Brexit, existential anxiety and ontological (in)security

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the Brexit Referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union has been a source of destabilisation, dread and ontological anxiety. Focusing mainly on British citizens who voted or self-identified as “Remainers”, and on EU foreign nationals resident in the UK, it shows how existential anxieties have had different points of focus for different groups of people. Confronted with such destabilising anxieties, the article shows how people have adopted different mechanisms designed to reassert a sense of order and certitude often viewed as central to preserving ontological security. The ways in which this has been done, however, can themselves raise important questions.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit referendum
• ontological security
• anxiety
• everyday security
• UK

Acknowledgements

For comments on earlier drafts my thanks go to James Brassett, Owen Parker, Ed Page, the guest editors and anonymous reviewers, as well as the participants of the workshop on the Everyday and Ontological Security held at the ISA in Baltimore in 2017. I am also greatly indebted to my research assistant Aiste Jotautyte.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christopher S. Browning is a Reader in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and a visiting professor at the University of Oslo. His research is centred on identity politics, critical approaches to security and (critical) geopolitics. Most recently this has included research projects on ontological security and the politics of the everyday and the critical geopolitics of nation branding.

Notes

1 This is partly because “the 52%”, as it has become known, comprised only c.37% of registered voters and c.26% of the country's population (The Electoral Commission n/d).

2 But not all. Some Leave voters also found the result shocking, not least because they did not expect Leave to win and were often not voting about the EU as such, but rather lodging a more general protest vote.

3 Including c.3.3 million EU non-nationals (Low 2017).

4 Importantly, as the post-referendum period has unfolded existential anxieties have also increased markedly amongst Brexiteers. There are various explanations for this including: fears that Brexit is being sold out, unease at accusations of racism levelled against Leavers, the messy nature of the process and the realisation that Brexit is unlikely to provide the fulfilment desired. This paper focuses on Remainers for reasons of space, while the anxieties of Leave voters have been tackled in a partner paper (Browning under review).

5 This therefore avoids debates about the validity of scaling up ontological security from the individual to the collective level (e.g. Mitzen 2006, p. 352, Krolikowski 2008, Steele 2008, pp. 15–20, Croft 2012, pp. 29–32), a debate that arguably misses the fact that discourse and subjects are not ontologically separate realms and that as such people have different identities at different levels of generalisation (Solomon 2015, p. 63).

6 Applications for Irish passports were up 106% on the year before by November 2016 (Marsh 2017a).

7 To give one example: ‘I’m in a similarly awful position but with my family. I was for Remain and they for Brexit. I have no problem with having different political allegiance being a centrist myself but this is so much more. Even six weeks on I am full of pain and anger at the decision but worse I can't see my family the same way. They are diminished in my eyes and since I can't get over it and see that blood is thicker than water’ as my Mum would like I now don't see them. I respect their right to choose but they can't seem to accept my right to be disgusted by the choice they made. I am now dealing with awful consequences of the vote at work which I can't discuss with them. I wish so much that I could just see them as they once were and keep hold of the love they deserve but for me it's changed everything. It's making me utterly wretched and they are bemused and impatient. It's destroyed something I don't think we'll ever recover. I hope I'm wrong but it feels like a permanent break’ (“346cmt” in comments section to Frostrup 2016).

8 Interestingly both positions can sometimes be identified in single posts, thereby suggesting that the distinction is often blurred in people's minds (see “Havingalavrov” in comments section to Frostrup 2016).

9 According to one poll 50–60% of Christian, Jewish, White and Sikh groups voted for Brexit, whereas less than 35% of Mixed Race, Asian, Muslim, Chinese, Hindu and Black groups voted that way (Lambert 2016).

10 The Home Office reported a 41% increase in racially and religiously aggravated offences between July 2015 and July 2016 (Corcoran and Smith 2016, p. 1).

11 On the integral link between racism and homophobia see (Weber 2016).

12 Infamously, Nigel Farage unveiled a poster depicting a long line of dark skinned refugees and migrants with the slogan “Breaking Point: the EU has failed us all”. For many this highlighted the racialized and inflammatory nature of the campaign (Stewart and Mason 2016).

13 J.B. Evans comment on the Facebook group EU immigrant Brexit survival, 27 June 2016, https://www.facebook.com/groups/540396686153880/?ref=notif&notif_t=group_r2j_approved&notif_id=1480325462119132

14 “Interestingly, I am feeling more French than ever since the referendum” (Charles Noblet quoted in O’Carroll 2016).

15 Whether or not the motive was Brexit related, the important point is that this is how it was widely perceived across society, thereby further enhancing the anxieties of foreign nationals.

16 Thanks to Aiste Jotautyte for highlighting this dynamic.

17 Although in actuality Leave voters were more likely to be middle class than poor (Bhambra 2017, p. 217). Whether such people felt they were poor – in light of British politicians’ frequent appeals to the “strivers” and the “just managing” – is an interesting question.