The Nested Games of Brexit

Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Pauline Schnapper, Simon Usherwood, Agnès Alexandre-Collier, Pauline Schnapper, Simon Usherwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032272009
• eBook ISBN: 9781000596922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a novel perspective on the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, providing insights to the ways in that domestic concerns interact with European policy to produce sometimes counter-intuitive outcomes.

The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both political parties in the UK. This innovative volume considers the extent to which the interrelation between the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for reshaping political action. The nesting of these two levels matters, firstly in allowing for the mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly, in explaining why seemingly unimportant or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have fundamental impacts on the first order's preferences.

Bringing together scholars from a wide range of approaches and covering various aspects of the Brexit process, this book offers a significant contribution to improving our understanding of an event that will shape British and European politics for a generation.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

Brexit and Trump: contesting new cleavage formation

Chris Gifford

ABSTRACT

The 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU and the election of Donald Trump in the US are seen to have exposed fundamental social divisions and acute political antagonisms. While each reflected the idiosyncrasies of their domestic political scenes, these events pointed to transnational trends and developments that were shared across and beyond Anglo-America. In the Brexit and Trump votes, the anger and frustrations of being ‘left behind’ was considered to have translated into a politics of social conservatism, exclusive nationalism and populist anti-elitism. The forces of globalisation seemed to have split national communities into two distinct social worlds with irreconcilable interests and values. This article examines whether these significant political events can be explained in terms of cleavage formation. The evidence from the Brexit referendum and Trump election points to a complex picture of voting in which social groups express multiple and intersecting identities and experiences. The article emphasises the universalising processes of individualisation and fragmentation in globalised societies underlying new forms of political conflict. Finally, the article assesses the role of racism in generating political divides in contexts where identities are fractured and uncertain and a new politics of exclusion has taken hold.

The Brexit and Trump votes have been viewed as the clearest and most dramatic expression of new cleavages that are shaping social and political landscapes across globalised societies. The hallmark of this is seen to be social division and political polarisation that is challenging the fabric and cohesion of national communities. It is a divide believed to be rooted in the inequalities generated by economic globalisation but transcending traditional class relations and their left/right articulation to encompass divisions over values and cultural identities (Delanty 2017; Crouch 2017; Calhoun 2017; Inglehart and Norris 2017; Hooghe and Marks 2018). Characteristic of this is the rise amongst significant sections of society in support for populist, nationalist and xenophobic movements, parties and politicians, which direct their opposition to the perceived dominance of liberal elites and a cosmopolitan ethos. On this view, the forms of populist political mobilisation seen with the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump have their roots in the realities of people’s lived experiences, their changing material conditions and their increasingly threatened identities.

A considerable amount of research and analysis has been brought to bear on the 2016 votes in the UK and US, much of which speaks to new cleavage formation. In their aftermath, academic analysis and informed media commentary turned its attention to groups considered to have been ‘left behind’ by the forces of economic globalisation; those who have seen their jobs gone overseas, their living standards eroded and their communities fractured by immigration (Goodwin and Heath 2016a, 2016b; Hobolt 2016b, McKenzie 2017). On this reading, the Brexit and Trump votes were a backlash and an attack on mainstream political parties and a metropolitan establishment that no longer represented, or even considered, their interests and concerns. Such explanations have been supported by the socio-demographic evidence from UK and the US that pointed to the relationship between being older, less qualified and on a lower income and supporting Trump or Brexit (British Election Study Team 2016; Goodwin and Heath 2016a; Turney et al. 2017). A key dividing line that received considerable attention both in the UK and the US was between graduates and non-graduates and how this plays out geographically in the divide between the metropolitan centres and post-industrial and rural ‘backwaters’ (Jennings and Stoker 2016; Pew Research Center 2016, McGill 2016). Both academic analyses and public commentary sought to present the factors underpinning the votes in terms of social binaries, which aligned with the polarised choices on offer to voters in both elections. In this sense, political polarisation was seen to mirror social polarisation.

Two works in particular seem to capture the Brexit and Trump zeitgeist. In the UK, political journalist and commentator, David Goodhart’s (2017) The Road to Somewhere made a distinction between the ‘citizens of anywhere’ and ‘citizens of somewhere’, as the central divide characterising modern Britain. On the one side were the affluent cosmopolitan ‘anywheres’, comfortable with the dynamism and diversity of the modern world. They were mobile, having moved from they were brought up to go to university, and they valued autonomy and self-realisation over community and tradition. On the other side were the national ‘somewheres’ who experienced jobs going overseas, their living standards eroded and their communities fractured by immigration. They were less mobile and rooted to the towns and suburbs in which they had often grown up. They were nostalgic for a world that had been lost and regretted the passing of more traditional ways of life. As they witnessed globalisation and multiculturalism directly threaten their moral order, they became more intolerant and authoritarian in their views.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, following five years of ethnographic work in Louisiana, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2016a) appeared to capture a similar mindset amongst the typical Trump supporter. She spoke metaphorically of how those ‘waiting in line’ for the security and prosperity promised by the American dream had become resentful of those they considered as ‘the line cutters’. Not only had they experienced long hours, redundancies, poor working conditions and reduced pensions but they now saw others, careerist women, immigrants, blacks, ‘cutting in’ front of them, whilst the federal government denied them the same opportunities. While published before the US Hochschild (2016b); Hochschild (2016c)) subsequently asserted that her work provided an in-depth explanation of the appeal of Trump amongst a white working class. Goodhart and Hochschild are examples of academics and public intellectuals who have received considerable media recognition as experts able to offer in depth explanations of Brexit and Trump (for example, Badger 2018; Wolf 2019). Such analyses have fitted with a widespread media framing that accepts the proposition that large sections of Western societies hold common and justifiable grievances that have been ignored by mainstream political elites.¹

