Brexit

7 Key excerpts on "Brexit"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Politics and Economics of Brexit

  • Simon Bulmer, Lucia Quaglia(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION

  The politics and economics of Brexit

  Simon Bulmer and Lucia Quaglia

  Introduction

  The British referendum on continuing membership of the European Union (EU) in June 2016 represented a turning point in the relationship between the United Kingdom (UK) and the EU. The result – a 51.9% to 48.1% victory for Leave voters on a high turnout of 72.2% – was accepted by Prime Minister David Cameron as a defeat; he resigned. In March 2017, the British government under Prime Minister Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, officially beginning the negotiations of UK withdrawal from the EU – the Brexit process. The economic and political effects of Brexit will be far-reaching for the UK and the EU and warrant scholarly examination. This collection has two main aims: to investigate the implications of Brexit for the EU and the UK, placing this assessment in the context of the long-term evolution of UK-EU relations; and to draw some lessons from it, relating these findings to debates within the literature on EU policy-making, comparative politics and political economy.

  Brexit raises a set of important questions addressed by this collection: (i) what are the repercussions of Brexit for the EU, to be preciseits policies, the relations between member states and the domestic contestation of the EU? (ii) what are the consequence of Brexit for the UK, specifically for British politics and the British economy? (iii) What are the implication of Brexit for theories of EU integration? The papers address these questions. The material is organized into two parts. The first explores the implications of Brexit for key policy areas, namely the single market, finance and migration. The policies selected are those in which the consequences of Brexit are likely to be most significant because they are linked to the ‘four freedoms’ in the Single Market. The second part explores important ‘horizontal’ or thematic issues, namely lessons from Brexit for theories of integration, the balance of power in the EU amongst the main member states post-Brexit, the evolution of the domestic political contestation in the EU, and the impact of Brexit on domestic politics in the UK.

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  The EU's Crisis Decade

  Reflecting on EU Capitalism and Governance

  • Chih-Mei Luo(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The unexpected outcome was confirmed to be the British exit from the EU (Brexit) with 51.9% of votes in favour of leaving the EU and 48.1% in favour of remaining in the EU (Bremain) (The UK Electoral Commission, 2016). The Brexit outcome has caused immediate political and economic repercussions across the UK and the world. For the UK itself, as Glencross (2014 : 2) comments, this result was the UK’s ‘most momentous political decision in the peacetime period since the Irish Home Rule ’. Whitman (2016a) believes such an outcome presented ‘the most formidable challenge to the UK’ since World War II, while the commentator of Financial Times, Martin Wolf (2016), describes it as ‘the single worst event in the British post-war history’. For Europe, as Barysch and Bildt (2016), the director of Allianz SE and former prime minister of Sweden, point out, ‘ Brexit is the most consequential event in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall ’, and Niblett (2016a) indicates that the EU faced ‘the most difficult period in its history’. This historic event has caused profound impact on European integration and the post-war consensus on promoting free trade. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, comments Brexit as ‘a turning point in the history of European integration’ (Politico, 26 August 2016a), while there is widespread concern about its spillover to other Western advanced economies, as the New York Times expresses in its editorial (28 June 2016). The Chinese president, Xi Jin-Ping, also warns the rise of protectionism and anti-globalization after the UK referendum. Whether or how Brexit will have impact on European integration and wider regional integration requires thorough examinations into how this issue emerged and developed first, and to explore under what circumstances, the Brexit outcome has been produced. This research is an attempt to answer such questions

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  The Future of British Foreign Policy

  Security and Diplomacy in a World after Brexit

  • Christopher Hill(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  1  Brexit and UK Foreign Policy

  All kinds of metaphors can be used to describe Britain's relationship with European integration since the start of the process in 1950 – we have missed the bus, dragged our feet and tried to slow down the Franco–German locomotive driving the project forward. Finally, in 2016, the British people voted clearly, if by a small majority, to get off the train altogether. In our various moods, and by means of governments from both major parties, we had persistently and with some success attempted to put a brake on integration over 43 years of membership. But whether because Britain itself had changed, with hardening views towards Europe, or because the European Union (EU) itself had run into ever more serious problems, this strategy was deemed insufficient. Britain would have to leave, to renegotiate fundamentally its relationship with its closest neighbours, and thus to seek both a new identity and a new role in world politics.

