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Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, a number of explanations have... more Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, a number of explanations have been put forward for the vote to leave. In this article, we argue that none of them provides a satisfactory account. We then outline an alternative explanation. The UK has long been one of the most Eurosceptic countries in the EU, and the reason why is that Britons have a weaker sense of European identity––an identity which is rooted in specific aspects of the country’s history. Since the early 1990s, Britons’ Euroscepticism has been amplified by four key developments: the ERM crisis; the increasing pace of European integration; the Eurozone debt crisis; and immigration from Eastern Europe. Our explanation answers two critical questions: ‘Why did the UK that voted to leave, rather than any other member state?’; and, ‘Why did the UK vote to Leave in 2016, rather than at any point in the past?’

Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, a number of explanations have... more Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, a number of explanations have been put forward for the vote to leave. In this article, we argue that none of them provides a satisfactory account. We then outline an alternative explanation. The UK has long been one of the most Eurosceptic countries in the EU, and the reason why is that Britons have a weaker sense of European identity––an identity which is rooted in specific aspects of the country’s history. Since the early 1990s, Britons’ Euroscepticism has been amplified by four key developments: the ERM crisis; the increasing pace of European integration; the Eurozone debt crisis; and immigration from Eastern Europe. Our explanation answers two critical questions: ‘Why did the UK that voted to leave, rather than any other member state?’; and, ‘Why did the UK vote to Leave in 2016, rather than at any point in the past?’

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