Bulletin n. 2/2016
December 2016
INDICE
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Michael Freeden
    After the Brexit referendum: revisiting populism as an ideology
    in Journal of Political Ideologies , Volume 22, Issue 1 ,  2017
    In late May 2016, shortly before the British referendum on membership of the European Union that resulted in a modest majority of 51.9% for leaving the EU (and among those eligible to vote, a 37.47% vote to leave), I was interviewed on Czech TV on the topic of populism. At the height of the crisis of refugees from Syria, Africa and other middle eastern countries, I pointed to one striking difference between sentiments on migration on the European continent and in the UK. In continental Europe, people were afraid of refugees; in the UK, people were afraid of Europeans. Of course, this needs the kind of fine-tuning that a media soundbite cannot provide. The fear of refugees was unequally distributed spatially across Europe, attaining a higher intensity in its eastern and east-central reaches. The UK avoided similar sentiments of alarm simply by accepting a trifling number of refugees in the first place, so that their visibility was negligible (and in the case of the now dismantled Calais ‘jungle’ camps, forcibly keeping most of them out of British territory). The fear of non-national migrants was also unequally distributed ideologically, broadly affecting more people on the right-of-centre spectrum than on the left-of-centre. Furthermore, that fear was unequally distributed on socio-economic and age indices. And the modes of movement across borders were dissimilar: Europeans from EU countries entered and exited the UK freely, while non-European migrants into the European mainland entered illegally or were subject – usually retroactively – to national quotas. Not least, in a telling twist of vocabulary, public discourse in the UK has for decades inserted a caesura between ‘Britain’ and ‘Europe’, setting Britain adrift from its European geographical location and rendering it, sometimes provocatively, continent-less.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016