When Polanyi met Farage: Market fundamentalism, economic nationalism, and Britain’s exit from the European Union

Abstract

The vote for Brexit is not an isolated event, but part of a wave of populist, anti-elite revolts: a new ‘anti-system’ politics Western democracies are experiencing, shaking the existing consensus around economic integration, free markets and liberal values. This wave takes a variety of forms, but has in common a robust, even violent, rejection of the mainstream political elites and their values, and a demand for governments to act on the sources of social and economic distress and inequality. This article views Brexit as a part of this new anti-system politics, a reaction to the decline in ideological competition in democracies and the increasing impotence of politicians to address the upheavals wrought by global free market capitalism. This reaction has become particularly acute after the financial crisis of the late 2000s, which affected Britain disproportionately, and the failure of austerity policies to revive growth, crystallising the ineffectiveness of existing policies to deal with economic stagnation and cultural change. This policy failure is compounded by a perceived refusal of politicians to engage with the broader public and a lack of real choice between the mainstream political parties. The article will present evidence that a failed policy consensus, a rise in inequality and a decline in the representativeness of political elites, rather than a resurgence of intolerance or xenophobia, are the principal causes of the Brexit vote.

European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas: Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit Debate

“…As such Brexit becomes a particularly egregious example of the domestic politicization wave that began in the wake of the signing of the Treaty on European Union at Maastricht in 1991. A second temptation is to situate Brexit within a second, more recent, populist wave of discontent that follows from the onset of the Eurozone crisis the best part of a decade ago (Hopkin, ; Pettifor, ). While recognizing that Brexit takes its particular form thanks to a combination of quite peculiar UK‐specific factors of varying temporality, there is undoubtedly some mileage in thinking about it as a product of these two more generic waves of EU politicization.…”

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit

“…There is a profound overlap between the features of the British model and the pro-market stances of the EU since its creation (Hopkin, 2017). Many of Britain's defining flagship policies have indeed been uploaded at the EU level.…”

“…The UK's decision to leave the EU, to which it is ideologically aligned, also stimulates a reflection on the new conflicts that are emerging within Europe (Vis, Kersbergen and Hylands, 2011), namely the issue of the distribution of resources between the core and peripheral countries. In this context, the rejection of EU membership (Brexit) is a rejection not only of neoliberalism and commodification (Hopkin, 2017), but of the very fundaments of the British political-economic strategy in Europe.…”

The Brexit Fiasco and the Failure of Article 50 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union

“…Moreover, the analytical approach combines game theory 13 with the analytical methods and concepts used in the economics of federalism. 14 However, several caveats should be stated. A first caveat relates to the limited research sample, which may present a limitation of the provided study.…”