Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom (original) (raw)
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The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit
2020
Brexit is not only a matter involving the United Kingdom and the European Union. It also has far reaching external implications which this timely collection explores. The Handbook is a welcome contribution to the study of the multifaceted consequences of a state's withdrawal from the EU."
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2020
Brexit Worlds I was in Goldsmiths sociology department and it was October 31-Halloween-and the day that Boris Johnson had repeatedly said that 'come what may' the UK would be leaving the European Union today and that for him it was 'do or die' and if it did not happen he would 'die in a ditch'. Some on the Tory right who were in the hard Brexit European Research Groupthe ERG had said that had we not left Britain would 'explode' and that there would be riots in the streets. But none of this happened even though it was a mantra that had been so often threatened. It was part of a narrative world that had been created around Brexit by those who were determined to leave without a deal if necessary, because for them, it was the leaving itself that was a matter of faith and could alone allow Britain and its four nations to be free from what they had framed as the 'shackles of the EU', an allusion back to slavery showing how issues of race were at the unspeakable core of a hard Brexit. With the date of the 31st October so firmly set in the nation's mind and it being presented as a critical moment in which we would 'leave or die'-there was a way that language had become an instrument that was deployed so readily in the tabloid press and in the wider media to capture our consciousness and frame an unbelievable world that felt endless and which we might desperately want to escape, but somehow felt trapped and obsessed with. It was in an uncanny time when we realised that what had been promised was not going to happen, and when our attentions have been displaced on the general election that had just been announced for December 12, that so many people, be they 'leavers' or 'remainers', felt an unspeakable anxiety about what all the threats had been about. For many discussions around Brexit-the 'B' word as it had been framed-were to be avoided, even if at another level they could feel inescapable.
Critical Discourse Studies, 2019
While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several aca- demic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Clarke & Newman, 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017; Koller, Kopf, & Miglbauer, 2019; Ridge-Newman, Leon-Solis, & O’Donnell, 2018; Outhwaite, 2017; Wincott, Peterson, & Convery, 2017). While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and econ- omic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally. Our contribution has thus three interrelated aims. First, the articles in this special issue provide evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, we show how such discourses reflect the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in defining the discursive and mediatic contexts within which Brexit has been articulated. Third, we identify discursive trajectories at play in the ongoing process of Brexit putting forward an agenda for further analysis of such trajectories.
Brexit: Modes of uncertainty and futures in an impasse
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalising and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit became in the impasse between the UK’s EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit was variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit took form and co‐exist, we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of “modes of uncertainty” as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A “mode of uncertainty” is a...
Goodbye Britannia? The International Implications of Britain's Vote To Leave The EU
The vote by the British people to withdrawal from the EU – also known as a " Brexit " – means both the UK and the EU now face an unprecedented challenge. Brexit could have significant implications for the EU, the ideas and structures of European integration, and European geopolitics. The UK itself faces an uncertain future. This article examines why Brexit has come to pass and explores what it could mean for the EU, European integration, and Europe's economics and security. It argues that as with many of the other problems the EU has faced, the EU and UK will muddle through a Brexit, coping but not solving the challenges it presents.
Brexit and emergent politics: Introduction to the special issue
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 2019
Brexit has been described as a landmark event marking what Gilbert (2015) has neatly described as the "long 90s," meaning the period since the mid-90s during which neoliberalism became an unquestionable assumption in the running of the economy and politics of western democracies. Alongside the election of Trump as President of the United States and the rise of the far-right across Europe, Brexit has been interpreted as marking a shift away from the hege
Brexit as Conjuncture? Developments in the Modes of Production and Politics
The Libertarian Ideal, 2017
In this essay I argue that Brexit must be understood as a conjunctural event that has discohered the way politics is understood in Britain. The de-axiomatised explanations of the EU referendum so far present a fragmented socio-economic explanation for both the European Union referendum result and for the political attitudes that characterise the resultant Brexit. However, looking through a neoliberal axiomatic understanding and a range of polling data related to the EU referendum, we can see that many voters who voted leave can be seen to be the discontents of globalisation, those left behind economically. However this macro-level variable does not cohere to the micro-level processes of the voters, who voted overwhelmingly due to cultural and national issues such as immigration and national sovereignty. Due to the extent of neoliberal subjectivation in the UK which individualises economic activity and creates a politics of consensus, economic issues became difficult to articulate as they lack a collective socio-economic subject. Thus the referendum acted as a de-economised catalyst, where people's grievances were funnelled through a culturation of politics. This culturation is continuing post-referendum, as voters' cultural and national concerns come to the fore of politics, leading toward processes of trasformismo and co-optation where the governing elites, particularly in the Conservative Party, are adopting this cultural rhetoric and re-engineering it into a form of neoliberalism with Brexit characteristics. Brexit then is not a revolt of the masses against neoliberal globalisation, but an event that is being slowly reabsorbed into the prevailing modes of production and politics. (Key words: Brexit, EU referendum, modes of politics, neoliberalism, subjectivation, conjuncture, governance)
Brexit and beyond: a Pandora’s Box?
Contemporary Social Science, 2019
A fundamental challenge for addressing 'Brexit and Beyond' is its multi-faceted and multi-dimensional nature. This is also reflected in the multitude of analytical accounts of its causes and potential outcomes. These accounts, however, have tended to focus on voting behaviours and a number of economic scenarios in general. This special issue makes a different contribution in focusing on four lines of enquiry that can be generalised into a critical narrative of one of the most complex issues facing social sciences for over sixty years. These lines comprise: 'drivers of the economy-industry, trade and immigration'; 'Brexit's wider European context'; 'From politics to territorial governance'; and 'Post-Brexit rural and fisheries policy'. By setting this analysis in a brief historical reading of 'Europe versus Empire', the Introduction to this special issue provides a context for understanding Brexit's deeper and wider resonance.
Underwriting Brexit: The European Union in the Anglosphere Imagination
2019
In the eyes of senior Brexiteers, the Anglosphere constituted a familiar and appropriate international grouping for post-Brexit Britain. Strikingly similar views about the European Union also emanated from Anglosphere enthusiasts outside Europe, highlighting the role of the European Union (EU) as an ‘other’ against which the Anglosphere was cast. These detractors’ views of the European project fed into the Brexit referendum campaign. They helped create a distinctively Anglo-British Anglosphere resting on three pillars: parliamentary sovereignty, the memory of empire, and twentieth-century conflict, underpinned by a meta-narrative concerning the emergence and export of a particular form of liberty. By establishing the salience of the Anglosphere idea in right- and left-leaning newspapers since 1999 and by examining the discursive co-constitution of the Anglosphere and the EU during the 2016 referendum, this chapter illustrates how senior Brexiteers offered the Anglosphere as a vision...
Exit Europe: Brexit, Stage Right (2016)
2016
This essay explores the meaning of Brexit. The culture/politics/economics of our time is stretched by raging contractions. This means that without emphasizing the contradictions themselves any analysis will be hopelessly out of its depth. Four examples are developed, themes that are hard to express in newspaper headlines. The essay argues that we are seeing firstly the globalized resurgence of an inward-regarding nationalism; secondly, the globally fuelled intensification of a particular kind of localized democracy; thirdly, the local/global exacerbation of cross-cutting social divisions; and, fourthly, an increasingly dependency of national economies upon a global market that intensifying globalizing contradictions between national and global, modern and postmodern layers of the economy in turn renders increasingly fragile.