Complexity’s Embrace: The International Law Implications of Brexit by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald and Eva Lein (eds.)
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018811914 |
| Author | Paul Daly |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
joined, left, and were reintegrated or expelled as political events unfolded. Coghlan
and his editors have attempted to keep all the players and the map of South Sudan
they influenced named and appropriately placed, but it is easy to get lost. Readers
who are looking to keep these events in better order would be well advised to read
the two appendices, a chronology of events in Sudan and a list of acronyms, before
wading into Coghlan’s narrative. It would have been more helpful to include these
at the start of the work, rather than leaving them as appendices.
Another sour note comes from the lack of detail regarding how the account itself
was crafted. Coghlan quotes freely from those who were in South Sudan with him.
It would have been useful to know whether all of these quotations came from
written correspondence, or if they are based on the author’s recollections. If the
latter, was it the case that he kept a journal, or did these remain in his memory
years later, when this manuscript was being written? A brief description of the
writer’s process in an introduction would have done all that was necessary to
solve this shortcoming.
Despite these issues, Coghlan’s work is a useful and often-engaging account of
South Sudan’s first traumatic years. The work of Canada’s diplomats in places like
South Sudan deserves more attention, and hopefully books like this will continue
to shed light on the good, bad, and ugly sides of this world.
Oonagh E. Fitzgerald and Eva Lein (eds.),
Complexity’s Embrace: The International Law Implications of Brexit,
Centre for International Governance Innovation: Waterloo, ON, 2018; 336 pp.:
ISBN: 978-1-928096-63-4, C$45.00 (cloth)
Reviewed by: Paul Daly (pd309@cam.ac.uk), University of Cambridge, UK
As I write, in the summer of 2018, there is tremendous noise in British politics: cries
of frustration from those opposed to the United Kingdom’s departure from the
European Union; howls of outrage from those who fear Brexit will not loosen the
ties of EU law; and confident pronouncements from officials that the UK will be
ready—with stockpiled food and medicine—for even the hardest of Brexits.
Amidst the hubbub, however, only one noise really matters: the slow ticking of
the clock. By operation of law, the process triggered with great fanfare by the
service of a notification under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union on
29 March 2017 will come to an end two years later, on 29 March 2019—deal or no
deal—unless the period is extended by unanimous agreement of the EU member
states or by some act of lawyerly ingenuity. At that point, the UK will become a
‘‘third country’’ in the eyes of EU law. It will be as if a previously unknown
landmass, equipped with a developed legal system and a powerhouse economy,
had suddenly emerged on the other side of the Channel.
Those who wish to think about the post-Brexit framework coolly and
calmly, concentrating on the ticking clock rather than on the noise emanating
from a fevered British body politic, will enjoy this collection. The primary merit of
Book Reviews 635
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