https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117711092
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
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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 concept.
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 uncertainty
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
2	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
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 existing
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 considered
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 objectives
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 construct
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
Adler-Nissen et al.	 3
Diez (1999: 599) argues, ‘tak[ing] part in the construction of the polity itself’. Speaking
about Brexit does not simply describe a given reality; it also constructs it. The performance
aspect of Brexit takes two overall forms: it promises a particular future and it
constructs a past. Here, we draw on insights from J. L. Austin and Judith Butler. To
understand how Brexit works as a promise, Austin’s speech act theory helps us understand
the performative speech act, most prominently, by Theresa May: ‘Brexit means
Brexit and we’re going to make a success out of it’. In the Butlerian understanding, the
discourse of Brexit does not express some ‘true’ nature of British identity, geopolitics or
economy. Rather, it creates that which it seems to represent: namely, a post-Brexit
Britain and post-Brexit world—and in doing so, it also constructs a particular past.
Overall, understanding Brexit as performative assumes that the very language of Brexit
does something politically.
Brexit as a performative speech act
Following speech act theory, performative utterances are sentences that not only describe
a given reality but also change the social reality they are describing. J. L. Austin (1962: 5)
argued against a claim that utterances always ‘describe’ or ‘report’ something, which he
calls ‘constatives’. In contrast, he wrote, there are performatives, utterances that are not
true or false, and that are a part of the doing or promising of a certain kind of action.
Austin’s famous example is from the marriage ceremony: ‘I do’ (take this man to be my
lawful wedded husband). In our case, Theresa May made a promise of success: ‘Brexit
means Brexit and we’re going to make a success out of it’.
Some speech acts are written into international treaties, whereas others create a moral
obligation (Fierke and Wiener, 1999) or an existential threat requiring immediate action
(Buzan et al., 1997: 27). The meaning of a speech act is largely determined by its specific
context, as the same sentence can have different meanings with different audiences
(Fierke and Wiener, 1999: 727). Integral to a speech act is the intention of the speaker to
take action through language (Diez, 1999: 601). In the case of Brexit, Theresa May’s
speech act may be intended to gather political support for the UK government, reassure
the population or inform international partners about national intentions. A speech act
also requires an audience, where context is key: ‘we’re going to make a success of it’
would mean something very different in the German or French context, where interests
may lie in protecting the European economy or limiting the success of domestic
Eurosceptic parties. The key analytical question emerging from this understanding of
Brexit as a speech act is What kind of promise for the future does Brexit hold outside the
United Kingdom, across the three domains at which we are looking?
Brexit as performative
In contrast to Austin, Judith Butler (1993: xii) argues that all speech acts are performative,
serving to define identity. Performativity is ‘that reiterative power of discourse to
produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’. The concept places emphasis
on the manners by which identity is brought to life through discourse. Just as with
Austin, the performative element of her theory suggests a social audience. For Butler,
the ‘script’ of gender performance—what is seen as appropriate for men and women—is
transmitted from generation to generation in the form of socially established meanings
that are reproduced and internalised.
4	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
In performing Brexit, then, actors perform identities, while ‘constrained by cultural
and historical practices’ (Zaiotti, 2011: 543). Applied to international relations, Butler’s
approach views the identity of the state as constituted through discursive practices over
time (Campbell, 1998: 10). As with gender, such performances of state identity inevitably
involve the construction of difference, of an ‘Other’. Central to this idea is the construction
of boundaries which ‘serve to demarcate an “inside” from an “outside,” a “self” from
an “other,” a “domestic” from a “foreign”’ (Campbell, 1998: 9). Therefore, performativity
in politics is also linked to constituting in- and out-groups.
Nevertheless, while for Butler (1988: 526) social orders as reproduced through
repeated performances constitute subjects, they do not determine them. There is always
the possibility of agency: more precisely, ways of acting out within the system in ways
that are subversive or transformative of it (such as drag, cross-dressing and other queer
forms of identity that produce new possible ways of being in society). The way out of the
performative trap is therefore resignification—practices that have the effect of changing
the meaning of words. So here the analytical question is How is Brexit being ‘scripted’,
embedded in pre-existing discourses about what the United Kingdom and EU’s past has
been (and how Brexit is being subverted)?
Below we examine both how Brexit functions as a promise of a future and how it is
being ‘scripted’, embedded in pre-existing discourses, thereby helping to produce certain
identities and particular pasts.
Brexit and national and European identities
This section provides some illustrative examples of the performative role of Brexit in
constructing European and national identities primarily from the German context. As
Brexit negotiations proceed, political leaders in the EU need to be responsive to public
opinion in their own national contexts, particularly those countries such as Germany and
France with national elections taking place in 2017. As a key actor in Brexit negotiations,
German public opinion about Brexit is particularly relevant. Here, we focus on two main
issues: representations of the other (the United Kingdom) and representations of the self
(the nation-state and Europe).
