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The UK could have asked for several different deals and got them. EEA would have taken zero negotiation, for instance.

I don't believe there's any mechanism to go from full EU membership to the EEA when you're already a member? That is more or less the same thing as negotiating to leave before article 50 is invoked.

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring too?

Why is it granted they would have gotten an EEA-like deal?

The UK was already a member of the EEA, ok it was by virtue of it's EU membership in the end, but the UK was a founder member. If the UK had decided that it wanted to maintain it when it left the EU I can't imagine who would have objected?

From what people were saying at the time, the other EEA-but-not-EU members didn’t much like the idea of their group being dominated by the UK.

I have no insight into how significant that concern would have been in practice, only that it reached the news.

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