Quiet unity: salience, politicisation and togetherness in the EU’s Brexit negotiating position

Abstract

A surprising feature of Brexit has been the united front the EU-27 presented during post-referendum negotiations. This membership crisis arrived when the EU had been facing multiple overlapping political and economic crises revealing deep cleavages both between and within member states. How did negotiations prevent a widening politicisation of European integration? In this article a novel dataset is used, containing national and European newspaper Brexit coverage between 2016 and 2020 to establish how negotiating stances were formed in key EU institutions and five influential member states: Ireland, Spain, France, Germany and Poland. The results indicate that the European Commission could maintain a strong, centralised negotiating position over Brexit because the preferences of these member states were mutually inclusive, their negotiating stances aligned, and each national case was subject to generally low levels of domestic politicisation. As a result, while Brexit shocked the EU, its immediate fallout could be contained even during uncertain times.

Keywords:

• Brexit
• European Union
• negotiations
• politicisation
• media content analysis
• salience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Factiva, the format of the search is: ‘Brexit’ AND ‘X’, where X is the country name (local language). If we wish to narrow the field, we add an ‘atleastY’ clause, limiting the hits to articles where Brexit and/or the name of the country appear Y times. For example, for Ireland we look for ‘atleast3 Brexit and atleast3 Ireland’. While this may seem narrow, we are confident we do not miss much, because hits are appearing at extremely high frequencies. Brexit has been more peripheral as an issue in Spain and our widest searches yield approximately 300 articles, while a similar search in Ireland yields 5000+ articles. As such, for a case such as Ireland, we tighten the search terms, adding a certain amount of times Brexit or Ireland must be referenced in the text in order to focus our attention on articles more centred specifically on this subject.

2 For a full list of issues and sub-issues, see Table A4 in the Online appendix.

3 The formula is $y=\frac{\sum _{i}n}{\sum _{i.t,j}n}$, where i is issue, t is time and j is a country case. In essence, the y axis measures the relative importance of the issue and how much it occupied our actors at each point in time. Only the three most important issue categories for each country are included.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under the Synergy Grant number 810356 (ERC_SYG_2018), in the scope of the project SOLID – Policy Crisis and Crisis Politics, Sovereignty, Solidarity and Identity in the EU post-2008.

Notes on contributors

Anna Kyriazi

Anna Kyriazi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan. Her research focuses on comparative European politics and public policy, migration and political communication. [[email protected]]

Argyrios Altiparmakis

Argyrios Altiparmakis is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute. His research focuses on party politics, political behaviour and the recent European crises. He is currently working on the SOLID-ERC project. [[email protected]]

Joseph Ganderson

Joseph Ganderson is a postdoctoral researcher at the European Institute, London School of Economics. His research interests include the political economy of banking and finance and the wider impact of political crises in the UK and European Union. [[email protected]]

Joan Miró

Joan Miró is Assistant Professor in EU Politics & Policy at Pompeu Fabra University. His research interests lie in European integration, particularly the socioeconomic governance of the EMU, social policy, and international political economy. [[email protected]]