Post-Brexit Britain seen from the outside
Brexit serves to (re-)construct external images of the United Kingdom that are embedded
in pre-existing, and often competing, discourses. Interestingly, Brexit is either constructed
as a break with or continuation of the past, thereby either naturalising the image of an
open, pragmatic and trustworthy partner in Europe or naturalising a British identity as the
‘awkward partner’ (George, 1994) and a ‘stranger in Europe’ (Wall, 2008). This binary
reflects an ongoing conflict between conceptions of the United Kingdom as a European
country, which Churchill envisaged, and British exceptionalism rooted in the history of
the British Empire (Delanty, 2017).
In German media coverage, one general position suggests that Brexit signifies a departure
from the traditions of a nation that is viewed as an integral part of Europe. This portrait
represents for Britain a loss of the cosmopolitan, Cool Britannia image popularised
in the 1990s (Calhoun, 2017: 63). Brexit highlights a perceived mismatch between how
the British have previously been understood and what Brexit represents for them now. For
example, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) describes the Brexit vision as a ‘rejection
Adler-Nissen et al.	 5
of the island’s self-confident, liberal cosmopolitanism’ (Schipper, 2016: 34). Along the
same lines, Süddeutsche Zeitung (2016: 41) notes that the ‘supposedly deeply-rooted
British virtues such as soberness and pragmatism made way for hysteria and xenophobic
narrow-mindedness’. Here, Brexit thus defines not just what the United Kingdom is
understood to have represented in the past, nor what post-Brexit Britain promises to be,
but also reiterates what values are important in this German context: cosmopolitanism,
tolerance and pragmatism.
Asecond major position, however, understands Brexit as a continuation of the ‘national
myth of British exceptionalism’(Gamble, 2012: 473). Some articles give rise to constructions
of the United Kingdom as a country that has always been different. Sometimes they
highlight the United Kingdom’s strong tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. FAZ, for
example, discusses a British attitude ‘that they should not be led by an elite or be told by
foreigners what to do’ (Thomas, 2016: 9). Alongside this caricature, many articles
describe the British mentality as resting on the historical experience of empire, where
Europe is constructed as Britain’s ‘Other’ (Gifford, 2006). For example, one describes a
nostalgic middle England that ‘wishes the old England back, an England that possessed a
global Empire’ (Lapido, 2016a: 5). Also in response to May’s speech, Die Welt Kompakt
published a front-page story: ‘Little Britain: Prime Minister Theresa May is leading
Britain into isolation’ (Die Welt Kompakt, 2017). In a Butlerian sense, Brexit thus signifies
a continuation of the past; it is a uniquely British phenomenon, a function of its
particular historical experience.
These images also reveal a high level of cultural knowledge about the United Kingdom,
particularly its imperial history but also popular culture that is unlikely to be matched by
British knowledge of Germany. British (Eurosceptic) media representations of Germany
primarily invoke the Nazi past (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999), also reflected in the
referendum debate when, for example, Boris Johnson claimed that the EU is comparable
to Nazi Germany with ‘different methods’(Ross, 2016). Thus, we can see a starkly asymmetric
relationship between the United Kingdom and other EU member states. It also
presents British exceptionalism and the British empire—colonialism—as the antithesis of
European integration. As such, Brexit is scripted into a particular ‘European’ political
culture—consensus-oriented, cosmopolitan and based on the sharing of sovereignty. In
some cases, Brexit represents a shift in perception of what Britishness means abroad,
defining Brexit and post-Brexit Britain as based on irrationality and intolerance. In other
cases, it serves fundamentally to differentiate Britishness from Europe.
Britain as the Other: Constructions of Europe and the nation-state
Second, Brexit provokes public constructions of Europe and the nation-state, embedded
in discourses on what it means to be European (Risse, 2010). In the case of Germany,
Brexit is embedded in particular discourses about European integration. On the one hand,
Brexit highlights Germany’s multiple European/national identities and serves in the
debate as a justification for the continued sharing of sovereignty, a reminder of Europe’s
role in constraining German power (Katzenstein, 1997). Germany’s European identity is
thus reproduced against its Nazi past as its historical Other (see, for example, AdlerNissen,
in press; Galpin, 2017). In a commentary in the FAZ, for example, then German
foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (2016) mentions the interwar period, warning
that ‘if a unified Europe […] breaks apart and falls away, then the odds of a better, more
peaceful and just world would be much worse’. He argues that Germany seeks not to be
6	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
the dominant power, but to work closely with its neighbours and in so doing ‘show our
particular historical experiences’ (Steinmeier, 2016).
