âTHE EMPIRE STRIKES BACKâ shouted the headline, its huge white letters consuming almost the entire front page. It was one of those days when the news needed to be announced in block capitals. In the background was a barely visible greyed-out Union Flag, worn away, no doubt, by winds of destruction, while below, a cut-out of Prime Minister David Cameron gazed offstage, his pained face signalling defeat to the world.
With clichéd but nonetheless vivid visual cues, this tabloid headline proclaimed a unique historical juncture, a moment in time that few readers would ever truly forget (Miranda, 2016).
It was the day after the Brexit referendum. Against every expectation, the people had voted Leave. âGet us out of here,â they said. Britain, and perhaps the world, would never be the same again.
But while it was certainly eye-catching and suitably dramatic, the headline was a little curious just the same. Something did not quite add up.
Precisely what âEMPIREâ was being referred to?
Was this an allusion to the United Kingdomâs self-styled standing as an imperial power, whose global relevance owes more to historical and cultural nostalgia than to actual territorial dominion?
Or was it a reference to the European Union itself, a pan-national expansionist consortium, often accused by Eurosceptics of having imperialist intentions of its own?
As with all things Brexit, matters were more complicated than they first appeared. As we will see throughout this book, quite what everything means depends largely on your perspective.
At least the notion of âempiresâ âstrikingâ at each other was appropriately apocalyptic. It was beginning to feel as though reality was falling apart. Within hours of the referendum result, the Prime Minister had announced his resignation. The value of the poundâand of the euroâplummeted on global currency markets. The worldâs media began to obsess about the implications of this unexpected sociopolitical meltdown.
And in the United Kingdom, Brexit was quickly becoming an all-consuming, collectively traumatising, and supremely challenging social upheaval.
For want of a better term, in the years since 2016, Brexit has unfolded into a fully-fledged psychodrama.
In the media, academia, and the public square, there is an ever-present impulse to explain Brexit in psychological terms, albeit with varying degrees of convincingness. Brexit attitudes are frequently projected as symptoms of pathological thought. People who voted Remain are labelled âRemoanersâ, implying the presence of chronically disordered mood. Those who voted Leave are dismissed as âBrextremistsâ, which hints at sociopathy.
The language of psychiatry is often used to decry Brexit as an act of national âself-harmâ, with little apparent regard for the sensitivities of people for whom actual self-harm is a lived reality. This so-called national self-harm of Brexit is sometimes depicted as a catastrophe; at other times, it is employed to titillate readers by implying a nationwide predilection for masochism.
Other perspectives focus on political performance. They analyse the group dynamics and organisational behaviours required to achieve the best bureaucratic Brexit. The entire enterprise, ostensibly the crafting of a new national sovereignty on an unprecedentedly grand scale, is reduced to the grubby realities of personality clashes and the needs of internal party management.
For many people, the psychological impact of Brexit is the challenge of its complexity. Brexit melts the brain. Its incomprehensibility is a source of national distress. In a daytime chat show interview that went viral on social media, the actor Danny Dyer spoke for millions when he declared Brexit to be âa mad riddleâ about which âno-oneâs got a f***ing clueâ (Busby, 2018).
Brexit is not the result of accidental tragedy or spontaneous economic turmoil. It was contrived by politicians, was voted for by citizens, and is now being implemented by bureaucrats.
Brexit did not âjust happen.â It exists because people decided to make it exist. It is therefore hugely influenced by a myriad of psychological factors as experienced across many social groups. Brexit is the combined reflection of a multitude of perceptions, preferences, choices, self-images, attitudes, ideas, assumptions, and reasoned (or ill-reasoned) conclusions.
So if you want to understand Brexit, why not turn to a psychologist?
After all, psychology is the formal study of these very human behaviours, these emotions and thoughts, these experiences of individuals and communities. Psychology is a science (more or less) in that it seeks empirical evidence to support or reject given claims.
Psychologists develop theories, conduct experiments, and gather data. They look for signals in what would otherwise be treated as noise. They seek to impose intellectual order on worldly chaos.
And what could be more chaotic than Brexit?
The Psychologising of Brexit
Brexit is unavoidably relevant, and not just to British audiences. It is a case study in group decision-making within mass democratic systems; its lessons speak to any community where choices are made at ballot boxes. It took one of the most advanced societies ever to have existed and turned it into a place of prevalent and near-permanent pandemonium. It is a warning to all other peaceable countries against cultural complacency.
