World economy

The endurance of Member Statehood

A final way in which Brexit unites the UK with the rest of the EU is that it has been an exemplary lesson in what it means for a ‘Member State’ to leave the EU. The term ‘Member State’ refers to a distinctive form of statehood and not just a legal title referring to formal membership of the EU (Bickerton 2012, 2017a). The UK underwent its own transformation from nation-state to Member State. As a result, Brexit poses more than just juridical and regulatory challenges. As a process, Brexit makes demands upon the British state that presume it to be and to act like a nation-state, when in fact it has become a Member State. This puts the British state under acute constitutional, administrative, political and social pressures. As Ross McKibbin observed, the EU has become ‘as much a part of the structure of the British state as the Union with Scotland once was’ (McKibbin 2014).

The characteristics of Member Statehood shape the Brexit process in manifold ways. The European orientation of the administrative British state was on show throughout the referendum campaign, with major British institutions – such as the Bank of England and the Treasury, and the ‘deep state’ of the higher education sector – openly backing the Remain campaign. The lack of planning around Brexit, itself a symptom of the deep Europeanisation of the British state, has placed a huge post-referendum burden on the civil service, which is now struggling to manage.

Brexit has challenged another feature of Member Statehood, namely the orientation towards problem-solving and consensus-building within institutional settings where all parties share the same basic political outlook.5 In effect, Brexit has obliged British diplomats to act in ways that are quite alien to them, in particular with regards hard bargaining and assessing important trade-offs. Rather than accepting the costs of leaving as a price worth paying, we have seen prolonged equivocation on the part of British officials about whether there will be any cost associated with Brexit at all. ‘Having your cake and eating it’, a phrase that was the butt of many jokes in the media, points directly to this inability to think in terms of costs and benefits. An earlier example was David Cameron’s letter to the president of the European Council. Setting out the UK’s various ‘baskets’ of demands; the language used suggested that the goal was not to defend the British national interest but rather to transform the EU for the better. It was very difficult to tell if the prime minister saw himself as defending the national or the European interest, as the boundaries between the two had become, by that point, quite blurred.

It is also noteworthy that there has been a great reluctance to accept that Brexit means the UK is ‘going it alone’ in any meaningful way. Nationalist histories of the past – including that of the UK – have made much of the ability to ‘stand alone’ but in the UK’s case even confident Brexiters have sought the comfort of wider communities such as the ‘Anglosphere’ or the Commonwealth (Bell, 2017). The referendum campaign itself never addressed directly the issue of the UK’s status as an outsider. Even discussions about leaving the Single Market or the Customs Union were muted. Instead, there was an extensive debate about which ‘model’ the UK would adopt. Critics of this discussion talked of a ‘bespoke arrangement’ for the UK, which had comforting echoes of receiving special treatment and of not being left out in the cold. This refusal to consider Brexit as the state transformational challenge that it is continues into the post-referendum period. British civil servants currently working within the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) are, for instance, only seconded – for a term of two years – from their original ministries, the implication being that their services will only be needed for this short interim and transitional period. This is clearly a dramatic under-estimation of the administrative challenges posed by Brexit

The relevance of the British experience for the other EU Member States is clear. As Member States rather than nation-states, they also constitute themselves as discrete political communities through their participation in wider networks of rule, from the EU through to the G20, the United Nations (UN) and the WTO. Self-government and the ability to construct a national will that stands apart from other national wills is as alien to these other EU Member States as it is to the UK. The Greek example is telling here. It was only the eccentric and self-absorbed person of Varoufakis who could attempt to stand up to the Eurogroup, the Greek state as a whole being unable to contemplate life outside of either the eurozone or the EU. Opposition to the Troika was thus limited to mere grandstanding, with the Greek people left to pick up the pieces. Brexit raises the fundamental issue of representation and the capacity of a state to represent to the outside world the collective and popular will. Member statehood is premised on a horizontal understanding of power and legitimacy where it is being a part of the wider community that matters most. The authority of governments is the borrowed authority of this wider group. Brexit thus reveals in a dramatic fashion the way in which Member States struggle to fulfil even their most basic functions of self-government associated with the model of the sovereign state. This is by no means only a British affair. It is also an urgent issue for all European citizens who believe in the capacity  – and duty  – of governments to represent the will of their citizens.