However, Brexit is also embedded in competing ideas about European identities and
often serves to oppose further integration. In the German discourse, Brexit reproduces new
divisions in Europe through constructions of Northern Europe in contrast to the ‘South’,
based upon Germany’s conception of a Europe true to Germany’s ‘ordoliberal’ economic
model (Galpin, 2017)—a form of neoliberalism based on free markets enforced by rules
of the state (see also Nedergaard and Snaith, 2015). FAZ, for example, writes that Brexit
will shift voting weights ‘in favour of countries that tend to support redistribution and
protectionism—that is, towards the south’ (Kafsack, 2016). Britain is constructed as part
of a ‘Northern Europe’ that stands for ‘economic discipline’ and opposes Europe-wide
redistributive policies. This construction also brings to the fore a clear paradox of Brexit,
in which the British debate largely ignored Britain’s role in shaping the EU’s liberal economic
agenda, while that role clearly is acknowledged outside the United Kingdom.
This acknowledgement gives rise to an emphasis on the importance of the German–
British relationship. For example, one article in Die Welt notes that ‘the scepticism of the
Brits, their non-conformism and their liberalism were always the motor of Europe …
Today it needs a German-British axis’(Seibel, 2013: 1). Such calls for a close relationship
contrast strongly with representations in the British debate that place Germany in the
weaker position dependent on British trade (Dominiczak, 2016). Within the EU, many
other states emphasise a close partnership with the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands,
for instance, Anne Mulder from the ruling People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy
(VVD) noted that it ‘will have major consequences for the European economy and the
geopolitical balance. The Netherlands is losing an important ally in Brussels negotiations’
(Dutch News.nl, 2016).
Furthermore, Brexit is also used by those opposing deeper political union or who criticise
the EU’s democratic deficit themes embedded in communitarian or nationalist discourses.
FAZ cites an Alternative for Germany (AfD) regional party leader, Björn Höcke,
who states that the Brits ‘have left the path of collective insanity and decided in favour of
democracy and national sovereignty’. Federal spokesperson Alexander Gauland also
blames Angela Merkel for Brexit, arguing that she ‘has driven Britain out of the European
Union with her open borders’ (FAZ, 2016), thus embedding Brexit into national debates
about immigration and refugees.
Brexit can therefore be considered performative in the Butlerian sense: it reproduces
pre-existing notions of British, European and national identities, and also highlights divisions
between cosmopolitan and communitarian identities. However, it is also a powerful
speech act outside the United Kingdom, promising a new, more stable future or the beginning
of a new world order.
Brexit, diplomacy and geopolitics
When it comes to geopolitical imaginaries and conceptions of what is diplomatically possible,
Brexit has led to a range of different interpretations across the world. Interestingly,
many of these readings appear to be in contradiction. In the following, we will focus on
three illustrative examples of the diplomatic promise of Brexit: multilateralism (liberal
world order, security communities), post-imperialism (Commonwealth, Anglosphere) and
bilateralism (special relationships, partnerships and ‘gateways’). The examples illustrate
that what Brexit means depends not only on who you are but also from where you see it.
Adler-Nissen et al.	 7
Brexit as a threat to multilateralism and the promise of European unity
First, Brexit has given rise to a range of different threats and promises about multilateralism
and the international liberal order. Such ideas also relate to identity discourses, by
emphasising shared values and interests, community boundaries and a common threat
from an Other. One geopolitical discourse portrays Brexit as an existential threat to the
Western-dominated liberal world order. Beginning with the transatlantic security community,
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
warned against Brexit, saying that ‘a more fragmented Europe would threaten Europe’s
shared security’ (CBC News, 2016). Stoltenberg argued that Brexit signalled more than
the United Kingdom leaving the EU; it created uncertainty about the global order and
international cooperation. Interestingly, Japan became the most vocal advocate of multilateralism.
In a 15-page letter, Japan underlined that it was committed to ‘further cooperate
with Europe with a view to maintaining the rules-based global order’ (Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Japan, 2016: 2).
Following the referendum result, US President Obama sought to build a narrative
about a resilient international order despite Brexit, promising the unifying ability of ‘our
shared values, including our commitment to democracy and pluralism and opportunity
for all people in a globalized world’ (Parkinson, 2016). China also supported the United
Kingdom remaining in the EU, but this view was articulated as a way of ensuring a strong
EU that could counter the United States—a vision of multipolarity. Ai Jun (2016), writing
for the state-owned newspaper Global Times, explained:
A multipolar world requires more powers, which are independent of the US, to participate in
international governance. The EU is supposed to be one of them. But the leverage of a divided
Europe is bound to be limited. That’s why China wishes to see a united and strong EU.
