Papers by Pauline Schnapper
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
The previous chapter has attempted to show the link between a national democratic crisis in the U... more The previous chapter has attempted to show the link between a national democratic crisis in the UK and a wider disaffection towards the EU. In this chapter, we explore further this connection between national and supranational politics by looking at the widespread public questioning of the legitimacy of the European project throughout the EU and its consequences on the position of the UK.
After Brexit, 2017
The British decision to leave the EU in the 23 June 2016 referendum was the unexpected outcome of... more The British decision to leave the EU in the 23 June 2016 referendum was the unexpected outcome of a multifaceted crisis. It can be explained by a mixture of specifically British factors and others, which are present across many European countries, raising potentially lethal problems for the cohesion and future of the EU. A year after the referendum, though, the EU has kept its unity and limited the risk of contagion. It has attempted to present a coherent plan not only to deal with Brexit but also to take the opportunity to strengthen the Eurozone and European defence.
Among the changes and uncertainties of the post-post Cold War period in Europe, the British vote ... more Among the changes and uncertainties of the post-post Cold War period in Europe, the British vote to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 (or Brexit) probably stands out as one of the most unexpected and potentially far-reaching developments for the future of the continent. At first sight, this looks like a return to a traditional nationalist, power-based realist foreign policy, at least in the rethoric of Brexiters, who want to turn their backs on over 40 years of multilateral rules-based cooperation in Europe in favour of global agreements reminiscent of the UK’s glorious imperial past. Whether this is consistent with globalisation and economic interdependence is debatable, which raises the question of whether this renewed “realism” is actually realistic.
La crise des dettes souveraines dans la zone euro a cristallise entre Londres et ses partenaires ... more La crise des dettes souveraines dans la zone euro a cristallise entre Londres et ses partenaires de l'UE un conflit enracine dans l'ambivalence (...)
Revue française de civilisation britannique, 2017
Our campaign was based on the simple proposition that electorates don't vote against their own po... more Our campaign was based on the simple proposition that electorates don't vote against their own pockets 1 .
British Foreign Policy, 2011
The last twenty years have seen a lot of agonizing — both in the academic literature and in the m... more The last twenty years have seen a lot of agonizing — both in the academic literature and in the media — about what it means to be British, whether Britishness ever existed and, if so, when this national identity was formed and whether and when it ceased to exist (Crick 1991; Marr 2000; Redwood 1999; Colls 2002). A relative consensus has, however, emerged around Linda Colley’s interpretation that the Act of Union with Scotland, coupled with colonial expansion, enabled a cohesive British identity to develop in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to flourish until the early twentieth century (Colley 1992). The Second World War, it is further argued, marked the end of the period when this cohesive sense of Britishness was unquestioningly accepted as a common civic identity, distinct from the English, Scottish or Welsh national identities (Robbins 1994; Reynolds 2000; McCrone and Kiely 2000). The loss of the Empire, which had acted as the glue between the different nations through their shared colonial experience, as well as the economic and political decline that Britain experienced after the war, weakened the links between England, Scotland and Wales. The ties binding the nation together were therefore loosened, leading to fears, and in some cases hopes, that Britain would break up. From then on, one can argue that the ‘politics of decline’ identified by Andrew Gamble as having dominated the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (Gamble 1990) was accompanied and then followed by discussion around the ‘politics of identity’.
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
In this chapter we are interested in how economic and social perceptions of the EU fed into growi... more In this chapter we are interested in how economic and social perceptions of the EU fed into growing levels of euroscepticism and outright europhobia in the UK, identified in the previous chapters, which led to increasingly aggressive and ultimately unsuccessful, government intransigence in Brussels after 2010.
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
Euroscepticism used to be a largely British1 phenomenon, at least in terms of mainstream politica... more Euroscepticism used to be a largely British1 phenomenon, at least in terms of mainstream political parties and political and opinion-forming elites. Indeed, the word was coined in the 1980s to describe Margaret Thatcher’s policies and attitude towards the EC at a time when she was reasserting British sovereignty against Brussels’ plans for political and monetary union (Leconte 2010: 3). It was later applied to the anti-European wing of the Conservative Party when it battled against the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992–1993 (Baker et al. 1993a, 1993b, 1994, Alexandre-Collier 2002, Forster 2002). At that time, Britain was considered as the ‘awkward’ or ‘reluctant’ partner, exceptional in the EC for the ambivalence of its political class and general public towards a project it had joined belatedly (George 1998, Young 1998, Gowland and Turner 2000). Party divisions and a general reluctance towards integration imposed constraints on policy-making, made brutally clear under John Major and more subtly under Tony Blair, who in spite of his own preference refrained from organising a referendum on adopting the European single currency when faced with strong media and political opposition.
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
It has become commonplace to describe Western countries, especially in Europe, as experiencing a ... more It has become commonplace to describe Western countries, especially in Europe, as experiencing a crisis of democracy. Crozier et al. first used the term to describe advanced Western democracies in the mid-1970s (1975). Others have talked of ‘disaffected democracies’ (Pharr and Putnam 2000) or of ‘democratic challenges’ (Dalton 2004) attributed to a decline in ‘civic culture’ (Kavanagh 1989 in the case of Britain) or to the rise of post-materialist values (Inglehart 1990). One of the main aspects of this crisis, especially in Europe, has been voters’ disconnection from politics and the lack of trust towards the political elites expressed, among other outlets, by a rise in populist parties.
