Imagining Brexit, reimagining Britain

The Round Table, 2019

Global Discourse, 2019

The ‘fourth freedom’ of freedom of movement of persons – somewhat misleadingly labelled ‘European citizenship’ – lay at the normative heart of the European project. Although sceptics have often suggested it was part of the building of a European fortress, or even a last gasp of elite European colonial privilege, the essential point of EU freedom of movement was its revolutionary introduction of a regionally expansive non-discrimination by nationality, going well beyond established abstract notions of ‘personhood’ and human rights on which other global egalitarian movements depend. For sure, it had been battered by roll back in national courts, suspension of Schengen, and new external borderings, well before the Brexit vote. Yet the practice of the fourth freedom in terms of everyday transactions and interactions struck at the heart of the core of the modern Hobbesian nation state: its sovereignty to decide on the boundaries of its own, increasingly de-territorialised population, which was also its power to shore up the most potent source of global inequalities – the birthright lottery which protects the ‘wealth of nations’ and the privileges of democratic ‘peoples’ from the unbounded effects of de-territorialised mobilities. As we are also seeing – and hearing among many ostensibly progressive academic voices – the putatively egalitarian voice of people’s democracy can be used to further bolster the shrinkage of moral community within the nation state. The essay takes upon itself to evaluate what is being lost normatively in terms of the return of the national – methodologically as much as politically – as the slow motion car crash of Brexit has unfolded.

Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 98/1, 2022

In response to the vote by the United Kingdom electorate in the referendum on whether to exit the European Union on 22 June 2016, commonly known as Brexit, issues of culture and identity moved centre stage in British political debate. Some theologians associated with the political networks “Blue Labour” and “Red Tory”, which use certain insights from Catholic Social Teaching in their thinking, saw the referendum result as a wake-up call to address the anxieties of those in the communities in the UK “left behind” by neoliberal economics and apparently beset by fears about immigration and multiculturalism. This interpretation was reinforced by the overwhelming victory of the Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, in the “Get Brexit Done” General Election in December 2019. In the first part of this paper I will outline and critique how Blue Labour and Red Tory thinkers use a particular reading of CST to emphasise the importance of a “citizenship of somewhere”, where community and belonging play a key role in cultural identity. I will then consider interpretations of the Common Good tradition that point in a different direction, away from these communitarian understandings to a universalist view. In the second part I shall consider how the resources of the Christian mystical tradition could make a contribution to developing a universalist model of ethical citizenship. I will then consider how this universalism, and the transcendental humanism implied by it, can enhance the use of CST principles in debates on immigration and multiculturalism in contemporary British politics, and our response to the global, national and local inequalities highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

2019

In the eyes of senior Brexiteers, the Anglosphere constituted a familiar and appropriate international grouping for post-Brexit Britain. Strikingly similar views about the European Union also emanated from Anglosphere enthusiasts outside Europe, highlighting the role of the European Union (EU) as an ‘other’ against which the Anglosphere was cast. These detractors’ views of the European project fed into the Brexit referendum campaign. They helped create a distinctively Anglo-British Anglosphere resting on three pillars: parliamentary sovereignty, the memory of empire, and twentieth-century conflict, underpinned by a meta-narrative concerning the emergence and export of a particular form of liberty. By establishing the salience of the Anglosphere idea in right- and left-leaning newspapers since 1999 and by examining the discursive co-constitution of the Anglosphere and the EU during the 2016 referendum, this chapter illustrates how senior Brexiteers offered the Anglosphere as a vision...

Critical Discourse Studies, 2019

While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several aca- demic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Clarke & Newman, 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017; Koller, Kopf, & Miglbauer, 2019; Ridge-Newman, Leon-Solis, & O’Donnell, 2018; Outhwaite, 2017; Wincott, Peterson, & Convery, 2017). While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and econ- omic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally. Our contribution has thus three interrelated aims. First, the articles in this special issue provide evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, we show how such discourses reflect the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in defining the discursive and mediatic contexts within which Brexit has been articulated. Third, we identify discursive trajectories at play in the ongoing process of Brexit putting forward an agenda for further analysis of such trajectories.

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 2021

When history books about Brexit are written a key question asked will be ‘how did it happen?’ How did a country renowned for stable governments, pragmatism and diplomacy produce a chaotic outcome so harmful to its economic interests and international standing? This article examines the factors that produced Brexit by analysing its political and historical context, the main campaign groups and their communication strategies. Drawing on the work of Verdery (1999), Maskovsky and Bjork-James (2020) and other anthropologists, I suggest we need to look beyond conventional political science concepts and consider Brexit in terms of ‘enchantment’, ‘angry politics’ and ‘technopopulism’. I conclude that while Brexit provides a window for analysing fault lines in contemporary Britain, it also highlights problems in the EU, its austerity politics and democratic deficit.

The Political Quarterly, 2016

Global Affairs, 2017

Brexit shocked liberal elites across Europe, instigating a burgeoning new field of research. Brexit scholarship tends to puzzle over two questions: what happened? What will happen now? This article addresses the latter and builds upon scholarship that suggests that “identity” mattered as much as economics. Digging deeper into British identity, this essay borrows from social-psychology to analyse how temporal status comparisons contributed to Brexit. It argues how the peculiar qualities of British identity narrative make Eurosceptic complaints about sovereignty, Brussels and “control”, particularly salient to nationalists. In short, negative temporal status comparisons with Britain’s former self underpins its longterm Euroscepticism: When Brits learn they once “ruled the world”, the European Union’s practices of compromise compare poorly: Cooperation is easily presented as subordination. Brexit can thus be understood as a radical attempt to arrest Britain’s decline by setting sail for a future based on a nostalgic vision of the past.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

IN THE scholarly analysis of contemporary politics, public opinion is king. As liberal democracies have seen multi-party competition devolve into divisive, one dimensional verdicts on strong man politics and single issue referenda, so has public opinion scholarship never been more prominent or discussed. Brexit in the UK has been a boomtime for this kind of work. University of Manchester professors Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford sit at the sober and most scholarly end of a highly visible and influential field of work, that runs from the technical boffinry of John Curtice on election night, via scholars such as Geoff Evans and Will Jennings echoing the "blue left" by charting the loss of the Labour heartlands, to the anti-liberal op. ed. provocations of Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann and David Goodhart. All of them seem to share a thirst for the media limelight: sometimes awkwardly combining "data science" with work close to the logic of media commentary and party strategising. Brexitland may stand as the capstone of a literature first launched by Ford's earlier volume with Goodwin, Revolt on the Right (2014): on the rise of UKIP, Nigel Farage, and the ripping apart and realignment of two party dominated British politics. Brexit, it argues, was the end point of a seismic shift in British politics that can be drawn right back through the post-war period. Key to this view has been the emergence of what they see as a deeply rooted "cultural war" patterned essentially on the one raging on the other side of the Atlantic, with one crucial dimension — the variable salience over the decades of "immigration" as the wild card in British politics.

Political Insight, 2018