China’s pro-Remain rhetoric is thus embedded in a discourse about multipolarity, whereas
the United States’pro-Remain discourse is scripted into a discourse about a liberal, essentially
US-led, world order.
Within the EU, most member states emphasised the resilience of European integration.
From this perspective, Brexit is a performative speech act as per Austin: Brexit is a crisis,
the EU-27 exists, and it will remain unified. The day after the referendum, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel maintained that ‘only together can we continue to assert our
values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law and our interests’ (Der Spiegel, 2016).
This narrative brings the EU-27 discursively into being prior to the United Kingdom’s
actual departure—redrawing the boundaries of the EU and reflecting the United
Kingdom’s insider/outsider status (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Shackleton, 2016). Meeting at a
summit in Bratislava without the United Kingdom, the heads of state and government of
EU-27 promised a stable and prosperous future. Echoing May’s promise to make a success
of Brexit, the summit’s joint declaration stated that:
In the aftermath of the wars and deep divisions on our continent, the EU secured peace,
democracy and enabled our countries to prosper […] We are determined to make a success of
the EU with 27 Member States, building on this joint history. (European Council, 2016: 1)
As part of this narrative, Brexit is constructed as a crisis that will unite the EU-27 against
a common threat. Against this promise, Die Welt argues that Brexit is considered likely to
strengthen the ‘centrifugal forces’ in the EU (Schiltz and Tauber, 2016: 2), as the risk of a
8	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
Eurosceptic domino takes hold. For example, David Cameron, in calling for a referendum
to appease his party, is considered in Die Welt to have ‘jeopardised the future of a whole
continent’ (Lapido, 2016b: 4) The performativity of Brexit, therefore, is not simply about
the social construction of subjects. Rather, it is a discourse that inscribes boundaries
between subjects and reifies them in that very process. Taken together, this multilateral
discourse promises that the world is—or rather should be—the same after the shock of
Brexit: governed by binding international rules, democracy and pluralism.
Brexit and the promise of a New World Order
The election of US President Donald Trump challenged the discourse of a continued liberal
world order. Trump argued that Brexit marked the beginning—or indeed the promise—of
a new world order based on national independence and identities. Here, a Europe
of sovereign nations is discursively constructed against a common threat—Brussels.
Trump interpreted Brexit as a parallel to his own election: ‘People want to take their
country back. They want to have independence in a sense. […]And it is happening in the
United States’ (quoted in MacAskill, 2016). In France, Front National’s Marine Le Pen
shared this interpretation. For Le Pen, Brexit was ‘the beginning of the end of the
European Union. And I hope the birth of the Europe of nations, a Europe of cooperation
that we’ve been propounding for years’ (Walt, 2016).
In the Netherlands, before his sound defeat in the Dutch parliamentary elections in
March 2017, Geert Wilders (2016), leader of the Freedom Party (PVV), argued that Brexit
was only the beginning of a ‘Europe’s Patriot Spring’. Also for Germany’s AfD, Brexit
promised a new European future. The day after the referendum, party leader Frauke Petry
declared that ‘the time is ripe for a new Europe, for a Europe of the fatherlands’(Alternative
für Deutschland, 2016). Thus, among Brexit’s international supporters, Brexit constitutes
the promise of a different future, and a different world order.
Subversive post-imperial imaginaries
Second, Brexit gives rise to a range of post-imperial associations, not just within the
United Kingdom but also in former British colonies. One important idea during the referendum
campaign was that Brexit would reignite ‘the Commonwealth’ (Chabe, 2016).
Brexit is thus embedded in identity discourses helping to (re)constitute the United
Kingdom as an empire, but also reminds former colonies of the nature of their relations to
London. However, rather than consolidating the promise of a successful Brexit, based on
its imperial past, many post-imperial associations outside the United Kingdom subvert
this very discourse.
Prior to the referendum, the message from the 53 members of Commonwealth was
that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the EU. As Patricia Scotland,
Commonwealth Secretary-General, explained, ‘the Commonwealth does not set itself up
in competition with Europe—we are partners’ (James, 2016). Speaking directly to the
Commonwealth agenda, Director of the African Growth Initiative at Brookings Institute
Amadou Sy and research assistant Mariama Sow claimed that Brexit would mean
‘reduced British outwardness when it comes to global development issues, as well as
decreased bilateral development assistance and trade’ (Sy and Sow, 2016). Several
Commonwealth countries, including Australia, New Zealand and India, expressed interest
(in principle) in free trade deals, but demanded easier migration from these countries
Adler-Nissen et al.	 9
into the United Kingdom than currently permitted (Onslow, 2016). When Theresa May
visited India to discuss a post-Brexit trade deal, Indian diplomats discussed Brexit as an
opportunity to improve the ‘human dimension of the relationship with the UK’, and
specifically the visa issue. This discourse from key Commonwealth countries thus subverts
a core argument in the Leave campaign: namely, that Brexit would help to control
migration into the United Kingdom.
