Inevitability and contingency: The political economy of Brexit
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117710431 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles - Part One |
research-article2017
Special Issue Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Inevitability and contingency:
2017, Vol. 19(3) 434 –449
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117710431
DOI: 10.1177/1369148117710431
of Brexit
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Helen Thompson
Abstract
Placing Britain’s vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union (EU) in historical time raises an
immediate analytical problem. What was clearly the result of a number of contingencies, starting
with the 2015 general election where we can see how events could readily have turned out
otherwise, the result might also represent the inevitable end of Britain’s membership of the EU
seen from the distant future. This article seeks to take both temporal perspectives seriously. It
aims to provide an explanation of the turn to Brexit that recognises the referendum result as
politically contingent and also argues that the political economy of Britain generated by Britain’s
position as non-euro member of the EU while possessing the offshore financial centre of the
euro-zone and Britain’s eschewal in 2004 of transition arrangements on freedom of movement
for that year’s accession states made Brexit an eventual inevitability, saving a prior collapse of the
euro-zone.
Keywords
Brexit, Cameron, European Union, freedom of movement, the euro
Britain’s vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union (EU) presents a temporal
paradox. Seen from the distant future, Brexit is likely to appear the inevitable outcome of
the long history of Britain’s membership of the EU and its predecessors. Britain joined a
partial economic union whose rules had been determined by others; when that union
became a currency union, it was unwilling to sacrifice monetary sovereignty and opted-
out, and when that currency union produced an economic crisis that both required more
political union and had spill-over effects for Britain, membership was rendered unsustain-
able. Symbolically, this torturous path from problematic membership through partial
withdrawal to secession reached its end when, although trying to keep Britain inside the
EU, David Cameron negotiated an opt-out of the ever closer union that is the EU’s stated
raison d’étre. Yet judging Brexit from the present, the outcome of the referendum was
experienced as a shock by much of the British political class. Moreover, seen in short- to
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Corresponding author:
Helen Thompson, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, The Alison
Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: het20@cam.ac.uk
Thompson
435
medium-term time, the path to Brexit required a set of contingencies to occur: Cameron
had to promise to include a referendum pledge in the Conservatives’ 2015 manifesto; the
Conservatives had to win enough seats to form another government; the other EU states
had to refuse to make significant concessions to the British government in the renegotia-
tions; and the Leave campaign had to win the referendum.
Here, I ask whether Brexit was inevitable or not, taking into account both these tem-
poral perspectives. The point of departure used for the shorter time frame is the return of
the Conservatives to office in May 2010. Contrary to those who insist that Cameron pre-
cipitated an unnecessary crisis of Britain’s membership by calling an avoidable referen-
dum (Glencross, 2016; Saunders, 2016; Vail, 2015), I argue that the underlying structural
forces generated by Britain’s singular macro-political economy created a relatively high
degree of probability that the denouement of Britain’s membership of the EU would be
reached under the conditions of the Conservative party being in office.
There are a number of limitations to this argument. First, Britain’s singular macro-
political economy is not the only possible starting place in looking for structural fault-
lines in Britain’s EU membership. Britain can easily be seen as a country with a singular
European history in relation to the continent (Adler-Nissen et al., 2017: 6–7). One could
argue that given the long-standing difficulties of reconciling Britain’s constitutional tradi-
tion to the EU, a democratic reckoning was eventually inevitable, especially once the
governance of England had been rendered incoherent by asymmetric devolution
(Henderson et al., 2016). After the Maastricht Treaty was ratified without a plebiscite, and
it is quite possible that Britain’s membership could have been be sustained only so long
as British governments could avoid holding any EU referendum. A ‘no’ vote would have
been likely whatever the question on the ballot paper. If it had been on a treaty, any
attempt to have Britain vote again as had occurred in other member-states would have
probably failed and triggered a crisis.
Second, whatever the effect of structural fault-lines, political agency matters too. As a
matter of judgement, British governments had long avoided drawing any conclusion
about inexorable impediments to successful membership. They made sacrifices—over
fishing engaged in futile attempts to change the EU’s course—the hard ECU proposal –
and ignored the ways opt-outs were diluted—the Charter of Fundamental Rights—
because they wished first to gain and then preserve membership. British governments
kept Britain inside the EU by kicking problems down the road. As Jim Bulpitt (1992: 260)
noted, most of the behaviour of Conservative governments between 1961–91 exhibited
not defeatism but ‘hyper-optimism in presenting the benefits of Community membership
as regards both the British economy and Britain’s international power pretensions’. In
significant part, this strategy for dealing with membership arose because of the strong
preference of successive governments of both parties to see the issue in terms of Britain’s
geo-political position in the world (Gamble, 2003; Wilson, 2017). This desire was exhib-
ited by the Macmillan government’s initial pursuit of European Economic Community
(EEC) membership to appease the Kennedy administration (Kaiser, 1999). It was also
evident in Cameron’s reported remark to Daniel Hannan, in rejecting the argument that a
trading relationship within the EU was sufficient, that he thought Britain ‘get[s] a greatly
amplified voice through having a common foreign policy’ (Quoted in Shipman, 2016: loc
2309). Given the potential loss of British international influence (Dee and Smith, 2017),
it is quite possible that no British Prime Minister would ever have demurred from the
judgement that Britain geo-politically should be in a functioning EU and rejected subject-
ing that judgement to a referendum.
436
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(3)
Third, for all the historical problems of domestic consent to British EU membership,
Brexit at this point in time turned on a referendum in which only around 600,000 people
would have had to vote otherwise to produce a different outcome. The ‘Leave’ campaign
initially appeared disadvantaged in political resources. But it ran a superior operation in
mobilising votes and devised an effective message around ‘let’s take back control’, cho-
sen from an array of rather less potent options pressed upon it. Even at a point of subse-
quent crisis, if a British government had decided Britain should leave the EU, it would
still have had to win a referendum. Whatever problems of high politics EU membership
has generated for British governments, many voters have positions and emotions around
the EU that exist entirely independent of them. Referendums inherently offer no guaran-
tees to governments.
The analysis is divided into three sections. The first considers the long-term macro-
political economy of Britain’s EU membership and its political consequences. The second
explains in general terms how, as a consequence of this divergence of interests, the 2008
financial crash and the euro-zone crisis changed the economic and political context of
Britain’s EU membership. It then shows how these general problems manifested them-
selves in a succession of policy conflicts between the British government and other mem-
ber-states, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Commission in which
British influence was weak. The third assesses the contingencies in play from May 2010
to the renegotiations in February 2016, by posing two counter-factual questions. One
concerns Cameron’s decision in January 2013 to promise a referendum, and the other is
the terms of the renegotiations. The final section draws some conclusions.
Macro-economic outsider
Britain’s accession to the then EC immediately created general economic problems from
trade to agriculture to fishing. Consequently, British governments lacked shared interests
with other member-states. In a Community led by a Franco-German axis, British govern-
ments frequently lacked allies. Politically, Britain became, in Stephen George’s (1998)
words, an ‘awkward partner’, in Stephen Wall’s (2008), a ‘stranger in Europe’, and in Jim
Bulpitt’s (1992: 269) ‘the permanent minority member’.
Of course, these initial problems were not the sum total of Britain’s EU membership.
As time passed, each became less...
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