GLOBAL EUROPE IN THE FACE OF MULTIPLE INTERNATIONAL CRISES

 GLOBAL EUROPE IN THE FACE OF MULTIPLE INTERNATIONAL CRISES

1.2.1. Post-Brexit and Nation-State The UK was not an original member of the EEC. It joined it late in 1973,and never became part of the Schengen Agreement or the eurozone. In2014, the UK’s right-wing populist political party, the UK IndependenceParty (UKIP) was able to capture 24 out of 73 seats of Britain’s in its election to the European Parliament. 

The UKIP and Eurosceptic members within the Conservative Party, pressurised the UK’s the then PrimeMinister, David Cameron,to hold a referendum on the EU membership,which he pledged only if Conservatives won the 2015 general elections.

After gaining amajority in general elections, Cameron’s gamble was put tothe test. He himself supported remaining in the EU hoping that the Britishpublic would vote in favour of the EU. However, on June 23, 2016, 17.4million voted to leave the EU while 16.1 million voted to remain part of it.The following day, David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister and Theresa May was chosen, as his replacement, by the Conservative Party to lead the Brexit talks with the EU. The UK joined the EU in 1973 and now, after more than four decades, it is set to leave the EU in March 2019. The Brexit campaign of 2016 lacked deep political thinking and was mostly based on ending immigration and bringing back Britain’s contribution to the EU budget and investing it in National Health Service (NHS), while the “Remain” . ( Benjamin Martill and Uta Staiger, Brexit and Beyond ─ Rethinking the Futures of Europe London: UCL Press, 2017) Since the late 1990s, immigration from the EU states to the UK increased rapidly and between 1995 and 2015, the EU nationals living in the UK rose from 1.5 to 5.3 per cent. Many people who voted in favour of Brexit considered national identity as their most important value under threat due to large-scale immigration. Goodwin and Heath report that 88 per cent of the people who were against immigration supported Brexit.For them, their national identity had to be preserved even if that came at some expense to societal wealth. Puglierin also agrees that the threat of losing national identity and control over borders due to rising immigration played an important role in the pro-Brexit outcome.(Jonathan Wadsworth, Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and John Van Reenen, “Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK CEP BREXIT ANALYSIS NO. 5(London: Centre for Economic Performance, 2016)

1.2.2. Rising Euroscepticism Those who argue that Brexit is the result of rising Euroscepticism due to eurozone and migration crisis are only partially correct. It needs to behighlighted that Euroscepticism initially started off, in the 1990s, as aspecifically British phenomenon. Barometer opinion polls have consistently shown that British citizens have less attachment to Europe and are proud oftheir own distinct identity as British. The Eurobarometer polls show that the UK has consistently, with occasional interruptions, been the most Eurosceptic member state over the years. A survey conducted repeatedly in the EU member states shows that the UK is the only member state where considerable support for leaving the EU exists since 2012, as shown in figure no. 2. While the net gap between those wanting to leave and those who wanted to stay in the EU was well above 20 per cent in favour of staying in both Denmark and Germany and also above 10 per cent in Finland and France, with greater fluctuation in support in Sweden. (Sara B Hobolt, “The Brexit Vote: A Divided Nation, a Divided Continent,” Journal of European Public Policy: (2016) 1259- 1277. The Eurosceptic politicians and British newspapers then capitalised on these anti-EU sentiments and made the masses believe that immigration and EU was to be blamed for many of their woes. They made false claims that leaving the EU would enable the UK to invest £350 million/week on National Health Service rather than contributing that amount to the EU budget. Hence, it can be concluded from the above discussion that Britain’s decision to move out of the EU was not solely based on economic reasons but was a combination of a perceived threat to national identity and sovereignty, rising Euroscepticism after the eurozone and migration crisis and economic insecurities due to globalisation. (Sampson,“Brexit)