A more curious connection between Brexit and British (post-)imperialism can be
found in the Iranian response to Brexit. The deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces,
Massoud Jazayeri, states, ‘England should pay the price of years of imperialism and committing
crimes against humanity’, explaining that the price would be Scotland and other
parts of the United Kingdom demanding independence (Borger and Wintour, 2016). This
Iranian discourse is not only subversive of the dominant Brexit discourse. It also involves
a resignification of the imperial past, where the British empire is constituted not in the
discourse of a visionary and ‘truly global’ Britain, but is portrayed in terms of domestic
tensions and identity conflicts within its imperial core. From a queer perspective, by
bringing such identity mismatches into light, external interpretations of Brexit may have
subversive effects on British identities.
Brexit and the many special relationships
Third, Brexit has revealed that a very large number of states appear to have some sort of
‘special relationship’ with the United Kingdom. Here, Brexit is clearly performative in
the Austinian tradition, promising the continuation of bilateral relationships. Beginning
with the ‘special relationship’ par excellence, that of the United States, Obama promised
that ‘the United Kingdom’s membership in NATO remains a vital cornerstone of US foreign,
security, and economic policy’, and Vice-President Joe Biden highlighted the longstanding
US-UK relationship, promising that ‘that very special bond will endure’ (quoted
in Berensen, 2016).
Another related metaphor for bilateral diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom
is that of ‘gateway’, with a range of countries describing the United Kingdom as their
closest allies in the EU. Japanese Prime Minister Abe stated that ‘Japan attaches importance
to our relationship with the UK as a gateway to the European Union’ (quoted in
Stewart, 2016). Similarly, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi explained that he hoped
that the United Kingdom would remain in the EU as it was India’s ‘gateway to Europe’
(McLain, 2016). Again, Turkey’s ambassador to the EU, Selim Yenel, emphasised that
Brexit might have consequences for the EU’s ability to deliver promises to Turkey, as the
United Kingdom is ‘one of [Ankara’s] biggest backers in the EU’(quoted in Peker, 2016).
Perhaps most interestingly, before the referendum, in October 2015, China officially
stated that the United Kingdom could help promote the development of strong China–
EU relations. As China’s Xi Jinping explained to the UK Prime Minister, China ‘hopes
Britain, as an important member of the EU, can play an even more positive and constructive
role in promoting the deepening development of China-EU ties’ (quoted in
Bounds, 2015). China’s position was not linked to protecting values or ensuring support
for multilateral cooperation. Instead, what Obama and Xi have in common was that
they both saw the United Kingdom as their economic and political ‘gateway’ into the
EU. In contrast, several African leaders reacted more pragmatically, many predicting
that Brexit would have limited impact on their bilateral relations. However, the President
of Nigeria hinted at his country’s dissatisfaction with the result, saying that he hoped
10	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
the West African country could enjoy ‘greater cooperation and consolidation of shared
interests’ with the United Kingdom ‘despite the outcome of the referendum’ (quoted in
Gaffey, 2016).
In sum, in terms of bilateralism, the United Kingdom is at the same time the closest
trading partner for Japan, ensures good China–EU relations, defends Turkish interests in
the EU, discloses security information to the United States, and all the Commonwealth
countries have special partnerships with United Kingdom. These stories about ‘special
relationships’—although substantively often very far from the arguments of Leave campaign—might
help explain why many British voters felt safe in believing the promise that
the United Kingdom would be a ‘truly global Britain’ outside the EU.
Brexit and the global economy
The eventual withdrawal from the EU of one of the world’s largest economies will have
global repercussions. We focus here on the ways in which Brexit has shaped competing
subjective visions of the global economy. Brexit has been embedded in discourses about
the global economic order that, similarly to discourses on identity and the geopolitical
world order, reflect an international versus nativist cleavage. The insertion of Brexit into
these discourses has revealed some intriguing paradoxes within (particularly) conservative
discourses on the global economy.
Within economic thought there is a traditional division between liberalism and economic
nationalism. Economic liberals tend to advocate the advance of market society and
the minimisation of the interventionist reach of government. Economic nationalists premise
economic justice on whatever is best for the nation at any given time. Economic liberalism
has been associated with the recent period of globalisation in the world economy,
while the rise of economic nationalism has often been associated with retreats from
globalisation.
A good deal of evidence suggests that the vote for Brexit—as well as the election
of Donald Trump to the US presidency—was associated with a backlash against globalisation
(see also Blyth, 2016; Wilson, 2017). Withdrawal from the EU under the
mantra of ‘taking back control’ implies a victory for a form of economic nationalism.
