Sociological Questions Through the Spectre of Brexit

The Conservative Party victory in the 2015 general elections on a pledge to hold a Referendum on the United Kingdom’s EU membership raised immediate questions about the possible sociological consequences of an eventual popular decision to leave the European Union. Such questions became increasingly more pertinent as the referendum date was set and with the campaign debates becoming more vicious and focusing primarily on the political and economic aspects of a possible exit from the EU. Thinking ‘sociologically’ about the vote and the changing relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union more generally would have meant, among others, asking questions regarding the observable and expected changes in the social structure, relationships, norms or beliefs of different social actors and groups.

It was in order to pursue such inquiries that the Sociological Review-funded project ‘The sociology of “Brexit”: citizenship, belonging and mobility in the context of the British referendum on EU membership’ was launched in February 2016. Having recognised EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in another EU country as the social groups most directly exposed to the consequences of the UK Government’s renegotiation of the country’s terms of EU membership and the Referendum, the project consisting of a series of three public seminars set itself the double aim to identify and bring together findings from empirical research on the experiences of such ‘mobile citizens’, and to explore the theoretical possibilities of a ‘sociology of Brexit’. ‘Brexit’ – this unlikely neologism whose popularity should not have outlived the expected lifespan of any other linguistic fad of the social media age – was to be treated as a broader politico-economic process upsetting the rules by which access to social goods and services are distributed, and a discursive phenomenon affecting social perceptions and relationships; as such it provides a useful basis for analyses concerning uncertainty and social change, concepts that have been placed centre stage in contemporary sociology.

Following the outcome of the referendum, ‘Brexit’ and its disruptive effects have suddenly obtained unexpected concreteness, and the term is destined to remain relevant to everyday existence rather than being merely one of sociological abstraction. Change is about to be experienced at a much broader scale, and uncertainty is bound to be used as a descriptor of ever more facets of politics, economic relations and everyday life in Britain and Europe. As sociological interest turns forcefully to these issues, the primary analytical challenge will probably be to resist the temptation of disregarding temporality and the complex roots of the phenomena we encounter and study. Another challenge will be to identify the right questions to ask, and this should be a guiding aim for projects like the ‘Sociology of Brexit’. The topics discussed at the first seminar in the series can offer some guidance in both respects, and in the following I aim to provide a brief overview of the research showcased at the event, with links to the presentations. The following overview uses extensively material from paper abstracts and summaries provided by the seminar participants, whose contribution must be credited: Michaela Benson, Paul Bridgen, Adrian Favell, Taulant Guma, Russell King, Aija Lulle, Thanos Maroukis, Traute Meyer, Josh Moran and Simone Varriale.

The first seminar, titled ‘The Spectre of Brexit: Free movement and European citizenship in question’, was organised on the 17th of June, 2016, the Friday before the EU Referendum, at the University of Southampton. The seminar brought together eight paper presentations, including two keynote talks by Professor Adrian Favell and Dr Michaela Benson. The papers were organised in two broad topics, one on the politics of mobility, belonging and classification, and another on social citizenship in the light of the Referendum.

In his opening presentation Adrian Favell – whose contributions to the fields of EU mobility and the sociology of European Union are becoming classic works in those disciplines – adopted a broad view on the outcomes of the quasi ‘natural experiment’ of free movement within the EU following its Eastern enlargement. On the face of it, the initial UK experiment with open borders and high levels of free market governed migration from within Europe – as an alternative to non-European immigration or irregular/segmented labour markets – might be deemed a success compared to both restrictive models (for example, the sluggish dynamics of France; the exclusionary reality of Denmark) and high level alternatives (the segmented, exploitative outcome of Germany; the unregulated marginality of EU migrants in Spain). Arguably, this arrangement benefitted the migrants and the sending states as well, confirming the EU’s integration theory based on a win-win-win model of migration-development. However, the 2008 economic crisis was a turning point, and the UK’s policy has proven politically unsustainable, placing the mid-to-long-term outcome of the experiment in doubt.