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
We begin with the wider context of our study, the economic crisis of the EU, since many of the re... more We begin with the wider context of our study, the economic crisis of the EU, since many of the recently heightened political and institutional problems relating to the UK which we cover elsewhere in the book have been exacerbated by the EZ’s economic crisis. We look at how it unfolded and how, in well under a decade, a Europe of growth and growing prosperity was replaced by one of insolvent banks, austerity, mass unemployment, street protests and sluggish or negative growth. Together this has encouraged the growth of negative attitudes towards the EU, expressed as political extremism, and (especially in the UK) euroscepticism and hostility towards federalism, as well as reigniting the ‘German question’ — how to curb the excessive influence of a state too powerful for its geopolitical context (Stevens 2014). Jean Monnet famously remarked that ‘Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises’, but it is doubtful that he envisaged such a traumatic and dangerous crisis, or such a Germanic solution (Bergsten and Kierkegaard 2012: 1).
Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015
The current debate about European integration in the UK places considerable emphasis on the fact ... more The current debate about European integration in the UK places considerable emphasis on the fact that the EU is moving towards a seemingly unstoppable federal union, increasingly diverging from the UK’s preference for intergovernmental, open regionalist trade-based cooperation in Europe. British eurosceptics often claim that their country was ‘cheated’ into signing up for much more than they originally desired, essentially a simple free-trade area, and that the momentum towards ever more integration since the Maastricht Treaty is alien to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty and its global outlook.
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2014
This article analyzes British Labour Party leaders' discourses on Europe since 2007-that is, afte... more This article analyzes British Labour Party leaders' discourses on Europe since 2007-that is, after Tony Blair left power. Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband are analyzed in relation to one of the traditional attitudes of the party since the 1950s. It is argued that two trends in attitudes to European integration among Labour leaders can be identified. One is wariness of European integration for fear that Britain could lose its Commonwealth links and its global outlook. The other is seeing strong engagement in the European Community as crucial to Britain's political and economic future. Blair followed these steps, at least rhetorically, in aiming to strengthen British leadership in the EU. Brown and Miliband, though sharing a broad support for the EU, both emphasized the failings of the EU and shared their earlier predecessors' preference for a 'global' Britain. * I am grateful to Emmanuelle Avril, David Baker, the participants in the University of California-Berkeley workshop on 8 November 2013 and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Journal of Contemporary European Research, 2021
The British vote to leave the European Union in 2016 shook the Franco-British bilateral relations... more The British vote to leave the European Union in 2016 shook the Franco-British bilateral relationship (FBBR) to its core and led to unexpected tensions, considering the depth of cooperation between the two countries in many fields, and their geography. In this article we analyse the impact of Brexit on the FBBR to date, including the likely aftershocks. We focus on the 2017-2020 Brexit negotiations themselves, and on the matters that escaped those negotiations but which are core to the FBBR namely: security and defence; borders and migration. We draw on a number of high-level interviews with French and British officials and on literatures of contemporary diplomacy to ask how the new environment for the FBBR challenges traditional ways of conducting bilateral diplomacy outside of the multilateral framework provided by the European Union.
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2021
The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for... more The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both parties. In this special issue, we consider the extent to which the inter-penetration of the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for recasting political action. The nesting of these two levels matters firstly in allowing for the politicisation and mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly in explaining why seemingly sub-optimal or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have fundamental impacts on the first order’s structure and preferences. Bringing together scholars from a wide range of approaches and covering various aspects of the Brexit process, this special issue offers a significant contribution to improving our understanding of an event that will shape British and ...
Revue française de civilisation britannique, 2015
The Scottish referendum on 18 September 2014 was not only about the future of Scotland as an inde... more The Scottish referendum on 18 September 2014 was not only about the future of Scotland as an independent country and the future of the United Kingdom as a union state, important though that obviously was. It was also about the position of both Scotland and Britain in the European Union and about the more general role of sub-state entities in the EU, as the presence of many Catalans, Corsicans, Basques and others in the streets of Edinburgh on referendum day illustrated. The European dimension to the Scottish referendum was obvious in the debates preceding the ballot, with the conditions for Scottish membership of the EU one of the main issues-together with the economy and defence-debated during the campaign, both directly and through the question of the currency of a possible independent Scotland. Europe was one issue which Yes supporters used to express the growing discrepancy between the Scottish and English political scenes.
A period of great uncertainty over the future of British foreign policy has begun with the EU ref... more A period of great uncertainty over the future of British foreign policy has begun with the EU referendum of June 23, 2016, concerning not only its future relations with the European Union but also its position on the international scene. The May government’s wish to establish a “global Britain” might be difficult to fulfil if other great powers are less keen to strengthen relationships with a now isolated UK.
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Papers by Pauline Schnapper