Yet, the pro-Brexit coalition involved not only nativists mobilising the ‘losers of globalisation’
around an anti-immigration message but also hyper-liberals who understood
the EU to be a regulatory impediment to the delivery of a truly free market order
(Finlayson, 2016). One of the most interesting features of Brexit is thus this coalition
between two largely antithetical positions often seen as ideological rivals (Zürn and de
Wilde, 2016).
The cleavage between these nativist and globalist political economy positions is also
highly prominent in external meaning making around ‘Brexit’. The focus here is on
claims about how the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU should reshape the ordering
principles of the global economy and how, in turn, these visions confirm pre-existing
normative claims about economic order.
The relationship between the United Kingdom and the global economy brings to mind
Winston Churchill’s view of the country at the intersection of three great circles of external
relations: the British Commonwealth and Empire, the sphere of transatlantic relations
and the English-speaking dominions, and the soon to be united Europe. Thinking retrospectively,
the three circles metaphor has been used to capture the defining dilemma of
British foreign policy since 1945 (Gamble, 2005; Sanders and Houghton, 2016). The
Adler-Nissen et al.	 11
three circles can be seen as rival economic spaces, embodying alternative value sets and
philosophies of political economy. Here, we sample varieties of each discourse as they
apply to each of the ‘three circles’.
A new transatlantic economic space?
‘Transatlantic’ has two distinct meanings in post-Brexit discourse. First, for some
actors, the term ‘transatlantic economy’ describes the progressive integration of the US
and EU economies. This process is one of market making and liberalisation (as exemplified
by the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement), and
is inclusive of all component EU member-state economies. Thus, the Trans-Atlantic
Business Council (TABC—an association of around 70 US and European multi-national
corporations) sees Brexit as potentially disruptive of the existing transatlantic economic
order. The TABC sees the EU’s single market as providing a ‘predictable, common
regulatory framework’, whereas Brexit ‘introduces substantial levels of legal, commercial
and economic uncertainty’(TABC, 2016: 1). One fear is that Brexit will deprive the
EU of its most forceful advocate of economic liberalism and free trade (Jackson et al.,
2016: 2). Advocates of this position regard the maintenance of a transatlantic liberal
order as crucial to resisting the rise of new potential hegemons such as China individually
or Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) collectively (Duina,
2016). Thus, the risks posed by Brexit have broader geo-economic implications for the
sustainability of the neoliberal project.
The TABC advocates an arrangement between the United Kingdom and the EU-27
that disturbs as little as possible the existing benefits of the single market. Put into the
terms laid out above, this position—effectively ruled out by the UK government—envisages
clear benefits of maintaining a North Atlantic liberal economic space, within which
the jurisdictionally separate US, EU and post-Brexit UK economies would continue a
relatively seamless integrative path. This version of the transatlantic economy is premised
on long established practices that have shaped and naturalised the US-EU economic relationship
into this particular conception. What critical scholars have long seen as the emergence
of a transatlantic neoliberal order (Gill, 2016; Ryner and Cafruny, 2017) can be
read in our terms as a Butlerian form of performativity.
The second conception of the transatlantic economy works from a different geographical
premise. Here, the key spatial parameters of that economy are Anglo-American rather
than Euro-American. By implication, the Anglo-American economic space would find
itself in a competitive relationship with the European economy. In one prominent guise,
this emergent form of conservatism presents itself as a revived version of the purest form
of 19th-century economic liberalism. As the American writer Kevin Richardson (2017)
puts it, ‘the argument for free trade contains within it practically the whole of conservative
economic thinking and a great deal of conservative thinking beyond economics’.
Richardson’s essay reflects on, inter alia, the award of a major prize by the National
Review Institute to the British Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP)
Daniel Hannan for his role in persuading the United Kingdom to leave the EU. Hannan—
like other key figures behind the ‘Leave’ campaign—presents himself as an old-style
free-marketeer, keen to reassert the virtues of minimal state intervention, low levels of
regulation and tax cuts (Hannan, 2017a).
This version of transatlanticism portrays the EU not as an agent for the propagation
of free markets, but rather as an interventionist bulwark that prevents the realisation of a
12	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
market society. The delivery of Brexit becomes the means to protect core economic liberal
values. But the very act of announcing ‘Brexit’ is an assertion, in an Austinian sense,
of the idea of Anglo-American economic liberalism. Writing for the free market think
tank the Cato Institute, Hannan compares Brexit with the American revolution: ‘all the
grievances that animated your patriot leaders apply equally to us. Let me put it even more
simply: you guys voted Leave in 1776’ (Hannan, 2017b: 2). His piece drops the names of
multiple conservative and free market thinkers and purports to offer an ethical case for
free markets. It is an Anglo-American vision of political economy performed across policy-facing
platforms.
