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Britain and the world after Brexit

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Abstract

‘Brexit’—Britain’s forthcoming exit from the European Union—can be understood as a series of related material and ideational processes. These processes served to bring about the ‘Leave’ vote in the referendum of 23 June 2016 and will continue to shape subsequent outcomes: both the Brexit settlement that is eventually negotiated, and Britons’ satisfaction (or otherwise) with such a deal. Building on Tim Oliver’s recent article in International Politics (2016), this essay contends that the most suitable targets for future research into the causes of the Brexit vote include the economic and cultural distortions of globalisation and the factor flows associated with it, public and corporate policy failures over more than three decades, a strong public attachment to representative democracy, and distinctive conceptions of Britain’s role in the world. The article then progresses to consider the potential UK national security implications as the Brexit process unfolds. It suggests that—while such implications should not be overstated—plausible outcomes could include the fragmentation of the UK and its collective defence effort, diminished political and fiscal capacity for national security policymaking, and a less benign regional security environment, including the possibility of a federal ‘United States of Europe’ eventually dictating terms to Britain.

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Notes

  1. Based on 48.11% of voters choosing Remain, on an overall national turnout of 72.2% of eligible voters (Electoral Commission 2016). For discussion of the associated permutations of non-voters’ perspectives on Brexit, see Clarke et al. (2016) and Low (2016). Of course, there is a case that those who fail to vote in a democracy have eschewed the chance to have their opinions considered.

  2. Although it is not even clear that invoking the Lisbon Treaty’s Article 50 will also constitute withdrawal from the Single Market—more diplomatic and legal wrangling may be required to affect such an outcome on terms anything other than acrimonious unilateral withdrawal (Barrett 2016). Single Market ‘access’ (as distinct from ‘membership’) now becomes a key negotiating fault-line.

  3. For a nuanced treatment, see Qvortrup (2005).

  4. For the most comprehensive extant survey of Brexit’s implications and outlook at the time of going to press, see Menon et al. (2016c). For a valuable analysis of how the UK might actually set about leaving the EU, see Menon et al. (2016b).

  5. The production of macro-level evidence that weak recovery from the 2008–2009 financial crisis is the primary cause of wage reductions (Wadsworth et al. 2016) has not shifted the perception on the part of many UK workers that their wages could have recovered more quickly in the absence of an essentially unlimited extra-UK labour supply. Moreover, the broader point here long predates the 2008–2009 crisis—the relocation of manufacturing jobs from industrialised to emerging economies dates back to the late Cold War, with the West’s enthusiastic embrace of Deng Xiaoping’s post-1978 Chinese economic opening and the subsequent extension of such globalisation across the world following the Soviet Union’s collapse.

  6. For a neat example of one side of the partisan press taking aim at the other over the EU, see Toynbee (2016).

  7. Interestingly, such divisions also hold within London itself, as well as between rich, globalised cities and the rest of England (May 1996).

  8. In these commentators’ defence, there is more subtlety in their substantive analysis than in the headlines that their editors chose—another symptom of the clickbait age. Banal soundbites about ‘love’ versus ‘hate’ have been similarly vacuous, and may go some way towards explaining the liberal-left’s recent inability to generate persuasive traction (Prendergast 2016; Brown 2016).

  9. In observing that both Trump and Brexit supporters have a greater preference for order and continuity, for example (Kaufmann 2016), we need to parse the reasons—educational, financial, cultural, ideational, and so forth—why certain tracts of the country have such proclivities in greater concentrations. Selection biases are at work, of course—those with a disposition towards cosmopolitan, globalised living are more likely to opt for residency in London and other major cities, while those without such a disposition are likelier to choose rural or small-town life—but there are complex co-constitutive causal relationships at work, too. Parsing such relationships between social, cultural, and economic change in a way that goes beyond crude ‘either/or’ characterisations to make sense of the recently ascendant anti-globalisation coalition, in Britain and elsewhere, will be a key challenge for future scholarship in this area.

  10. Ageism that is particularly unjustified if—as seems possible—a majority of the under-30 age group failed to vote in the referendum (Parkinson 2016). Older age groups fulfilled their civic duty to democracy, even if a majority made a choice that has subsequently left many younger people unhappy.

