Crisis, what crisis? Conceptualizing crisis, UK pluri-constitutionalism and Brexit politics

Wincott, Daniel; Davies, Greg; Wager, Alan

doi:10.1080/00343404.2020.1805423

Cited by 13 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In its totality, therefore, the UK's devolved system's inbuilt structural inadequacies militated against the emergence of shared or binding narratives about what Brexit should mean, prevented joined-up thinking and compounded the problem of managing cross-territorial tensions. In this way, Brexit served as a catalyst for bringing questions about the scope and limits of devolution to the surface (Wincott et al, 2020). This has perhaps been nowhere more apparent, or of greater consequence, than in Northern Ireland, where devolution has not only been characterized, but also been largely defined by sustained political contestation, structural weakness and systemic fragility.…”

Section: Devolution In the Uk: Ambivalence And Ambiguitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contesting sovereignty and borders: Northern Ireland, devolution and the Union

Murphy

Evershed

2021

Territory, Politics, Governance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Supported by UK and Irish membership of the European Union (EU), the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement's post-sovereignist compromise helped to diminish the contested politics of the border in Ireland. However, by altering the status of the border, Brexit aroused and fomented politically charged divisions in Northern Ireland. We explore the confluence of four consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland. Firstly, we detail how Brexit highlights the inadequacies and dysfunction of the UK's territorial architecture. Second, we examine the specific structural, institutional and relational weaknesses of Northern Ireland's devolved system. Third, we explain how Brexit further weakened the scaffolding that supports Northern Ireland's devolved settlement. And fourth, we explore why Brexit has prompted profound reconsideration of the UK's existing territorial set-up. Brexit's challenge to the status quo in Northern Ireland, and by extension the UK's constitutional and territorial integrity, is linked not just to internal political dynamics in Northern Ireland, but also to the ambiguity of the existing asymmetrical UK devolution settlement, its lack of embeddedness within the UK constitutional order and the absence of binding cultural narratives. Finally, we extend this analysis to posit that Brexit has revived the 'Irish question' and stirred a potentially destabilizing debate about Irish unity.

show abstract

Section: Devolution In the Uk: Ambivalence And Ambiguitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contesting sovereignty and borders: Northern Ireland, devolution and the Union

Murphy

Evershed

2021

Territory, Politics, Governance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This co-exists alongside increasing support for Scottish independence, growing Scottish National Party (SNP) agitation for an 'Indyref2' and burgeoning 'indy-curiosity' in Wales (Shipman and Allardyce, 2021). In sum, Brexit has represented a marked challenge to the integrity of the United Kingdom's territorial constitution (Wincott et al, 2020). For Sinn Féin, these developments represent an unparalleled opportunity for the completion of the Republican project in the short term.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An bhfuil ár lá tagtha? Sinn Féin, special status and the politics of Brexit

Evershed

Murphy

2021

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article we critically examine how Sinn Féin responded to Brexit, why, and with what consequences. By destabilising the UK’s territorial constitution and intensifying debate about Ireland’s constitutional future, Brexit has represented a moment of unprecedented opportunity for Irish republicanism. However, this has been offset by the very real political and economic risks it has posed for the island of Ireland. We argue that Sinn Féin’s pursuit of ‘Special Status’ for Northern Ireland represented an attempt to mitigate Brexit’s risks, rather than to leverage its opportunities. This approach came with political costs for the party, whose recent electoral surge has arguably been in spite of rather than because of it. We demonstrate how Brexit has served to reshape Sinn Féin’s politics, and how it has functioned to further moderate its ‘Eurocriticism’.

show abstract

“…The Scottish and Welsh Government roundly rejected the UK Government's unitarist vision (Miles, 2020;Scottish Government, 2020). Each had an established view that the UK is a union-state, dependent on the ongoing consent of the constituent parts (Keating, 2018;McHarg, 2018;Wincott et al, 2021). Normally, explicit legislative consent is required from the devolved legislatures for any UK legislation that encroaches on their competences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our focus on territoriality clarifies the constitutional assumptions shared by the Anglo-British imaginary, assumptions otherwise occluded in the textbook tradition and wider constitutional debates. Typically revealed only in fragments, these shared territorial assumptions allow the Anglo-British imaginary to encompass both the Diceyean orthodoxy and its English critics Murray & Wincott, 2020;Wincott et al, 2021). Equally, the Anglo-British imaginary has long coexisted with distinct peripheral visionssometimes including alternative or overlapping imaginariesof the multinational UK state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Anglo-British imaginary and the rebuilding of the UK’s territorial constitution after Brexit: unitary state or union state?

Wincott

Murray

Davies

2021

Territory, Politics, Governance

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Brexit has foregrounded radical divergences between the accounts of the UK's constitutional order advanced by the UK Government and the devolved governments, with the distinctions coming into sharp relief in debates over legislation to sustain the UK's internal market. This article examines the limits to the roots of the UK Government's insistence that the UK is a unitary state, and not a union-state, in the textbook tradition of constitutional scholarship. Writers from A. V. Dicey to S. A. de Smith asserted that the UK was a unitary state largely as an adjunct to their accounts of parliamentary sovereignty. We also examine how the received orthodoxy of unitary accounts of the UK's constitution came under increasing pressure after the advent of devolution, but that the UK's membership of the European Union, and the operation of the principle of subsidiarity within European law, forestalled a considerable amount of constitutional contestation. The need to replace European law as a foundation of the UK internal market, and the UK Government's attempts to exert control over this transition, has produced a sustained debate about what the union means after Brexit.

show abstract

Crisis, what crisis? Conceptualizing crisis, UK pluri-constitutionalism and Brexit politics

Cited by 13 publications

References 14 publications

Contesting sovereignty and borders: Northern Ireland, devolution and the Union

Contesting sovereignty and borders: Northern Ireland, devolution and the Union

An bhfuil ár lá tagtha? Sinn Féin, special status and the politics of Brexit

The Anglo-British imaginary and the rebuilding of the UK’s territorial constitution after Brexit: unitary state or union state?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About