Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom
| Author | Ben Rosamond,Charlotte Galpin,Rebecca Adler-Nissen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117711092 |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles - Part One |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117711092
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(3) 573 –591
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148117711092
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Performing Brexit: How a
post-Brexit world is imagined
outside the United Kingdom
Rebecca Adler-Nissen1, Charlotte Galpin2,3
and Ben Rosamond1
Abstract
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The
referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios.
While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom,
Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities
of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It works both as a promise of a
different future and performatively to establish a particular past. Brexit works as a frame with
potential to shape perceptions in three domains. The first is identity. How does ‘Brexit’ shape
national and European identities in distinct national environments? The second is how Brexit
shapes understandings of geopolitical reality and influences conceptions of what is diplomatically
possible. Third is the global economy. How does ‘Brexit’ work within intersubjective frames about
the nature of global economic order?
Keywords
Brexit, diplomacy, identity, performativity, political economy
Introduction
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the con-
cept. The referendum campaign and its aftermath show that the idea of ‘Brexit’ can be
applied to a variety of imagined post-Brexit scenarios. In the United Kingdom, the lack
of a formulated plan by the UK government has resulted in ongoing debates and uncer-
tainty over possibilities ranging from ‘hard’ Brexit to ‘soft’ Brexit (Wallace, 2016: 814).
While it is important to analyse how rival imaginings give rise to particular forms of
political contestation in the United Kingdom, it is also the case that Brexit is constructed
1Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
2Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
3Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Corresponding author:
Ben Rosamond, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353
Copenhagen K, Denmark.
Email: br@ifs.ku.dk
711092BPI0010.1177/1369148117711092The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsAdler-Nissen et al.
research-article2017
Special Issue Article
574 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(3)
and imagined from the outside. This article explores how Brexit has been interpreted
outside of the United Kingdom, operating as a signifier with symbolic value.
Understanding how Brexit is imagined outside the United Kingdom is important for
three reasons. First, it helps to construct identities that lend support for particular political
projects. At times of crisis, political actors seek to make sense of events by evoking exist-
ing identities that resonate in their respective national contexts. Crises can therefore
reflect identity discourses (Galpin, 2017). External perceptions of Brexit can contribute
to shaping British identities. Within the European Union (EU), pan-European and national
debates not only construct particular national stereotypes but also shape domestic ideas
about a European hierarchy of states (Adler-Nissen, 2017). Brexit has also been consid-
ered the result of a new international cleavage between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘nationals’
(Delanty, 2017: 112) that shapes attitudes to European integration (Hooghe and Marks,
2009).
Second, outside constructions of Brexit are linked to the negotiating positions of the
United Kingdom’s external partners. The UK government has focused on a ‘global
Britain’ that trades freely with the world (May, 2017). Brexit thus presents a challenge to
the United Kingdom’s diplomatic relations, requiring new multilateral and bilateral
agreements with international partners (Glencross, 2016: 48). A key question for the UK
government will therefore be how its negotiating partners respond to its demands
(Wallace, 2016: 814) and the extent to which outside perceptions match with its objec-
tives or destabilise British self-understandings. To lead in foreign policy, a country ‘also
has to be constructed as a leader by the actors in its negotiation environment’ (Elgström,
2007: 952). How the United Kingdom’s international partners perceive their relationship
thus becomes key as Brexit negotiations proceed.
Third, Brexit can be considered not just a UK phenomenon, but part of wider European
and global populist backlash against globalisation (Calhoun, 2017; O’Rourke, 2016) and
the decline of democratic capitalism (Delanty, 2017; Rosamond, 2017; Streeck, 2014).
The considerable political and academic attention paid to the possibility of ‘contagion’ to
other member states with significant Eurosceptic movements has led to calls for a theory
of European disintegration (Rosamond, 2016). Brexit can thus be placed in the context of
the wider nature of the global political economy. On this basis, this article investigates
what Brexit signifies outside of the United Kingdom in these three overlapping domains:
identity, diplomacy and global political economy.
The article is divided into four sections. The first develops a theoretical framework of
performativity to analyse how the discourse of Brexit creates that which it purports to
describe, promising actions and constructing identities. This approach points us to the
way in which Brexit can be taken to mean a variety of things across domains, countries
and time. The second section examines the role Brexit plays in how German actors con-
struct national and European identities and how it relates to questions of sovereignty. The
third section analyses how Brexit shapes understandings of geopolitical reality and feeds
into conceptions of what is diplomatically possible at the global level. The fourth section
focuses on how far ‘Brexit’ works within competing intersubjective frames about the
nature of the global economic order.
A performative theory of Brexit
Theoretically, we are interested in understanding Brexit in performative terms.
Accordingly, speaking about Europe is not a matter of simply describing the EU but, as
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