Instrumentalising sovereignty claims in British pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221089136 |
| Author | Julia Rone |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221089136
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(3) 444 –461
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221089136
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Instrumentalising sovereignty
claims in British pro- and
anti-Brexit mobilisations
Julia Rone
Abstract
Despite the growing literature on Brexit, specifically, and conflicts of sovereignty, more generally,
there has been insufficient research on how the concept of sovereignty has been used in citizen
campaigns and street protests across the United Kingdom – a form of ‘counter-democracy’
through which people attempted to oversee the post-referendum political process. Combining
qualitative content analysis of campaign websites with a discourse-network analysis of media
articles on Brexit protests, this article shows that claims to sovereignty were mobilised not only
in conflicts between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but also in conflicts between
different institutions within Britain itself. Both ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ appealed to popular
and parliamentary sovereignty at different points in time, pragmatically adapting their framing
according to changing circumstances but also as a result of a dynamic series of interactions with
each other, including denying, keying and embracing their opponents’ frames. Crucially, conflicts
around different institutionalisations of popular sovereignty did not demand system change, a
rhetoric familiar from other protests of the 2010s such as Occupy Wall Street with its emphasis
on ‘We are the 99%’. To the contrary, pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations remained firmly focused
on Brexit policy itself. They problematised the split between ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’ within
the United Kingdom, between 48% and 52%, and thus, on a deeper level, the tension between
the political principle of popular sovereignty and the sociological reality of a split country. Finally,
the more Leavers opposed Remainers, the more movements and parties on each of these two
sides aligned. Politicians featured prominently in campaigns and as speakers at protest events,
contributing to close cooperation between protesters and parties, and precluding anti-systemic
discourses around popular sovereignty that would target parties and institutions altogether.
Keywords
Brexit, campaign, framing, movement–party relations, protest, sovereignty
Sovereignty claims in pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations
Debates around Brexit have played out on the benches of the House of Commons, in the
Supreme Court, in election campaigns and on prime time TV. Still, some of the most
CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Corresponding author:
Julia Rone, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT,
UK.
Email: jr803@cam.ac.uk
1089136BPI0010.1177/13691481221089136The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsRone
research-article2022
Original Article
Rone 445
defining images of the period featured also citizens mobilising across the country – pro-
testing in front of Westminster wrapped in European Union (EU) flags or marching under
the rain to support Brexit. For many, both supporters and opponents of Brexit, protests,
marches and campaigning have been a key way to socialise, voice their opinions and
demonstrate their political engagement in the increasingly polarised political environ-
ment after the referendum. Some Brexit-related mobilisations attracted hundreds of thou-
sands of people, overshadowing most other UK mobilisations from the 2010s, such as for
example earlier protests against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP) (Rone, 2020). Yet, with a few important exceptions (Brändle et al., 2018, 2022;
Davidson, 2017), pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisations have so far attracted little academic
attention in the field of social movement studies.
This article aims to address this gap by exploring both pro- and anti-Brexit mobilisa-
tions and, more specifically, their use of the concept of ‘sovereignty’ in light of Brexit’s
recent characterisation as the ‘sovereignty referendum’ (Hobolt et al., 2020). There is
ample existing research on sovereignty claims in UK Parliament and media (Baldini
et al., 2020; Rone, 2021; Todd, 2016) but still no research on how non-institutional mobi-
lisations on Brexit understood and used the concept of sovereignty.
This is particularly surprising considering that protest, petitions and other non-institu-
tional forms of organising democratic distrust are themselves a key way to express popular
sovereignty beyond legal and political institutions (Rosanvallon, 2008). In the situation of
political impasse and a crisis of the party system following the 23 June referendum (Bickerton
and Brack, 2022), both mass street protests and legal challenges against executive overreach
mounted by campaigners such as Gina Miller could be interpreted as expressions of ‘counter-
democracy’ defined by Pierre Rosanvallon (2008: 8) as ‘a form of democracy that reinforces
the usual electoral democracy as a kind of buttress, a democracy of indirect powers dissemi-
nated throughout society’. According to Rosanvallon (2008), popular sovereignty has been
expressed, on the one hand, in the democratic right to vote periodically and the correspond-
ing liberal democratic representative institutions, and on the other hand, in various non-insti-
tutionalised democratic functions to hold institutions into account, including oversight,
prevention and judgement. Counter-democracy does not ‘oppose’ democratic institutions but
complements them and can be an important corrective pushing for institutional reform.
Indeed, popular mobilisations in the 2010s, such as Indignados in Spain or anti-auster-
ity protests such as Occupy in the United States and the United Kingdom, not only criti-
cised concrete austerity policies, for example, but also put forward broader demands for
institutional overhaul, ‘real democracy now’, and more power to the people (Bailey,
2014, 2020; De Nadal, 2021; Della Porta, 2013; Gerbaudo and Screti, 2017; Rone, 2020).
At first sight, it might seem that similar developments took place in Britain in the after-
math of the Brexit referendum. To be sure, there were cases of pro-Brexit actors invoking
‘popular sovereignty’ in right-wing media to oppose ‘unelected out-of-touch’ Lords or
judges criticised as ‘enemies of the people’ (Rone, 2021). Nigel Farage even toyed with
the idea of ‘making referendums binding’ (Freeden, 2017: 8). In this context, it is not a
surprise that many scholars analysed pro-Leave mobilisations through the prism of ‘pop-
ulism’ (Clarke and Newman, 2017; Freeden, 2017). Sovereignty was invoked by Leavers
to argue that part of the people was ‘the people’, utilising ‘the culturally prevailing legal
and political fictions of sovereignty as ‘one and indivisible’’ (Freeden, 2017: 8). Still,
such analyses overlook two key trends. First, as debates over Brexit progressed in the
aftermath of 2016, both pro-Leave and pro-Remain mobilisations started invoking the
concept of sovereignty and ‘the will of the people’. Leavers insisted that the ‘People are
sovereign’ with the aim to defend the result of the referendum, while Remainers would
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