The Brexit result and the Trump election have been used to confirm both in academic and wider media commentary that societies are facing a critical juncture in which new political cleavages have taken hold. Cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Bartolini and Mair 1990) traditionally understands party competition as the expression of underlying social divisions associated with the formation of closed groups defined in opposition to others. In modern societies, while such divisions have included religious affiliations, urban/rural conflicts, they have been dominated by a class cleavage. However, political scientists have also pointed to the declining role of these traditional social divisions in structuring individual choices and increased volatility in the relationship between social groups and political preferences. For some, this has coincided with the emergence of a new value based cleavage in the West, particularly associated with the expansion of education and expressed in an opposition between post-materialist and materialist values (Inglehart 1997). The Brexit and Trump votes can therefore be located within this longstanding debate over how political cleavages are constituted and being transformed. Moreover, as we have seen, both votes have specifically contributed to the growing appreciation of the autonomous role of globalization in cleavage formation, as Zürn and de Wilde note:

Where the class cleavage resulted from the industrial revolution as political entrepreneurs employed liberal and socialist ideologies to successfully mobilize significant parts of society, globalization as the next ‘societal revolution’ could generate its own cleavage if—again—political entrepreneurs mobilize both winners and losers. (Zürn and de Wilde 2016, 281)

Globalisation takes on a significance in relation to cleavage formation because it erodes the national protections of social classes directly transforming their material interests, whilst simultaneously reconfiguring values by uprooting and challenging traditional cultural systems (Giddens 2003). In particular it is the rise of populist politics that signals a transformation in cleavage formation as these parties ‘articulate a new structural conflict that opposes globalisation “losers” to globalisation “winners ” ’, which can takes the form of opposition to economic and cultural and political processes of denationalization (Kriesi 2014, 369). While growing economic inequality and dislocation is a key driver, it is the value dimension that arguably has been fundamental to formation of new political cleavages. Inglehart and Norris (2017, 446) for instance locate the immediate causes of the rise of Trump and populist parties in terms of a cultural backlash and value orientations that can cut across economic lines and draws people together in opposition to immigration.

Taken together with the general rise of populist parties, the Brexit and Trump votes seem to confirm the reemergence of cleavage politics in Western societies reversing the trend towards social fragmentation and the erosion of the cleavages that were typical of industrial society. From such a perspective, deep structural divisions were at work in the Brexit referendum and Trump election that transcended context specific political orientations. Nevertheless, to be consistent with cleavage theory, it is important to recognise that ‘the translation of social conflict into political and party alternatives – turns out to be quite fraught and complex’ (Mair 2005, 371). Mair’s (2005) influential theory of cleavage formation points to three distinct components that are necessary before we can speak of a new cleavage. A clear social division needs to exist that is then normatively reproduced in terms of specific values and identities, which in turn is politically organized in the form of a political party or movement. Mair’s (2005, 373) criteria for cleavage formation are appropriately demanding including a shared social experience, a collective sense of identity and a common value system.

The Trump/Brexit votes raise key questions about the relationship between social structure and collective identity formation and political outcomes. The mounting evidence of a value divide in contemporary politics, documented for some time, has not shown conclusively that this is the expression of coherent social groups with distinct cultural identities. Bornschier (2009, 6–7) notes that value differences are still relatively young and we do not know whether they will have the same persistence as class and religious cleavages. Drawing on Blühdorn and Butzlaff's (2019) rethinking of populism, a central proposition of this article is that coherent collective identity formation remains inconsistent with processes of differentiation and fragmentation that characterises contemporary social change. From this perspective, the Brexit and Trump votes occurred in a context where processes of globalized modernisation render individual and collective values and interests increasingly inconsistent and volatile and their articulation and organization profoundly challenging (Blühdorn and Butzlaff 2019, 200). Global capitalism demands flexible, self-responsible and disciplined workers who in turn expect to pursue consumption based projects of self-realisation, as they are freed from the constraints, and security, of traditional settings (Blühdorn and Butzlaff 2019, 201–2). The rise of the populist right is fueled by the core dilemma of late modernity, which is the continued expectation of consumer-based lifestyles and forms of self-realisation in contexts where access to the necessary organizational and material resources are increasingly restricted. As such right wing populist movements are not rejecting the achievements of modernization but are primarily concerned about not being...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – The nested games of the UK’s EU referendum: ruptures, reconfigurations and lessons for Europe
• 1 Brexit and Trump: contesting new cleavage formation
• 2 Brexit, nationalism and disintegration in the European Union and the United Kingdom
• 3 Labour and the Interplay of Brexit and Electoral Politics
• 4 Post-Brexit nationalism: challenging the British political tradition?
• 5 Theresa May, the Brexit negotiations and the two-level game, 2017–2019
• 6 From UKIP to the Brexit party: the politicization of European integration and disruptive impact on national and European arenas
• 7 The post-referendum reconfigurations of conservative cleavages around black and Asian minority ethnic MPs
• 8 Northern Ireland and Brexit: where sovereignty and stability collide?
• 9 Disintegration reversed: Brexit and the cohesiveness of the EU27
• Index