  11. For voters comparing the 1975 referendum and the EU’s subsequent evolution, see BBC (2005). That said, of course, there was already a federalising drive at the European level by the 1970s (for example, Schumann 2003 [1950]; Monnet 1963), which Britain subsequently sought to resist (Thatcher 2003 [1988]), and sovereignty was a key fault-line of contestation in the 1975 Common Market referendum just as it was in the 2016 EU referendum (Saunders 2015, 2016). For the democratic deficit as a motivator of at least one influential Leave campaigner, see Gove (2016).

  12. On the EU’s democratic deficit see, for example, Follesdal and Hix (2006) and Terry (2014). For the counterpoint, see Majone (1998) and Moravcsik (2002). For an example of the sort of undemocratic, federalising elite behaviour that has rankled with European voters, see Waterfield (2008).

  13. Indeed, this is why the observation that the majority of Trump voters were not in fact poor (Henley 2016)—which has been used to rebut the ‘working-class revolt’ thesis on his rise—is over-simplifying. The remarkable thing is not that wealthy, capital-holding voters (of all colours and genders) backed a Republican candidate, but that a sufficient share of the capital-lacking lower-middle and working classes (whites overwhelmingly among them) backed that same candidate—while others from the same economic classes failed to turn out to vote for a widely reviled alternative candidate, Hillary Clinton—to give him a winning electoral coalition.

  14. The significance of key individuals in causing a political shock of international-systemic importance further demonstrates the value of the recent renewed wave of scholarly attention to the importance of leaders in explaining major foreign policy outcomes (for example: Roth 2010; Saunders 2011; Yarhi-Milo 2014; Horowitz et al. 2015).

  15. As recently as 2013, even after the government’s failed attempt to win Parliamentary approval for military intervention in Syria on the back of post-Iraq/-Afghanistan public war weariness, 75% of Britons thought the UK should play a major role in the world to promote its economic interests, 65% thought the same to promote national security interests, 73% thought Britain should be a leading voice in NATO, and 78% thought the same of the UN Security Council (YouGov 2013, pp. 7–8)—although 70% also thought the same of the EU!

  16. This section of the article represents an expanded version of an invited submission to a roundtable on the causes and consequences of Brexit convened by H-Diplo’s International Security Studies Forum (Blagden 2016b). The author is grateful to the ISSF Editorial Board for permission to reuse the material.

  17. The UK has four constituent nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), fourteen Overseas Territories, and three Crown Dependencies (see HM Government 2012, for discussion). The UK Head of State, currently Queen Elizabeth II, is also head of state for a further fifteen countries.

  18. This is publicly available information (Nuclear Information Service 2002).

  19. Post-Brexit sterling depreciation—a consequence of lower nominal interest rates and reduced demand for sterling-denominated assets—may facilitate such a balance-of-payments correction, of course, but at a price of inflationary pressure and reduced overseas purchasing power.

  20. Small hints by key Brexit negotiation protagonists—such as those of autumn 2016 by Angela Merkel (Martin 2016), François Hollande (Friar 2016), Theresa May (Walker 2016), Boris Johnson (Mortimer 2016), David Davis (BBC News 2016d), and Liam Fox (Dunt 2016)—have all been minutely scrutinised, not only by both sides of the Brexit campaign decrying evidence of broken campaign promises, but also by jittery investors. This has resulted in sustained UK financial market volatility, stability-seeking investors’ anathema (Sky News 2016).

  21. On Britain’s different vision of the EU, see Merheim-Eyre (2016).

  22. On Britain’s erstwhile position as one of the EU’s three veto players, see Moravcsik (1998).

  23. For example, Klaas and Dirsus (2016). For a critique of the over-use of ‘isolationism’ as a critical charge on both sides of the Atlantic, see Porter (2016a).

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Oliver Bowen, Michael Clark, Kit Kowol, Anand Menon, Helena Mills, Patrick Porter, and Joshua Rovner for helpful discussions on the theme. A condensed excerpt of this article previously appeared as part of a H-Diplo International Security Studies Forum (ISSF) Policy Roundtable on Brexit (https://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/1-2-brexit); he is grateful to the editors of both H-Diplo/ISSF and International Politics for permission to reuse material.

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  1. Strategy and Security Institute, University of Exeter, Knightley, Streatham Drive, Exeter, EX4 4PD, UK

    David Blagden

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Blagden, D. Britain and the world after Brexit. Int Polit 54, 1–25 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-017-0015-2

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