  In this book I focus on the foreign policy dimension of the decision to leave, looking first backward, then at the uncertainties that face the country in the process of departing from the EU, and finally at the likely longer term consequences of such a seismic event. This is at once a large task and a limited one. Large, because foreign policy has come to encompass a wide range of issues, many bridging the external and internal divide. Limited, because it is neither possible nor desirable in a short book to cover every aspect of the United Kingdom's (UK's) relationship with the EU and of the agonizing negotiations over its departure. The negotiations focus mostly on finance, on the Irish border, on the rights of citizenship and on a post-Brexit trading deal. All of these have foreign policy aspects and implications that will occupy much of the energy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but they are highly technical and space-consuming questions. How they are settled will certainly shape Britain's future role in the world but, until then, our thinking about foreign policy is better focused on the broader questions of orientation, identity, security and power.

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  "Brexit" as a Social and Political Crisis

  Discourses in Media and Politics

  • Franco Zappettini, Michał Krzyżanowski, Franco Zappettini, Michał Krzyżanowski(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  per se , but rather in discursive practices as vehicles of different attitudes and ideologies. We therefore appeal to discourses as wider perspectives and as specific entry points for the analysis. They help us explore how some of the linguistic and semiotic productions surrounding the contingency of the Brexit referendum relate to different path-dependent trajectories and how these discourses have been articulated and seized upon by different actors at the time of the said critical juncture. For example, in its contingent form, Brexit has been a process defined by political opportunism aimed at reigning in the infight over Europe inside the Conservative Party but, in turn, such process have been fuelled by long-standing trajectories of British imperialism and Euroscepticism rooted in the historical visions of the relationship between Britain and the ‘continent’ and in the perceived distinct history of the British Empire and its democratic traditions from wider Europe (see, in particular, Maccaferri, 2019).

  The contingency of the 2016 Referendum on Brexit has also involved the (re)articulation of social, political and cultural narratives along logics of rupture, continuity or, in some cases, contradictorily both (Zappettini, 2019a). At institutional level, for example, discourses of ‘one United Kingdom’ which downplayed or even silenced the gamut of different regional views of Brexit across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were contrasted by narratives of rupture with the EU as an institutional framework politically and economically incompatible with Britain and its trade ambitions. At the same time, however, the institutional rhetoric has also portrayed new ‘global’ Britain as committed to ‘shared European values’ as the UK ‘leaves the EU but not Europe’ (see Krzyżanowski, 2010 for the ambivalent discursive constructions of the EU and Europe) and as the government vision for an out-of-the-EU UK has gradually shifted from ‘ambitious’ to ‘pragmatic’.

  The Brexit referendum was also – or perhaps in particular – reasserted and articulated through a discursive contingency based on the simplistic antagonism of the in/out binaries. These binaries were discursively appropriated by different actors and, in turn, they indexed larger ideological struggles over key political and social issues. For example, Brexit has been interpreted in relation to an international surge in populist backlash against globalisation and Europeanization as the perceived causes of rapid social changes (Calhoun, 2017). In this sense, for many ‘Leavers’, Brexit embodied the perceived opportunity for Britain to shift away from an ‘unavoidable’ supranational path inside the EU back to a ‘safer’ (inter)national system of relations. However, the Leave campaign ‘take back control’ slogan often represented a floating signifier that instrumentally legitimised both a logic of global deceleration rejecting neoliberalism and austerity (through the argument that power taken over by the EU global governance project should be reigned back into national remits) and a logic of global acceleration

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  The Brexit Policy Fiasco

  • Jeremy Richardson, Berthold Rittberger(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nationalism has long been the refuge of those who are insecure, who sense they are losing status, and who seek standing by identifying with the group. The promise of transnationalism has been gains for all, but the experience of the past two decades is that it hurts many. Hence, opposition to transnationlism is for many a populist reaction against élites who have little sympathy for national borders. (Hooghe & Marks, 2018, pp. 114–5)

  The Brexit referendum vote was clearly a vote against the political ruling class in Britain, but it was also a vote against the European-level elite. As Bogdanor has put it, ‘the referendum was a genuine grass roots insurgency, a revolt from below’ (Bogdanor, 2016, p. 350, emphasis added). In fact, the revolt is a rare example of authoritarian populism breaking into ‘normal’ politics in Britain. As Crewe argues

  authoritarian populism has always had a place in British political life. But its impact on elections, parties and government action has been – at least until the Brexit Referendum – remarkably limited, a case study in the capacity of the UK political institutions to impede the conversion of a significant and strongly held block of opinion into public policy. (Crewe, 2020, p. 17)

