The European Union after Brexit

Scott L. Greer, Janet Laible

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526133670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The European Union after Brexit addresses the forces and mechanisms at work during an unprecedented transformation of the European polity. How will the EU operate without one of its key diplomatic and international military partners? What will happen to its priorities, internal balance(s) of power and legislation without the reliably liberal and Eurosceptic United Kingdom? In general, what happens when an 'ever closer union' founded on a virtuous circle of economic, social, and political integration is called into question?Though this volume is largely positive about the future of the EU after Brexit, it suggests that the process of European integration has gone into reverse, with Brexit coming amidst a series of developments that have disrupted the optimistic trajectory of integration. Covering topics such as international trade, freedom of movement, and security relations, this book answers a need for a one-stop source of strong research-based discussions of Brexit.

1

A cautionary tale: ‘Brexit’, economic citizenship, and the political perils of neoliberalism

Mark I. Vail

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism’s status as a quasi-hegemonic economic paradigm in many advanced industrial economies has contributed to processes of political and social disintegration whose scope and scale researchers and policymakers are only now beginning to understand. Arguably the point of origin of politicized neoliberalism under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s, Britain, like the United States, has come to represent the elite consensus that generalizing economic prosperity would lift all boats, thereby both legitimizing the expansive view of markets as the central organizing principle of advanced capitalism and creating the social cohesion and political stability necessary to that legitimation. In the process, many brushed aside distributional concerns or questions about workers’ declining real incomes and economic inequality as the necessary, if unfortunate, side-effect of the expansion of market forces that would ultimately make everyone better off. Few acknowledged the possibility that the economic dislocation that neoliberal policies had left in their wake could threaten the ostensibly broad and deep consensus underlying market liberalism. As Britain’s June 2016 decision to leave the European Union (EU) showed, however, the social and economic dislocations wrought by market liberalism could indeed fracture society and undermine political stability. British voters, particularly among the working class and in the country’s erstwhile industrial heartland, grew increasingly disillusioned with a messianic vision resting on the twin pillars of neoliberalism and fiscal austerity, which they increasingly associated with both the Conservative Party and, in somewhat more diffuse fashion, Brussels and EU institutions. In the process, the economic dislocation generated by the policies of Conservative governments (as well as, in a somewhat softer and more attenuated sense, those of New Labour) undermined economic security and social cohesion while creating pressures for an alternative strategy of political integration for the Tories, which featured a neo-Thatcherite Euroscepticism increasingly focused on Britain’s EU membership. As I discuss in this chapter, Brexit thus represents a cautionary tale, not only for British officials, but more broadly for continental authorities who have yet fully to reckon with the potential political price to be paid for adherence to a denuded conception of state economic power and (often sotto voce), the embrace of fiscal austerity and the economic stagnation that it underpins, and the erosion of the social contract that these stances bring in their wake.¹

The Brexit vote paradoxically represented both the predictable culmination of decades of British Euroscepticism and a seismic shock that few had predicted. Beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s famous declamation that ‘We want our money back’ (resting on a rather simplistic conception of British-EU economic relations), though stemming in part from the much older sense of British separateness from the continent, British public discourse gave powerful voice to the conviction that EU membership conferred more political and economic burdens than benefits. Though by no means limited to it, this perspective was particularly concentrated among the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party. That said, much in the fashion of a German reunification that most assumed to be inevitable but not imminent, the negative result of the referendum stunned British and foreign observers alike, not least because both polling and oddsmakers had suggested that support for the ‘Remain’ side was solid up until the vote itself. These ultimately misleading snapshots of public opinion were reinforced by a longstanding, almost Whiggish view among many British voters of inevitable historical progress towards a liberal, cosmopolitan consensus, reinforced by more than a decade of Labour governments for whom such a worldview was a central part of their credo, with Eurosceptic Tories assumed to be an (admittedly vocal) minority. This led to a widespread sense among David Cameron’s governing Conservatives that ‘the centre was secure’ and that the referendum, called after long hesitation in an effort to neutralize the Eurosceptic wing of the party, would ‘be about jobs and the economy and it won’t even be close’ (Behr 2016).

