Marching for Europe? Enacting European citizenship as justice during Brexit

ABSTRACT

This article examines pro-European mobilisation in the United Kingdom following the European Union (EU) referendum. It develops a framework that combines Isin’s ‘acts of citizenship’ with Nancy Fraser’s three dimensions of justice – redistribution, recognition and representation – to examine the way in which Brexit has served as a mobilisation trigger for claims about European citizenship. Drawing on data from a survey of participants of an anti-Brexit march in London, it argues that Brexit can be seen as a process that makes people aware of the ‘right to have rights’ as EU citizens. While some protesters experience Brexit as a struggle over the substance of justice within the United Kingdom, many of the ‘48%’ experience Brexit as a serious injustice that results from what Fraser calls ‘misframing’ in the context of struggles over the boundaries of the political community. In this sense, economic, cultural as well as political forms of injustice amount to a sense of personal grief over being ‘misframed’ in a UK outside the EU.

KEYWORD:

• Brexit
• EU citizenship
• acts of citizenship
• justice
• mobilisation
• protest analysis

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Simona Guerra, Isabelle Hertner, Tim Haughton, Nicholas Allen, Vickie Hudson, Filipa Figueira and Tom Pratt for their assistance at the march.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Conservative Party has longed pledged to replace the Human Rights Act – which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into British law – with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, but in early 2017, this was put on hold until after Brexit.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the University of Copenhagen’s 2016 Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research (project title ‘Europe and New Global Challenges’).

Notes on contributors

Verena K. Brändle

Verena K. Brändle is a post-doctoral research fellow associated with the University of Copenhagen and Siegen University. Her research focuses on people’s contestation of citizenship and migration with a focus on online and offline spheres. She received her PhD based on the dissertation 'Contestation of Citizenship ‘from below’: People’s notions of justice about migration in the EU'. Her article 'Reality bites: EU mobiles’ experiences of citizenship on the local level' was recently published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Charlotte Galpin

Charlotte Galpin is Lecturer in German and European Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research is concerned with European identities, EU citizenship, Euroscepticism and the European public sphere. Her monograph, The Euro Crisis and European Identities: Political and Media Discourse in Germany, Ireland and Poland, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. Other recent publications include 'Converging towards Euroscepticism? Negativity in news coverage during the 2014 European Parliament elections in Germany and the UK' (co-authored with Hans-Jörg Trenz) in European Politics and Society (2018), '‘Brexit’ in transnational perspective: an analysis of newspapers in France, Germany and the Netherlands' (co-authored with Patrick Bijsmans and Benjamin Leruth) in Comparative European Politics (2018) and 'Performing Brexit: How a Post-Brexit World is Imagined Outside the UK' (co-authored with Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ben Rosamond) in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2017).

Hans-Jörg Trenz

Hans-Jörg Trenz is Professor at the Centre for Modern European Studies at the University of Copenhagen and Research Professor at ARENA – Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo. His main field of interests are the emergence of a European public sphere and of European civil society, European civilisation and identity, migration and ethnic minorities, cultural and political sociology and social and political theory. Recent publications include ‘Narrating European Society. Toward a Sociology of European Integration. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, Lexington Books, ‘Understanding the Mechanisms of EU Politicization: Lessons from the Euro-zone crisis (co-authored with Paul Statham) in Comparative European Politics (2015) and Europe's Prolonged Crisis. The Making or the Unmaking of a Political Union. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (edited together with Virginie Guiraudon and Carlo Ruzza).