In his tour of capitals in 2016, Barnier raised the likelihood of a transition after the UK's withdrawal and told government leaders: “My expectation is that we will work from October 2017 until summer 2018 on the new relationship. Afterwards, we can define the terms of a transition”. Some expressed surprise. The Maltese prime minister Muscat told Barnier that a transition made life too easy for the UK. National governments thought about possible relocations of financial services to their country. A short timeframe without a transition was therefore in their interest to add pressure on UKbased companies. Many in the German government pressed to make any transition short because they wanted to show that leaving the EU came at a cost well in advance of the 2019 European elections. Merkel told Barnier it was important to define first the future relationship and subsequently design a transition as a pathway towards the new destination, which would show the cost of non-membership.

Things turned out differently as a standstill transition with an economic and legal status quo was agreed in March 2018 before talks on the future even started. That outcome was more in line with what the French president Hollande told Barnier in the Elysee Palace in October 2016: “the existing institutional framework would need to apply”, he said, and added that the EU could not separate the four freedoms during transition. In that case, the Commission's top lawyer told a seminar with all 27 member states at the end of November 2016, the jurisdiction of EU judges had to apply in the UK. That was the model of a standstill transition. The April 2017 European Council guidelines reflected that the EU's thinking was fluctuating between a model of prolonging quasi-membership in a “time-limited manner” or creating “bridges towards the foreseeable framework for the future relationship in light of the progress made”. Sector-based continuations of membership arrangements after Brexit or transitional bridges to the future put the UK in a comfortable position, however, to ease smoothly into a new future and those ideas were soon abandoned.