  From the perspective of European elites, it might be comforting to present Brexit as just the most recent example of British exceptionalism within the EU, yet Hobolt warns otherwise. She argues that:

  although the attitudinal data show that Britain is something of an outlier in terms of Euro-scepticism, there is a growing divide within the EU both economically and culturally between those who feel left behind by the forces of globalization and those who have benefitted from it. The former group favours a “drawbridge up“ policy of less European integration , closed borders, and fewer immigrants, whereas the latter group are in favour of greater openness and international co-operation. (Hobolt, 2016, p. 1272, emphasis added)

  Thus, there is at least a case to be answered by the EU in terms of the causes of Brexit. As Schmidt notes ‘ … Brexit can also be read as a warning about fundamental problems in the EU integration process … constitutionalising policy choices, accepting case law rather than political preferences, implies the danger of shifting political contestation to another level’ (Schmidt, 2020, p.790, emphasis added). Edema and Kelemen, somewhat earlier, also warned of the effects of the judicialization of EU policy-making, arguing that the tendency to produce detailed inflexible regulations was deeply rooted in the EU’s political system, with a predilection for ‘judicial enforcement of strict legal norms’ (Idema & Kelemen, 2006, p. 116). Hobolt and Rodon point to the possible consequences of the ‘Europeanization’ of domestic electoral politics

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  Understanding Conflicts of Sovereignty in the EU

  • Nathalie Brack, Ramona Coman, Amandine Crespy, Nathalie Brack, Ramona Coman, Amandine Crespy(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Member statehood is thus a deeply unstable form of state. It contains both a ‘void’ between ruler and ruled and competing accounts of political authority and legitimacy articulated by the ruled themselves.

  Parliamentary versus popular sovereignty

  The UK referendum on EU membership in 2016 has revealed a gap between parliamentary and popular sovereignty (Weale 2017; Mabbett 2017 cf. Bogdanor 2016b). The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty states that nobody external to parliament can bind it. It can go as far as stating that parliament cannot even bind itself (Bogdanor 2012, 182). In the case of the EU referendum, however, it is very clear that parliament was bound by the results of the vote, namely to proceed with the UK’s exit from the EU, and therefore bound by an external body, the electorate.5 The problem stems from the fact that the vast majority of members of parliament (and also, of Peers in the House of Lords) were in support of the UK staying in the EU. The opinion of the two Houses on the issue of EU membership was thus at odds with a majority of the British public.

  Figures for this are difficult to obtain with exact precision but estimates suggest that around 218 Labour MPs voted in favour of Remain, with 11 voting for Brexit. For the Conservative Party, estimates are that 187 MPs voted for Remain, and 147 voted for Brexit (see Lynch and Whitaker 2018 for a discussion). All Liberal Democrat MPs stated they would vote for EU membership (eight MPs), as did all 56 Scottish Nationalist Party MPs, the three Plaid Cymru MPs, the four Sinn Fein MPs and the three SDLP MPs. Other Remainers included the Green MP Caroline Lucas, one independent MP and two Ulster Unionists. DUP MPs (8) said they would vote for Brexit, as did the one UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell. Overall, estimates are that out of 650 MPs, 480 voted to remain in the EU.

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  The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit

  • Juan Santos Vara, Ramses A. Wessel, Juan Santos Vara, Ramses A. Wessel(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 The implications of Brexit for EU and UK external relations An introduction

  Juan Santos Vara, Ramses A. Wessel and Polly R. Polak

  1.1 Introduction

  This handbook comes at a crucial moment in time. It was finalized on Europe Day, exactly 70 years after Robert Schuman underlined the need for ‘a united Europe’.1 At the same time, that same Europe is confronted with the withdrawal of one of its Member States. Schuman argued that ‘Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.’ These days, European solidarity is challenged and, indeed, has not proven capable of keeping all Member States on board. With his ‘realisation of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace’, Schuman could not have predicted some Member States would end up seeing close European cooperation as something standing in the way of their own national and global ambitions.2

  At the time of writing, no decisions have been taken on the final shape and form of the agreement (or agreements) governing the future relationship between the EU and the UK. The Withdrawal Agreement (WA), that established the terms of the UK’s orderly withdrawal from the EU, entered into force on 1 February 2020.3 The WA regulates the transition period, keeping the UK outside the EU institutional framework, while still fully applying EU law. The end of the transition is foreseen on 31 December 2020, with a possibility of a single extension, either for one or two years. The UK and the EU have also adopted the Revised Political Declaration of 17 October 2019 setting out the framework for the future relationship between the EU and the UK.4

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