The Canada-Europe trade agreement has gone from a done deal to a deal in perilous limbo. You will see headlines blaming this result on the tremors emanating from Britain's Brexit vote – but that's only part of the story.
The roadblock now standing in front of CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, is the product of the continent-wide forces that led to the Brexit vote. At issue is the long-running power struggle between national governments and the supranational EU, and between voters who want more Europe and those who'd like rather less. Right now, "Less Europe" is in the ascendancy. To appease the angry spirits of European politics, CETA is the sacrificial offering.
Explainer: What you need to know about CETA
Until Tuesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker planned to use EU institutions and only EU institutions – the European Parliament and his own executive branch – to ratify the Canada-Europe trade deal. The EU's 28 national parliaments and governments would not have been given a vote. Mr. Juncker may have had the power to do that, and an arguable democratic legitimacy of a sort. The European Parliament is elected, after all.
But at a time when euroskepticism is at its height across the continent, it would have been folly to have the EU's first big post-Brexit action be a precedent-setting bypassing of national sovereignty. European governments, led by Germany's, told Mr. Juncker as much. Politicians are not about to risk the ire of voters for the sake of what is, for Europeans at least, a minor trade agreement.
What's more, CETA is also a model for a future EU-U.S. trade agreement. And if national parliaments could be ignored when doing a deal with Canada, that would surely set a precedent for how to handle the larger and far more controversial American deal.
That's why Mr. Juncker reversed course on Tuesday. He put out a press release calling for CETA's swift implementation – subject to the approval of the EU's 28 member states "through the relevant national ratification procedures." Goodbye, fast track.
As an economy one-10th the size of its negotiating partner, Canada has limited leverage over what happens next. When approval of CETA passed through Brussels and only Brussels, the result was a fait accompli. Now that the road must wind its way through 28 European capitals, the journey will be more complicated and longer, and there are no guarantees.
CETA's problem isn't its substance. It's the calendar; in politics, timing is everything. And all politics, as Tip O'Neill once said, is local. That's why even European politicians who back the international deal worry about the manner and optics of its passing, and the impact on their own political careers.