Brexit, Retrotopia and the perils of post-colonial delusions

ABSTRACT

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 long-term 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• European Union
• identity politics
• status seeking
• foreign policy
• British politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Paul Beaumont http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3778-2355

Notes

1 “Brexit” refers to the referendum held on 23 June 2016, when 51.9% of the United Kingdom electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU).

2 A recent Special Issue of Journal of Politics and International Relations contained no less than 17 articles on various aspects of Brexit.

3 The notion of replacing the EU with an “Anglosphere” amongst Britain’s former dominions EU, popular with Eurosceptics, is probably the most obvious example of this tendency.

4 None of this is to deny that the EU suffers several institutional and systemic dysfunctions (a severe democratic deficit, inefficiency, etc.) or that the grievances Eurosceptics have with the EU are irrational or illegitimate.

5 By virtue of the UK’s system of government, in which parliament in London is sovereign over rest of the UK, English nationalists are “forced” to speak “the language of Britishness” when making Eurosceptic arguments about regaining sovereignty.

6 It is worth clarifying that this is not posited as the only narrative available, clearly many Scottish, Welsh and Irish national narratives differ considerably, while alternative narratives for Englishness and Britishness are in circulation; I merely suggest the one outlined below has been dominant across large parts of Britain, especially England.