Managing differentiated disintegration: Insights from comparative federalism on post-Brexit EU–UK relations
| Author | Andrew Glencross |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120968516 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120968516
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(4) 593 –608
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120968516
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Managing differentiated
disintegration: Insights from
comparative federalism on post-
Brexit EU–UK relations
Andrew Glencross
Abstract
This article applies insights from comparative federalism to analyse different models for managing
future EU–UK relations. The argument is that the stability of the EU–UK relationship before as
well as after Brexit is best understood by examining the presence of federal safeguards. Drawing
on Kelemen, four types of safeguards are identified as the means for balancing centrifugal and
centripetal forces. During the United Kingdom’s European Union membership, the strong glue
provided by structural and judicial safeguards was undone by the weakness of partisan and socio-
cultural ones. However, each post-Brexit scenario is characterised by weaker structural and
judicial safeguards. The most stable outcome is an indeterminate Brexit that limits the incentive to
politicise sovereignty and identity concerns by ending free movement of people and reducing the
saliency of European Union rules. Such stability is nevertheless relative in that, from a comparative
perspective, federal-type safeguards were stronger when the United Kingdom was still in the
European Union.
Keywords
Brexit, comparative federalism, differentiation, disintegration, European Union, federal safeguards
Introduction
The UK government’s decision to accept the mandate of the 2016 Brexit referendum and
withdraw from the European Union (EU) left unanswered the question of how exactly to
disassociate from the single market. Historically speaking, British Euroscepticism
excelled at finding flaws in the EU system, but as a reactive and negative creed it never
articulated a coherent template for life outside supranational integration (Usherwood,
2018). Thus the vexing political process of finding an alternative relationship with the EU
and then of accepting its constraints poses a further dilemma. That is, how politically
sustainable are any of the spectrum of post-Brexit options, especially knowing that the
strictures of EU membership already proved too much for UK voters? Hence this article
Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Corresponding author:
Andrew Glencross, Department of Politics and International Relations, Aston University, Aston Triangle,
Birmingham B4 7ET, UK.
Email: a.glencross@aston.ac.uk
968516BPI0010.1177/1369148120968516The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsGlencross
research-article2020
Original Article
594 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(4)
sets out to explore the potential stability of different arrangements for organising EU–UK
relations, which in conceptual terms is taken to be a debate concerning how far to estab-
lish differentiation outside the scope of formal EU membership (Leruth et al., 2019;
Schimmelfennig et al., 2015; Schimmelfennig and Winzen, 2020).
Historically, the British state has been at the heart of developments in European poli-
tics for centuries (Sweeney, 2019). But this engagement was contingent and often fickle,
as was the case during the United Kingdom (UK)’s membership of the European
Economic Community (EEC) and then the EU (George, 1998; Wall, 2008). In this con-
text, the political stability of different arrangements for managing UK–EU relations after
Brexit cannot be taken for granted.1 To this end, the analysis developed here expands on
the existing EU differentiation literature, which has been accused of having an imbalance
between overconceptualisation and undertheorisation (Holzinger and Schimmelfennig,
2012). Applied to the EU as a whole, differentiation as a field of study acknowledges a
gamut of possibilities from the rolling back of integration to the possibility of greater
centralisation arising out of crisis (Börzel, 2018; Leruth et al., 2019). One notable dimen-
sion that is missing in these treatments, however, is a theoretical framework for assessing
the stability of these respective institutional arrangements based on the political dynamics
they might encourage or stifle. In the absence of such work, it is hard to say if, and why,
disintegration from a starting point of high interdependence, as is the case for the United
Kingdom, is more stable than the constraints of EU membership.
To address this gap as it pertains to post-Brexit outcomes, the article draws on scholar-
ship that examines the difficulties of finding political accommodation between different
levels of government that share common rules and institutional structures, that is, com-
parative federalism. After all, a soft Brexit consisting of replicating membership of the
single market akin to the European Economic Area (EEA) involves significant constraints
on state sovereignty. This situation is akin to federalism, which entails a ‘change in the
political status of every member of the federation . . . it establishes a new status for every
member’ (Schmitt, 1992: 29). Fewer constraints apply in the case of shadowing certain
EU rules through a free-trade agreement (FTA) that binds the exercise of authority over
various policy areas in the form of regulatory alignment; fewer still would exist in the
event no FTA is concluded. Nevertheless, the contention of this article is that insights
from comparative federalism can be applied to understanding political dynamics pertain-
ing to the spectrum of post-Brexit EU–UK relations. This is because the options available
to the United Kingdom span a range from a ‘holding-together’ political arrangement to
maintain close alignment to what can be equated to secession (Lustick et al., 2004).
Whereas the former can be compared with institutionalised legal and political processes
found in federations that seek to devolve power back to constituent units (Stepan, 1999),
the latter constitutes the total breakdown of attempts to balance autonomy and common
obligations under a shared legal–political architecture of enforcement.
Hence the argument developed here is that the stability of the UK–EU relationship
before as well as after Brexit can best be understood by applying insights from the study
of how certain safeguards play a role in the endurance (or not) of federal-type structures.
The work of Daniel Kelemen (2007) scrutinising the durability of the EU as a federal-like
system is of particular relevance for this purpose, even if applying the federal analogy to
European integration is contested (Majone, 2006). Kelemen’s identification of four types
of federal safeguard for sustaining a stable political order that both constrains unit auton-
omy and upholds common obligations can be productively applied to understanding key
political dynamics that made UK membership of the EU unstable. As explained in section
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