Shocked as political elites were at the outcome, more astute voters might have seen it coming. Though there were a number of proximate causes for what turned out to be a revolt of many British working-class voters against the ostensible Europhilic, cosmopolitan consensus, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s lacklustre and half-hearted support for membership of a Union that he had long perceived as a business-dominated cabal, the referendum’s outcome actually grew from much deeper roots. These included growing alienation among many traditional Labour voters from the socially liberal and cosmopolitan worldview increasingly embraced by their party and represented by London and the financial services sector, whose dominance developed against a backdrop of deindustrialization and economic stagnation that had plagued the industrial North, Midlands, and Wales since the late 1970s. The hollowing out of the industrial economy, combined with the perceived smug self-satisfaction of London bankers who seemed just as callous and out of touch as EU bureaucrats, in turn created fertile ground for growing alienation of Labour’s core working-class constituency, leading to ‘lower turnout, falling identification with Labour, and growing disaffection with the political system’ (Ford and Goodwin 2017, 18).

If the groundwork for Brexit was thus lain by a combination of Tory Euroscepticism and the liberal cosmopolitanism embodied by New Labour and the Europhilic Liberal Democrats, this alloy had deeper social and economic causes. These included structural shifts in the British economy, exacerbated by a neoliberal economic philosophy embraced particularly by the Tories that viewed public investment in and support for the British social contract with suspicion. Even as global trends and public policy decisions were hastening the erosion of the postwar social and economic community and the Keynesian interparty consensus and Beveridgean welfare states that had supported it, both the Tories and Labour (the former more by design and the latter through neglect) failed to foster the development of a new social, economic, and political community to take its place. If Labour’s strategy had been one of whistling past the proverbial graveyard, the Tories’ had been a variant of what German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1970) had labeled ‘negative integration’, meant to denote nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s gambit of solidifying political support for a hollow democracy through a politics of enemies, both internal and external, not to be confused with the question of European integration.² If Bismarck’s targets had been Catholics, Austria, and Socialists, since Thatcher a growing number of Tories had demonized the EU, portrayed at best as an opaque and remote (and ultimately French) bureaucracy with little concern for British welfare, and at worst a hostile external force bent on undermining British sovereignty. Having spent the better part of three decades defining the British political-economic community against the EU, even as the neoliberal commitment to austerity hastened its demise, Tory politicians were hard-pressed to offer a substantive alternative, other than pabulum about a shared prosperity increasingly at odds with many workers’ lived experience. In so doing, they accelerated the erosion of the social and economic community that had long provided the basis for political stability at home, while increasing the likelihood of a rebellion against the European institutions. In the process, British voters came to tar both Europe and the British political establishment with the same anti-elitist brush, repudiating both in favor of an alluring, though ill-defined, domestic idyll informed by equal parts nostalgia and animus.

In this chapter, I argue that the result of the Brexit referendum is best understood as a failure of social and economic community exacerbated by a neoliberal creed that justified both neglect of and attacks on the British social contract. I suggest that the combination of the Tories’ anti-EU campaign of ‘negative integration’ (relating in no way to European integration but rather to the process of building domestic political coalitions through the politics of enemies), long-term trends of budgetary austerity and cuts to social programs, which disproportionately affected areas suffering from deindustrialization and the aftermath of the Great Recession, and growing anxiety over immigration among relatively ethnically homogeneous working-class communities, led both to hostility to the EU and a quest to regain a sense of economic community defined along increasingly ethnonationalistic lines, in the absence of an affirmative vision offered by the Tories of less parochial alternatives. I suggest that Brexit can best be understood as the product of a search for a social and economic community to replace that undermined by long-term economic trends exacerbated by neoliberal policies that failed to provide workers with needed support and avenues for adjustment. In this context, that hostility towards the EU and fears of the social and economic effects of immigration that led to Brexit were products of both social and economic anxieties and workers’ search for a renewed sense of belonging and community. I suggest further that the British case offers a cautionary tale for both other European states and the EU, offering lessons about the political risks of economic austerity and neoliberal policies, embraced by both the European Central Bank (ECB) and prosperous creditor countries in the European core, that undermine the economic bases of political consent. Given the EU’s failure to build a meaningful supranational political community, the continuation of such approaches to European economic governance seem particularly hazardous. In the conclusion, I argue that Brexit, seen from this analytical lens, also offers important lessons for those seeking to understand populist movements, particularly on the far Right, that seek to create new (and often exclusionary) forms of community to replace those that have eroded or collapsed.

