This is a brief book about Brexit: the short-hand expression for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), which was decided by a majority of just less than 52 % in a referendum held on 23 June 2016. It was the 2015 UK General Election that set the stage for this momentous decision. For despite heralding a return to one-party majority government, that election revealed a country torn between exceptionalist identity claims. The Conservative Party campaigned for a referendum on EU membership and won an outright majority in the House of Commons, while the Scottish National Party (SNP) triumphed by winning 56 out of 59 Scottish seats. At stake now that the UK is forced to reconsider its relationship with the EU is nothing less than the very constitutional fabric of the country and its role in global affairs.
None of this was what David Cameron intended when he plumped for holding a referendum in order to improve his chances at the ballot box and to reconcile factions within his party. The decision to delegate responsibility to the people ended up costing him his position as Prime Minister. EU heads of state and leaders of EU institutions were equally taken aback by this unprecedented reverse for European integration. This explains why there are no navigational charts for the course that now needs to be plotted. The overarching purpose of this book is thus twofold. It seeks, firstly, to shed light on how the UK came to vote for Brexit; secondly, it evaluates the implications that this decision has for the country’s international relations as well as for its domestic politics.
What the referendum outcome probably demonstrated most clearly was how far public opinion was out of step with the government’s cost–benefit argument for EU membership. Confident of winning the referendum on the basis of a pragmatic, bean-counting evaluation, David Cameron’s gamble proved a great miscalculation. It ranks amongst the major political blunders of British Prime Ministers and has sent shock waves across Europe and the North Atlantic. The anti-EU posture expressed by voters is unprecedented, notes historian Ronald Granieri (2016), because “at no time has Britain actively sought to undermine an organization within which it was already a member”.
What follows is a succinct attempt to make sense of what undid the government’s European strategy. The starting point for understanding the UK’s political predicament today is the nature of the political debate over Britain’s relationship with the EU. Hence the following chapter examines continuities in British Euroscepticism that after the 1975 referendum on membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) resulted in a 40-year “neverendum”. In this period, the UK approach to European integration as a pragmatic and utilitarian foreign policy – stripped of a normative commitment to a European ideal of ever closer union – coexisted alongside mounting calls for a new vote on EU membership. The very demand for a referendum to determine Britain’s EU status is presented precisely as an extension of an exceptionalist mindset deriving from a certain “British superiority” (Gifford 2010: 329). The driving force behind this desire to go it alone was the notion that the UK could walk away from a federalizing EU with no deleterious consequences. Whether this is true will now be determined once and for all.
It was precisely to contain the unknown risks of withdrawal that UK and EU policymakers met to discuss altering the terms of membership in a prelude to the referendum. Thus Cameron’s renegotiation is the subject of the third chapter, which explores the rationale for the Prime Minister’s demands and the way the EU responded. Historical legacies are once again useful to analyse the politics behind this gambit, which sought to reproduce the successful strategy of Harold Wilson in the 1975 EEC referendum. Yet the recent politicization of intra-EU migration and associated security concerns in the past decade point to the rather different context in which Britons were asked to pass judgment on European integration for a second time. The novelty of 2016 was that traditional Euroscepticism impugning the sovereignty-constraining effects of EU competences tapped into a groundswell of anti-immigration sentiment determined to see the end of the free movement of people principle. A British vote to remain in the EU was premised on the ability of the Conservative government to head off this alliance, but the renegotiation outcome did nothing to make this possible. If anything, it had the contrary effect of demonstrating the EU’s attachment to free movement as a condition of membership.
Nothing was inevitable about the Brexit vote: the campaign mattered profoundly, as discussed in the fourth chapter. Cameron’s confidence came from having previously won two referendums (defeating supporters of the alternative vote as well as partisans of Scottish independence) and a general election. Yet the EU campaign soon illustrated the limitations of relying on a message solely focused on the economic risks associated with leaving the EU. Not only did this approach ignore voters’ concerns about identity, it also left out any positive message about European integration. Interventions from abroad solicited by the government to lend credence to the risk argument also failed to convince as Eurosceptics stoked up resentment against elites and the experts the government relied upon for economic forecasts.
What was derided as Project Fear by opponents of EU membership was in reality Project Trust, as the government projected itself as having the only credible perspective on the issue. The majority’s disavowal of government advice – what Lord Rose, chair of Britain Stronger in Europe, dubbed “project reality” – to stick with the status quo thus illustrated the way the whole debate went beyond the facts regarding costs and benefits of the EU. As William Davies has noted, the Brexit referendum indicates how far citizens today are surrounded by data, not facts. The consequence is that “instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish” (Davies 2016).
