Plebiscite or Parliament? Brexit and the End of the History of the British Political Model (original) (raw)

2019, Contemporary European History

The fact that the proposal to leave the European Union obtained a narrow majority of 51.89 per cent in the referendum of 23 June 2016 was initially seen as a major crisis of the European Union. Two years later it is increasingly clear that Brexit is foremost a major crisis of British parliamentary democracy. The idea that the plebiscite is a superior form of democracy is profoundly alien to the British political tradition of parliamentarism, as a very explicitly indirect form of democracy. For liberals during the French Second Empire or the German Third Empire, the recourse to referenda was the hallmark of autocracy and antinomic to the idea of representative government. The brutal right of majorities to dispose of minorities was long seen in the United Kingdom as a continental disease, somehow linked to traditions of revolutionary and nationalist violence, electoral versions of the 'revolutionary surge' (levée en masse), at odds with the gradualism of representative politics in the United Kingdom. The 2016 referendum therefore is at least as much related to the 2011 referendum on alternative voting than it was to the 1975 referendum on European Community membership. After all, David Cameron resorted to the solution of a referendum to solve a problem within the Conservative Party through popular arbitration, thereby implicitly admitting that the first-pastthe-post voting system in the UK was paralysing in this regard and British parliamentarism chronically unable to reform itself. The prospect of Brexit has thrown both Labour and the Conservative Party into disarray, unable to formulate a clear answer on what the popular mandate meant, in terms of timing or in terms of the new relationship with the EU (customs union, single market, ECJ jurisdiction, freedom of movement), thereby admitting a legitimacy deficit of representative compared to direct democracy. After June 2016 it seemed as if questioning the timing or precise perimeter of the popular decision to 'leave' was no less than a betrayal of the people by illegitimate political elites usurping power. The strange halo of unquestionable authority surrounding the referendum result in the UK since 2016, compared to the blatant disregard for referendum results on the constitutional treaty in France and the Netherlands in 2005, reveals the exponential erosion of the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy over the last decade worldwide, rather than some profound difference between the United Kingdom, on the one hand, and France and the Netherlands, on the other. The fallout of the Brexit referendum proves, above all, that a plebiscite creates infinitely more problems than it can solve. The list of referenda creating inextricable complications for the problems they proposed to solve is long. The Upper Silesia plebiscite of March 1921 is an interesting precedent for Brexit. The overall result showed a crushing victory for 'remain' (with Germany rather than the new Polish State), but the allies decided to break down the result to the district level and dismember Upper Silesia, with the Eastern districts (where a majority had voted 'leave') joining Poland. An Upper Silesian solution to Brexit offers stimulating scenarios for Northern Ireland and Scotland. The 'informative popular consultation' organised in Belgium in March 1950 over the return of King Leopold III is an equally interesting precedent. The Belgian constitution of 1830, drafted under British inspiration, did not include any reference to the possibility of holding a