And in disrupting the balance of societyâin wrecking its resting homeostasisâBrexit is the very definition of what psychologists refer to as a âstressor.â It can therefore be presumed to be inflicting a grievous mental load on the population.
Brexit emerged from psychological impulses, was determined by psychological choices, is construed in terms of psychological perceptions, and will leave a lasting psychological imprint. For many people, especially in the United Kingdom (but not only there), Brexit looms large in the psyche. It should be no surprise then, when pundits try to explain it, that Brexitâs psychological dimensions receive so much airtime.
But not all hot takes are equal. Sometimes the interpretation of events reveals more about the people doing the interpreting than it does about the events themselves. The very idea that Brexit reflects a British yearning for past imperial glories may well be a case in point. This is important because such imperialist narratives have been used not only to explain Brexit, but also to demonise those who support it.
The notion that centuries of history intrude upon the behaviour of citizens alive today offers a highly seductive narrative. However, with any psychological approach, it is important to consider empirical evidence and scientific standards of reasoning. This is because seductive narratives are themselves propelled by psychological influences. In many cases, they are often seductive precisely because they are divorced from real-world banality.
In other words, many seductive narratives are examples of escapism.
They are seductive precisely because they are wrong.
Empire 2.0
It is in the psychological nature of humans to consider oneâs own kind exceptional. In this regard, the humans who make up the modern United Kingdom are, well, no exception.
Britons are generally aware that the United Kingdom has had a significant impact on the world. Few nations can claim to have impacted the world more. At one time or another, the British have forcibly invaded all but twenty-two of the countries that make up the current international community (Laycock, 2012).
It seems that Britain has been looking to take things over for as long as history has been written: one of the first recorded mentions of the British was when Julius Caesar wrote about them turning up, unexpectedly, fighting the Romans in France.
The first formal British endeavour to topple another stateâan invasion of Gaul led by Clodius Albinus in AD 197âgot no further than Lyon. However, over successive centuries, Britain went on to accumulate a slew of dominions, colonies, territories, and protectorates. Britain ruled the waves âat heavenâs commandâ and built a commonwealth that spanned the globe. Its truly global reach prompted George Macartney, the Irish-born governor of the British West Indies, to declare it a âvast empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertainedâ (Kenny, 2006).
In the United Kingdom, schoolchildren are taught that, at its peak, the British Empire comprised a quarter of the earthâs land area as well as a quarter of its population. The concept is ingrained in citizensâ minds from an early age. Whether all its ramifications are appreciated is less clear.
Occasionally, the statistic is garbled, as when a caller to national radio claimed that citizens should have no fears about a post-Brexit future, because their country used to control âthree thirds of the world.â When challenged, the caller reduced this to âtwo thirdsâ (Oppenheim, 2017). Past glories are often more influential in essence than in substance.
Public commentary and media coverage regularly locates Brexit within a post-imperial frame. For academic Nadine El-Enany (2017), the Brexit vote reflected a long-held anxiety about loss of empire. This created for Britain an âextreme discomfort at its place as, formally, an equal alongside other EU member statesâ, rather than holder of the imperial throne. Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats, argued that many Brexit supporters are addled by ânostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white, and the map was coloured imperial pinkâ (Jamieson, 2018).
Academics and journalists have described how a ânostalgic yearning for lost coloniesâ has become deeply embedded as âpart of [Britainâs] national psycheâ (Olusoga, 2017). It creates a condition of âpostcolonial melancholiaâ that continues to distort political debate (Saunders, 2019). Britain suffers a recurring âself-deluded narrativeâ about its prospects for new imperial exploits, where ââourâ former colonies will want to form a new, white, English-speaking trading areaânicknamed Empire 2.0âto replace the EUâ (Mason, 2018).
A theme of pathological self-aggrandisement appears repeatedly. According
to Guardian writer
Gary Younge (2018):
Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. At some point they convinced themselves that the reason we are at the centre of most world maps is because the Earth revolves around us, not because it was us who drew the maps.
In their book, Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire, geographer Danny Dorling and sociologist Sally Tomlinson warn that such post-imperial âarroganceâ fuels Brexit, because âa small number of people in Britain have a dangerous, imperialist misconception of our standing in the worldâ (Dorling & Tomlinson, 2019).
The post-imperial slant is not confined to British commentary. It has been adopted around the world as journalistic shorthand for reporting on Brexit. The New York Times records Brexit as âEnglandâs last gasp of Empireâ, a âmisguided cravingâ that plays on a âfantasy of revived greatnessâ promoted by âdreamersâ who are âsickened by nostalgiaâ (Judah, 2016). In the Washington Post , Britainâs âold colonial hubrisâ is depicted as causing the United Kingdom to âcling to imperial nostalgia,â weighed down by âa fair amount of delusionâ (Tharoor, 2019).