Richardson and Hannan make it clear that their version of future economic order
would stand in opposition to the economic nationalist orientation of the newly elected US
President Donald Trump. Richardson makes this point especially clear, seeing it as
‘incompatible with a politics based on property rights, individual liberty, and the traditional
moral and social order’ (Williamson, 2017). Needless to say, this argument raises a
paradox for conservative economic liberals who articulate an Anglospheric version of
economic freedom. Both the advance of Brexit and the Republican successes in the 2016
US elections relied heavily upon the mobilisation of nativist (and thus economic nationalist)
sentiment among voting publics. US economic liberals thus face the paradox of securing
political power with the support of constituencies whose understanding of economic
priorities is zero sum and ‘America first’ in orientation (Hankia, 2017).
Economic nationalist policies might, for a time, be consistent with the maintenance of
an Anglo-American market order. But, by definition, they can only support such a vision
to the extent that they serve the perceived economic interests of the United States.
Meanwhile, the Euro-American conception of liberal order is threatened by the types of
anti-globalisation backlash that both enabled Brexit and brought Trump to power.
Empire 2.0?
The fate of the Commonwealth ‘circle’was a matter of significant public debate in the run
up to the United Kingdom joining the European Communities in 1973. The idea of reviving
the Commonwealth as a vibrant economic space has come back into fashion in the
context of Brexit. Membership of the EU prevented the United Kingdom from partaking
in any initiative to create a Commonwealth free trade area, an idea that has now reemerged,
even if some Whitehall officials have dubbed it (disparagingly) ‘Empire 2.0’
(Blitz, 2017).
Some of the loudest voices advocating the construction of a new Commonwealth economic
space have emerged from Australia. In objective terms, it is clear that Australia is
an Asia-Pacific economy. Only 1.4% of Australian exports go to the United Kingdom,
and 1.3% of UK exports flow in the opposite direction (Evans, 2016; Parris, 2017).
Nevertheless, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott welcomed Brexit as liberation
from the ‘statism and bureaucracy of Brussels’ (Cleverly and Hewish, 2016: 4) and
laid out a clear vision of what the post-Brexit relationship between the United Kingdom
and Australia should look like:
The movement of goods between our two countries should be absolutely free of tariffs or quotas.
And each country’s product and service standards should be recognised in the other. … Provided
people are coming to work rather than to take advantage of social security or health services,
Australians should also be free to live in the UK and vice versa. (Cleverly and Hewish, 2016: 4–5)
Adler-Nissen et al.	 13
Here, Abbott transplants the basic operating principles of the EU single market to an
imagined future economic relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia. This
view resembles the second (Anglo-American) version of transatlanticism noted above: an
affirmation of faith in economic liberal principles combined with a critique of the EU as
an impediment to open and free markets. As Wellings (2016) notes, there is a tradition of
Eurosceptic discourse in Australia. Its advocates tend to portray the EU as illiberal, but
they also form part of a broader cultural politics of the right that unites politicians across
the Anglosphere. Once again Brexit seems to have emboldened two types of sentiment:
market liberalism (with an Anglosphere twist) and ‘Australia First’nativism (McDougall,
2016). The upshot (and the unifying thread) is a political economy nostalgia for a return
to a pre-1973 version of the Commonwealth where economic relations between the
‘white’ nations is privileged.
It should be said that this position remains a marginal (if revealing) strand of discourse—even
within Australia (Evans, 2016). The Commonwealth itself took a pragmatic
non-committal position on the referendum—even if some of its member states were
very vocal that Brexit would have severely negative economic effects for them (The
Commonwealth, 2016b). This impact is particularly true of the many less-developed
countries (LDCs) within the Commonwealth, which have relied upon EU preferential
arrangements to gain access to the UK market. Here, we move from nostalgic discourses
about the revival of the White Anglosphere as a liberal economic space to questions that
are existential for small developing economies (The Commonwealth, 2016a). The
Commonwealth’s own analysis of post-Brexit trade scenarios acknowledges that the UK
government is likely to pursue a liberal trade policy, but also fears that Commonwealth
interests will be crowded out of Article 50 negotiations (Stevens and Kennan, 2016).
It follows that there is no clear imaginary of ‘Empire 2.0’. In fact, the two positions
explored here are polar opposites. Strikingly, a revival of the pre-1973 Commonwealth
economy along liberal lines takes little account of the actual patterning of economic relationships
that has developed since. As Murray-Evans (2016) notes, the complex development
of the EU’s relationships with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states has
significantly reconfigured the United Kingdom’s own relationships with its former colonies.
Moreover, that relationship sits very much within an outward projection of European
economic space.
A new European economy?
