.
There were some furrowed brows among EU officials who have spent months in technical discussions with London that have thrown up as many questions as answers -- principally about how to square EU treaty law with curbs on immigration from Europe that Cameron says he needs to sell an EU reform deal to British voters.
Few have any illusions about the scale of the task facing them before the leaders’ next rendezvous in Brussels on February 17-18.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others made clear that they could accept some amendment to EU treaties, as Cameron says he needs. But over dinner several leaders stressed they had no chance of securing immediate ratification of such changes from increasingly Eurosceptic parliaments and electorates.
That, officials say, leaves what some call the “Edinburgh option” -- a binding protocol among the states of the EU to make changes the next time the treaties are revised.
A protocol gives leaders the chance to give their interpretation of the treaty, but cannot entirely overturn fundamental treaty principles.