The origins of the present crisis: neoliberalism and the anti-European strategy of the Conservative Party

Though the origins of the Conservative Party’s dilemma over EU membership lie in Thatcher’s simultaneous embrace of neoliberalism and elevation of Euroscepticism to official Tory policy, it was Cameron’s government that was forced to reckon with the political costs of these stances. Contrary to initial expectations that the then coalition government would be moderated by the influence of the less neoliberal and more Europhilic Liberal Democrats, Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne quickly reverted to an aggressive strategy of budgetary austerity and cuts in public spending, all in the teeth of the deepest recession Britain had known since World War II. Although Cameron and Osborne seemed committed to an economic strategy of austerity and budgetary orthodoxy, their posture vis-à-vis Europe was more ambivalent, as neither had embraced the hardcore Euroscepticism of the anti-EU wing of the party. Hearkening back to the first British referendum on EU membership of the 1970s under the government of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Tory divisions over EU membership had never been bridged, and Thatcher’s adoption of an almost reflexive anti-EU stance merely deepened them. The vocal opposition to the EU of many Tory backbenchers evolved from a perennial irritant to the driver of a potential crisis for the party with the rise in the 2000s and early 2010s of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose central platform was Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and which threatened to peel off many traditionally Tory voters. As Cameron began to perceive the rise of UKIP and the hardening of anti-EU sentiment in a growing wing of his party as an existential political threat, his rhetoric became more stridently anti-EU, as he hoped to soften divisions within his party and maintain support among the working-class voters that had abandoned New Labour but which were drawn to UKIP’s facile yet alluring formula of British nationalism and Euroscepticism, packaged in the blunt, even crass language of Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader.

Cameron’s move to the right on Europe represented a second-best, defensive turn to a strategy of ‘negative integration’ in the face of economic dislocation and political disaffection stemming from British deindustrialization but much exacerbated by his government’s embrace of neoliberalism, which had helped to accelerate the erosion of working-class jobs. These so-called ‘left behind’ voters grew increasingly alienated from mainstream parties during the 2000s, and many of them shifted their support, first from Labour to the Tories and thence to UKIP. Between 2006 and 2012, the share of working-class voters saying that ‘people like me have no say in government’ grew from about 20 percent to more than 30 percent, even as the share of working-class UKIP supporters grew by 7.6 percent and the share who had left school by the age of 16 grew by 10.3 percent (Ford and Goodwin 2014, 127, 164). Perhaps even more worrying for Cameron, the share of UKIP voters stating that they had voted for the Conservatives in previous elections grew from 29 percent in 2010–11 to 45 percent in 2012–13 (Ford and Goodwin 2014, 166). In view of such trends, Cameron understandably felt pressure to sharpen his anti-EU rhetoric, though doing so did little to bridge, still less to heal, the underlying divisions in his party about Britain’s relationship with the EU. Nor did it address the underlying trends showing that working-class voters beset by the corrosion of their economic communities and rising economic precariousness felt increasingly alienated from mainstream politics.

Cameron’s strategy for dealing with this set of political dilemmas increasingly focused on the referendum on EU membership. The tensions between the competing wings of the party came to a head following the election of 2010 and within the context of the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition to which it gave rise. The rhetoric surrounding negotiations over the coalition suggested moderation with respect both to Britain’s posture towards the EU and to plans for economic liberalization and reform, an unsurprising fact given the Liberal Democrats’ support for Europe and for preserving the British safety net. In relatively short order, however, it became clear that the Tories would make policy with little regard for their coalition partner’s preferences, which stood in opposition to the government’s unwavering commitment to aus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A cautionary tale: ‘Brexit’, economic citizenship, and the political perils of neoliberalism
• 2 Subtraction by subtraction? Brexit and its impact on the common European financial space
• 3 Brexit and the Single Market
• 4 Social Europe after Brexit
• 5 European citizenship and free movement after Brexit
• 6 The EU legal order without the UK: a pity to lose the contribution?
• 7 The East–West divide: obstacles to European integration
• 8 Networks after Brexit
• 9 European Union trade policy in the wake of the Brexit vote
• 10 A stronger European Union? The unexpected security consequences of Brexit
• Conclusion – the EU after Brexit: hard or soft?
• Index