We are either in the club or we are not!
Yeah, this is, as I indicated, a frequent refrain in response to the '
straw man' of 'What makes us so "special?' and 'You want to have your cake and eat it'. And it would be a valid point if (a) that is what Brexiters were really saying, (b) the EU was just a club and (c) my points were about 'membership' rather than about relationships with non-members.
It is not a 'club', where you join up to accrue some particular benefits in return for your subscription. It is an 'ever-closer union' subsuming nations into a single super-state, covering all aspects of our lives.
My arguments are not about 'in the club' or 'out of the club', they are about how the 20-30 'club members' could and should interact with the 170-180 'non-members'.
So yes, it would be somewhat unreasonable to say that we want to continue to participate in EU-specific projects or institutions that are just about the EU, if we leave.
Although there are many European projects and institutions that work perfectly well, while NOT being part of the EU (like the European Space Agency, and the European Patent Office) and so there is no reason why the UK, Switzerland, etc cannot be members of various smaller 'European clubs'. It seems regrettable to me, that many people working within the EU machinery seem to think that everything 'European' must be subsumed into the one superstate, rather than just being about co-operation amongst European nations.
And, if there was some goodwill, and not a doctrinaire focus on the EU being 'everything in Europe' we could usefully continue to participate in Europol, Horizon2020, Galleio, Euratom, and loads of other good 'European projects' that have been unnecessarily set up as 'EU projects'.
But also, it is totally reasonable for the UK to expect the EU to agree what are, in effect, bi-lateral agreements on, for example travel and residence for their citizens, driving licence validity, and (yes indeed) trade. I accept that the EU might want to be a ***** about that, in order to try ti intimidate its other members (although think about that for a moment - is that the sort of club you want to be in?). And I accept that the EU might want to prioritise trade with, say, the USA, over the UK but nonetheless, the UK is about the world's sixth largest economy and the EU's businesses want to trade with the UK, and the EU's people want to travel to the UK, so both parties have both a need and a duty to get on with it.
What is almost certainly NOT reasonable, is for the UK to expect the EU to be divided within itself. So for the UK to say to the EU, for example, that French people don't need visas, but Latvian people do, would quite reasonably be unacceptable. So, yes, the EU would not want to 'undermine themselves, their trade and the integrity of the single market', and rightly so. BUT there are exceptional situations, such as Ireland and Gibraltar (and the overseas territories of France, Spain and the Netherlands, and the long eastern land borders of the EU, and Switzerland), where special rules get made. And if the EU actually cared about peace in Ireland, they would be actively working on a good solution for the NI-EU land border, rather than making it a political bargaining-chip.