The main message put forward by Favell to the research community is that ‘amidst the European and British migration “crisis” and particularly the widening gap between “democratic” politics and economic analysis, as scholars we need to go beyond easy critical views (i.e. Marxist and Foucauldian orthodoxies) and engage again in constructive, progressive thought about the liberal political economy of managed migration (in Europe and globally) and the possibility of open borders, economic integration and co-development.’

An aspect of EU free movement which figured somewhat less prominently in the pre-referendum debates is the migration of British citizens to other EU countries. This issue was reflected upon by Michaela Benson in her keynote, who argued that the spectre of Brexit provides the opportunity to think again about the historical and political conditions that enable British (e)migration. She highlighted how the (e)migration of British Citizens is not only made possible by European Citizenship, freedom of movement and the right to reside in other European Union countries, but through colonial legacies and their traces in contemporary white, middle-class practices of residence and place-making. Revisiting her research on the Britons living in rural France, she introduces ‘constellations of privilege’ as a new conceptual apparatus to understand how privilege is structured through classed and racial formations in the United Kingdom and transposed onto the rural French landscape and population. In her presentation she illustrated how such constellations of privilege might be read through close observation of the everyday practices and claims to belonging. Complementing Favell’s call for a ‘post-critical’ reconsideration of our theoretical tenets, Benson’s message is an urge to (re)examine our empirical material through the spectre of Brexit – not by subsuming all analysis to a single perspective, but, conversely, by paying careful attention to how under its conditionality other structural and cultural factors come to prominence or recede in narratives and practices.

Following the two keynotes, the session on the politics of mobility, belonging and classification brought together three papers delivered by Simone Varriale, Russell King and Chris Moreh respectively. Varriale’s presentation re-examined recent scholarship on intra-EU migration regarding the ‘politics of classification’, specifically in respect to distinctions between deserving and undeserving citizens that migrants themselves draw when discussing other groups or fellow nationals. He focused especially on how these distinctions are drawn within national groups, revealing the centrality of class in shaping migrants’ narratives. The paper also discussed the evaluative criteria of such distinctions, namely cosmopolitanism (cosmopolitan versus provincial migrants), good taste (cultured versus uncultured migrants) and meritocracy (talented and hardworking versus unskilled and ‘lazy’ migrants). Varriale argued that this politics of classification obscures differences in social biographies and resources, and that Brexit is likely to exacerbate such inequalities (affecting migrants with less economic, social and cultural capital). His research looks at the politics of classification in relation to the post-financial crisis (and ongoing) Italian emigration to the UK.

The paper presented by King (co-authored with Aija Lulle) was a critical exemplification of the concepts of ‘liquid migration’ and migrant political agency, based on new empirical research on young-adult Eastern Europeans who have migrated to Great Britain since 2004. Against the backdrop of ‘Brexit’, the authors interrogated one of the defining characteristics of what has been called ‘liquid migration’ – its ‘intentional unpredictability’, meant as intentional openness to future migration trajectories under the open border regime – and further developed its linkages to the tactics and temporality of migrant agency. Drawing on two rich sources of empirical material – sixty in-depth interviews and a netnography of cyberspace discussions among Eastern European migrants on the issue of the Referendum – their aim was to contribute a novel understanding of the role of everyday tactics in the meta-concepts of belonging and migrant political agency. King and Lulle show how Eastern European migrants draw on their history of resilience, hardened by radical political changes in their own countries which have affected their families for generations, restricting mobility and the ability to achieve a ‘good’ or ‘decent’ life. They rely on tactics of endurance and waiting, putting their trust in the ‘market logic’ of their economic citizenship (work, income, tax-paying). They are convinced that they have proven themselves as good and trustworthy workers and residents, and prepare tactically to remain in the UK, also engaging in more active tactics such as applying for residence cards and dual citizenship where possible.