We have already seen how one influential version of transatlanticism is premised on the
continuation of US-EU economic space, while key voices in the Commonwealth are keen
to maintain extant trading relationships with the EU after Brexit. In other words, Brexit is
not only an opportunity for the radical re-imagination of economic space in an Austinian
sense; it has also prompted rehearsals of the virtues of prevailing economic configurations
in a more Butlerian sense.
The ‘European economy’ has always been a potentially contested idea, amenable to a
variety of political economy value sets (Rosamond, 2012). The progressive ‘neoliberalisation’
of the European economy with the United Kingdom as a driver is an established
theme within EU political economy research (see De Ville and Orbie, 2014; Gill, 2016).
This theme raises the question of whether Brexit creates discursive space for alternative
understandings of European economic space such as ‘social Europe’. The European
Trade Union Confederation (ETUC, 2017) deploys the idea of ‘social Europe’ with some
14	 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 00(0)
frequency, but so far its focus on Brexit has been on the status of mobile citizens in the
Article 50 negotiations. Gerhard Bosch—an academic advocate of ‘social Europe’, states
that ‘The trade union movement in Europe […] no longer has any convincing plans for
European reform’ (Bosch, 2017). Social Europe versions of the European economy have
loud and zealous advocates (Varoufakis, 2017), who deliver powerful Austinian speech
acts. But the relative absence of organisational support (from, for example, coordinated
action by trade unions and parties of the centre left) means that Butlerian performance
(and thus routinisation) of the idea of ‘social Europe’ is underdeveloped.
More orthodox voices are naturally concerned that existing patterns of economic governance
are not disturbed by the United Kingdom’s withdrawal. Equally, the United
Kingdom should not be allowed to secure competitive advantages over the EU-27 as a
result of Brexit. For example, Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been
keen to emphasise that, once out of the EU, the United Kingdom will still be subject to
international rules on investment incentives and G20 rules on tax avoidance (Wagstyl and
Chezan, 2016). This way is another in which post-Brexit economic futures are constrained
discursively. From this viewpoint, escaping the juridical strictures of the EU would not
exempt the United Kingdom from a variety of economic policy obligations. The vision of
European regulatory space is one where the EU is embedded within a broader international
economic space.
Conclusion
This article has argued for the value of understanding Brexit in performative terms. This
perspective allows us to invert the default mode of representing Brexit as being driven by
particular identity concerns in the United Kingdom. Instead, we have focused on how
Brexit helps provide subject positions to countries and organisations around the world,
giving them vital importance. As we have shown, Brexit is not just a tectonic event for the
United Kingdom. It also serves to construct other national identities and reinforces particular
images of bilateral and multilateral relations and the global economy.
At a global level, the language of Brexit is performative, embedded in pre-existing
discourses about Britain, Europe and the nation-state as well as the global order, and
it helps construct particular pasts. Brexit, however, also leads to other often directly
opposing performative speech acts, promising the status quo or a new, prosperous future,
not for the United Kingdom, but for the rest of the world. For instance, Brexit has led to
the promise that the EU-27 will remain united and to declarations of commitments to
multilateralism across the world. For others, Brexit promises a radical shift towards a
new world order, a new Europe of nation-states as well as the global power shift away
from the West. At the same time, we have seen how Brexit both reproduces pre-existing
conceptions of Britishness, as well as long-standing, and often competing, discourses on
European and national identity. Brexit also divides neoliberals across the world, producing
quite different geo-economic imaginaries depending on how market liberal ideas are
articulated to distinct conceptions of economic space.
In conclusion, while it is important to grasp the changing strategies through which UK
leaders articulate Brexit and European integration, this task should not come at the
expense of exploring the many ways through which the rest of the world identifies Brexit
as a threat or possibility. From a performative perspective, Brexit does not threaten the
EU or the multilateral system, per se. Instead, the dangers identified in Brexit serve as
foils against which other nation-states constitute their identities, testifying to the importance
of examining the discursive formations that enable specific politics. From this
Adler-Nissen et al.	 15
perspective, Brexit represents not just choices for the United Kingdom or Europe but
presents other actors around the world with opportunities to assert their own ontological
existence. This reality has real-life implications for the United Kingdom’s position in the
Brexit negotiations. Rather than consolidating the promise of a successful Brexit, based
on its imperial past and special relationships, the many different and competing Brexit
imaginaries outside the United Kingdom subvert this very discourse of success by revealing
its inner tensions. Yet, in doing so, Brexit also reveals contradictions and cleavages in
other nations’ identities and geopolitical and economic imaginaries.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: The research for this article was supported by the University of Copenhagen’s 2016
Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research (project title ‘Europe and New Global Challenges’)
and the Norwegian Research Council under the project ‘Undermining Hegemony’, project no. 240647.
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