In Le Monde , French historian Jean-François Dunyach complains of how British Eurosceptics deploy empire myths as âideological accessories,â comprised of little more than âirreducible ambiguitiesâ (Dunyach, 2019). American historian Dane Kennedy depicts Brexit as being permanently propelled by ârepeated evocations of the imperial pastâ (Kennedy, 2018).
All this talk combines to produce an elaborate psychological modelâa theory if you willâthat posits a clear role for deep-rooted empire-thinking in shaping todayâs events. As Dorling and Tomlinson put it, Brexit represents âthe last vestiges of empire working their way out of the British psyche.â
At first glance, it seems to add up. The very fact that Britain ruled the waves before would appear to provide prima facie evidence that it is capable of doing so again. This makes British prosperity a tangible possibility in peopleâs minds, and not merely a hypothesis.
But there is more to this psychodrama than a past that role-models the future. It is not just a case of learning logical lessons that allow you to imitate history. In this analysis, there are mysterious forces such as âdelusionâ, âmelancholiaâ, âyearningâ, âdiscomfortâ, and ânostalgiaâ and, of course, the amorphous âBritish psyche.â With visceral drivers of thoughts, emotions, and behaviour operating on a collective national mind, this is a theory of Brexit that describes a people simultaneously overwhelmed by distorting impulsivity and incapable of true logic.
The effects of this type of thing should be wide-ranging. To assert that British people really are weighed down by colonial anxieties, imperial hang-ups, and delusions of majesty is to describe a kind of brain-addling sickness that subverts the very process of democracy. It is to imply that the British, or at least some of them, are not of sound mind. Such a claim should place the psychology of Brexit at the very centre of daily life.
From Self-Regard to Self-Loathing
But before we address its merits, letâs take a moment to see where else this line of Brexit-as-post-imperial-psychodrama might take us. One consequence of no longer leading an empire is that the British people must now explainâto themselves, mainlyâwhy it is their status is so reduced. Decades of psychological research show how most people are unlikely to account for losses by simply taking the blame themselves. Instead, they engage in various kinds of rationalisation process, where personal histories get re-written after the fact.
One approach involves finding a scapegoat, someone to blame for oneâs plight. Often scapegoats are accused of precisely those failings that the accusers themselves feel guilty of. In other words, people end up âprojectingâ their own failings onto others. In couples therapy, a self-centred client might attempt to shift unwanted criticism by arguing that their partner is the one who is really greedy. Such rationalisations might succeed in deflecting blame in the here and now, but they are unlikely to produce long-lasting happiness.
A second strategy is to try to transfigure discomfort into something that feels more positive. For example, a client who feels their partner is selfish could decide that they actually love the fact that their partner is, in fact, so âself-assuredâ. Reframed in such terms, the clientâs uncomfortable situation becomes a source of positive emotions, rather than negative ones, albeit superficially and precariously so.
When adopted knowingly, these rationalisations can be seen as useful coping strategies, excuses that can be rolled out when seeking to avoid guilt. However, when earnestly believed, such excuses become something else. They become pathological delusions, beliefs in falsehoods, psychotic thoughts, disconnections from reality. They become symptoms. This symptomatic scenario is inherent in the depiction of Brexit as a post-imperial psychodrama.
Some accounts of Brexit attempt to tease out these ancillary notions, looking for signs that confirm the merit of the overall interpretation. Thus, it is said, the British people are frequently driven to find consolation by casting âfaceless Brussels bureaucratsâ as an âout-groupâ on whom they can project their own record of poor judgement (Carswell, 2018).
For example, British critics have frequently decried the European Union for failing to restrict immigration to the United Kingdom. However, for years, the UK authorities have had the power to regulate this for themselves (Lee, 2018). In other words, British Euroscepticsâmany of whom are parliamentariansâblame the EU for looking the other way on migration; when, in fact, it is the elected UK parliamentâin other words, many of those self-same Euroscepticsâwho are the real culprits.
From Self-Loathing to Self-Abuse
The scapegoating strategy is often supplemented by an effort to seek solace in suffering. One lesson from psychology research is that human beings find it quite easy to re-purpose their emotions in light of circumstance. In fact, they do it all the time, often without realising.
In a famous 1960s experiment, psyc...