These are the deals Britain could now make with Europe – and they don't actually look that bad

In many ways, Britain leaving is more of an opportunity for Europe than it is a threat

The Remain camp has been left bitterly disappointed by Friday's shock result

There will be a deal with Europe because there has to be a deal. It is the job of the politicians to sort that out. It is far too early to sketch what that deal might be, but you can sketch the framework – the range of issues that have to be settled – and see some possible institutional arrangements that will enable this to happen.

The first thing to do is to forget the pre-vote rhetoric. Forget George Osborne saying that there would have to be an emergency budget. Forget Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, warning that Britain would become as unimportant as Guernsey. Forget the anonymous Brussels bureaucrats warning that the EU would punish Britain if it voted to leave so that other countries would not want to do so. That was then. Now is now. The new reality is that it is profoundly in the self-interests of Europe to do a deal as fast as possible. That was acknowledged yesterday by the joint statement of EU leaders, calling for negotiations to be launched “swiftly”. The EU, which has a huge trade surplus with the UK, has to preserve its export market. (The UK has a current account surplus with the rest of the world.)

So there will have to be some kind of associate status for Britain. This may be easier to negotiate than it seems at first sight. We cannot be a full member, but though we technically are at the moment, in practice we aren’t really a full member now. We are not in the euro and not in the Schengen borderless travel agreement, the two most important elements of European integration. That makes divorce easier. We don’t, so to speak, have to worry about those two problem children.

There are two ready-made solutions, neither of which is perfect. One is the European Free Trade Area, the other the European Economic Association. EFTA was founded in 1960 by the UK and other European countries that were not members of what was then called the Common Market. Most members – ourselves, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and so on – subsequently joined what became the EU. But four remain: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The deal there is they have negotiated access to the EU markets but without being members. The EEA was deal signed in 1994, which includes three of the EFTA countries (not Switzerland) and all the EU members, giving everyone mutual access to the European single market.

So the UK could in theory join an enlarged ETFA, or it could negotiate access via the EEA. The trouble is that this would mean accepting European market legislation, including movement of labour. The most acceptable solution from a UK perspective would be, like Switzerland, to be a member of EFTA but not the EEA. But it would not give sufficient protection for our labour market.

While these ready-made solutions don’t really work, what they do is show something else. What they show is that Europe, taken as a whole, has been ingenious at finding ways to enable it to function as a single trading bloc, despite the political barriers. The one-size-fits-all common currency has, by contrast, been a disaster and its future is by no means assured.

Whatever happens, the UK economy will remain closely integrated with Europe, just as Switzerland’s is at the moment. The deal will on the one hand see the UK trying to retain as much access as possible for its exports of services to Europe, for we do much better on trade in services than we do on trade in goods. And on the other hand, Europe will seek to retain full movement of goods and as much movement of labour as the UK is prepared to accept.

Will the deal, whatever it turns out to be, be seen as a disaster for Europe? That depends on your vision for the EU. For people who want to see a totally integrated continent, with the same currency, same laws, complete freedom of movement, and so on, it might indeed appear a disaster. But that was a vision of 60 years ago – though the people who had that vision did not tell the voters who joined the Common Market. However, for people who see Europe as a diverse continent, with many similarities but also very different national histories and culture, the idea of a collection of countries that cooperate in economic matters but have quite different political objectives is not a bad one.

Indeed if this looser arrangement of countries, with a core in the middle and an outer ring, could find a way of including Russia in that outer ring, that would be a prize indeed. That is many miles from where we are now, but would be a nobler objective than the bureaucratic, fractious muddle that the EU has become. Put that way, the UK leaving is more of an opportunity for Europe than a threat.