Barnier said he hoped the talks, starting nearly a year to the day after a British referendum vote to leave the EU, would "identify priorities and a timetable that would allow me to report to the European Council later this week that we had a constructive opening of negotiations".
First they will cover the logistics to try to formulate a timetable for the talks before more substantive negotiations begin next month. Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said: "If we don't succeed, both sides will lose". With or without a deal, Britain will be out of the European Union on March 30, 2019. "But the 27 of us will formulate our interests very clearly and hopefully, together", Merkel said.
The negotiations kick off in Brussels on Monday with Britain under pressure for stalling the talks and entering the negotiations without a working parliamentary majority fully in place.
May had promised to take Britain completely out of the bloc's common trading area and slash the number of people coming from the EU. Gabriel said. "Now there is a hard, even impossible situation without any clear majorities or negotiating strategy, he added".
The EU says it will not compromise on its core "four freedoms": free movement of goods, capital, services and workers.
The talks at the European Commission's headquarters kicked off just shy of a year after the Brexit referendum, when U.K. voters chose to leave the EU by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin, and almost three months after U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May sent a letter formally triggering the withdrawal process.
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The UK dropped its objections to the EU's preferred order for talks after the general election result jeopardised its negotiating position.
But taking on one thing at a time, the EU's a priority is to guarantee their rights for 3 million European Union citizens in Britain and to collect billions of euros it says London will owe on its departure. May, whose future is uncertain after she lost her Conservative majority in an election this month, has insisted that trade talks start immediately and run in parallel.
Almost a year to the day since Britons shocked themselves and their neighbours by voting on 23 June 2016 to cut loose from their main trading partner (See: It's Brexit as United Kingdom votes to leave European Union), and nearly three months since Prime Minister Theresa May locked them into a two-year countdown to Brexit in March 2019, almost nothing about the future is clear.
"The most important thing I think now is for us to look to the horizon, think about the future, and think about the new partnership, the deep and special partnership that we want to build with our friends".
If Britain crashes out of the European Union without a deal, that would create huge uncertainties for citizens and businesses as well as issues like global security.
Finance minister Philip Hammond confirmed Sunday that it was still the plan to quit not only the EU but the customs union and the bloc's single market as well.
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