The fifth chapter examines the aftermath of the referendum. The challenge for UK policymakers is that by now the EU question is a domestic constitutional affair as well as a problem for international relations. Theresa May’s remark, upon becoming Prime Minister, that “Brexit means Brexit” deliberately obfuscated the need to define what it really means for the UK to no longer be an EU member state. Not only does the UK face the conundrum of how to trade with the single market in some way from the outside, the country also has to ponder its continued existence as a state. This is because voters in Northern Ireland and Scotland did not vote to leave the EU. Their preference was to remain, and while the Northern Irish assembly is divided over Brexit, the Scottish government interprets the referendum as a mandate to pursue ways of retaining the benefits of EU membership. Nevertheless, the analysis shows that reconfiguring relations with the EU is riddled with contradictions between motivation and outcome. That is, something must “give” in the tug-of-war between the political logic of seeking a complete break from EU rules and the economic rationale of maintaining privileged access to the single market. The same internal inconsistency is present in the Scottish nationalist project of quitting the UK since resolving the outstanding dilemma of which currency Scotland would use will create new dependencies.
Much of the initial commentary on the vote for Brexit has identified social inequality as the font of electors’ frustration with the EU and the governing class more broadly. The strong preference of Londoners to stay in the EU contrasts with the core Northern English and Welsh vote to leave, mirroring the structural divide between cosmopolitan, metropolitan liberals and globalization’s left-behinds in the provinces (Jennings and Stoker 2016). But, as explained in the sixth and final chapter, the political philosophy behind leaving the EU was just as much the product of disenchantment born of political inequality. The back story here is that the referendum itself reflected the post-democratic dilemma facing elected representatives in many Western democracies: they fear accusations of ignoring popular opinion, while seeking to micro-manage popular engagement with politics.
To appreciate the nature of this predicament, the best guide is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As a critic of political representation, he understood that the separation between the sovereign people and the government that claims to speak in its name creates a fundamental inequality between ruled and ruling. From this stems the possibility that a self-serving governing class will find a way to manipulate the sovereign people when necessary, all the while pursuing its own partial interests. The campaign for the UK to leave the EU used exactly this narrative about the way EU membership was a self-interested policy working against the people’s best interests or preferences. Not for nothing Nigel Farage (2016), the then leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) whose success was a catalyst for holding the vote, memorably declared the result a victory “for the real people, the ordinary people, the decent people”.
Whoever’s victory it actually was, the result still left the sovereign British people at an impasse. As an expression of popular sovereignty, the choice to leave the EU went against the preferences of the vast majority of the governing elite. Yet EU withdrawal could not take place overnight – negotiations with Brussels under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty were not triggered automatically by the vote. The supposedly sovereign people remain dependent on the government to invoke this much-talked-about article and decide terms of separation. In this regard the attempt to overturn the political inequality between governed and governing by resorting to direct democracy worked only momentarily. In the aftermath of the people’s decision, the gulf between government and people is just as wide as before and potentially can grow wider still if British withdrawal is conducted on terms that do not actually satisfy the vast majority of Leave voters. Post-referendum turmoil in the Labour Party, which experienced a schism between its pro-EU parliamentary party and the very much EU-ambivalent grassroots, is in essence a microcosm of the divide between the people and their representatives.
The chief difficulty facing the UK government after the Brexit vote is thus one of maintaining belief in the representativeness of the governing and in the sovereignty of the people. Sustaining these pillars of representative democracy is all the more difficult given that the Prime Minister leading negotiations with the EU actually supported the Remain campaign, while the vast majority of MPs did the same. If the referendum created a mirage of popular sovereignty in action, protracted UK-EU wrangling is bound to shatter that illusion. Hence Rousseau, whose own attempts to make government properly responsive to the sovereign people were never persuasive, is nevertheless set to have his concerns vindicated. Questions he raised long-ago about the frailties of political representation have been given a new resonance. The Brexit referendum is certainly not the first time these issues have appeared, but it has made them take on a new, central importance in British politics. It will require great diplomatic, constitutional, and political ingenuity to restore confidence in the UK’s representative democracy.
References
Davies, William. 2016. Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit. In The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report. London: Verso.
Farage, Nigel. 2016. Nigel Farage’s Victory Speech. The Guardian, 24 June. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/nigel-farage-ugliness-bullet-fired. Accessed 6 Aug 2016.
Gifford, Chris. 2010. The UK and the European Union: Dimensions of Sovereignty and the Problem of Eurosceptic Britishness. Parliamentary Affairs 63(2): 321–338.CrossRef
Granieri, Ronald J. 2016. Special Relationships: The EU, Brexit, and the Altantic Community. Available at http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/06/special-relationships-eu-brexit-atlantic-community. Accessed 6 Aug 2016.
Jennings, Will, and Gerry Stoker. 2016. The Bifurcation of Politics: Two Englands. The Political Quarterly. Available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-923X.12228/full. Accessed 6 Aug 2016.