My own contribution picked up the conclusions reached by King and Lulle through their qualitative study and presented analogous findings from a quantitative survey aimed at non-British EU citizens living in the United Kingdom. The paper – co-authored with Derek McGhee and Athina Vlachantoni – examined EU migrants’ opinions on the Referendum, and their coping strategies with a possible Brexit. While the majority of EU nationals living in the UK considered – on democratic grounds – that the Referendum should be held, opinions regarding their political rights, the preferred outcome for the referendum, and the planned coping strategies, varied considerably by the respondents’ country of origin. In broad terms – we argued – the EU referendum seemed to have a graver emotional impact on migrants from the ‘old’ member states than on those from more recently joined countries (in particular Romanian nationals, who only gained full access to the UK labour market in 2014). This manifests itself through a greater discrepancy between the number of those who would apply for permanent residence or citizenship in the case of a Brexit, and those who would do so regardless of the (outcome) of the referendum. The mechanism at work is related to ‘subjective Europeanisation’, or the ability of mobile EU citizens to derive their rights and social position from the European supranational normative framework, and organise their lives and plans accordingly, in contrast to those who link their fate to national assimilationist pathways. The consequence of Brexit – we suggest – will be a continuing increase in the number of applications for British citizenship, with a yet uncertain impact on the subjective experiences of citizenship and belonging.

The second session of the seminar consisted of three papers – by Josh Moran (co-authored with Paul Bridgen and Traute Meyer), Thanos Maroukis and Taulant Guma – on issues related to the question of social citizenship in the context of the EU Referendum. Moran and his colleagues challenged the idea that welfare support for EU migrants is a ‘burden’, adopting a ‘social investment’ perspective according to which state expenditure on social provisions pays off in the long term, as it lessens future welfare needs, turning expense to investment. Extending this argument to EU nationals living in the UK, the paper examined how a social investment effect is being undermined by the 2014 welfare reforms and in different post-Brexit scenarios, showing that the side-effects of such policies is a weakening of migrants’ productive potential, which in turn is detrimental to the UK economy.

Maroukis’s paper discussed the employment experiences and social protection of EU migrant agency workers in a framework of flexible labour market regimes, workfare policies and an emergent uncertainty as regards their immigration status. Drawing on life-stories of Eastern and Southern European migrant agency workers in low paid jobs in the English food industry, hospitality and domiciliary care sectors, the paper explored the retrieval of formal and informal social protection resources in a setting where precarious employment regimes prevail and social citizenship rights become increasingly dependent on employment relations. Maroukis argued that flexible market strategies and public policy structures which (de)regulate temporary labour arrangements and obstruct the accrual and (re)distribution of social protection resources exist regardless of the result of the referendum, and emphasised the role of EU migrants’ transnational family relations and interpersonal networks in coping with these situations. Restricting access to benefits or to free movement – he argued – will exacerbate social protection difficulties at home and in the host country and render migrants more vulnerable to exploitative work conditions.

Similarly, Guma interrogated the limits of EU citizenship through the various practices and experiences of welfare provision among Czech and Slovak nationals living in Glasgow. Drawing on sociological/anthropological perspectives on state and statecraft, he argued that these EU migrants’ experiences can be considered as constitutive of nation-building processes, processes which turn (EU) citizens into immigrants. While the ‘spectre of Brexit’ has inevitably brought into question the role of European citizenship, its privileges and the security that it brings, the paper demonstrated that (for some EU nationals) the ‘questioning’ of European citizenship and its entitlements has been ongoing and was already at play well before the current debates around the EU referendum and ‘Brexit’. The paper thus reminds us of the importance of examining the uncertainty and changes regarding (EU) citizenship not only through legal terms, policies and discourses but also in the everyday lives and from the perspective of affected individuals.

While the seminar could bring together only a selection of the current sociological research on the topic, the presentations highlighted some general themes of potential importance for a ‘sociology of Brexit’. The ensuing legal process should not distract focus from lived experiences of ‘de-Europeanisation’, and these should be examined in their own contexts. Conversely, changes in lived experiences can tell us about the real strength and value of legal membership, of class distinctions, colonial legacies or the structural sources of personal and group resilience. These initial themes will necessarily be developed further in the future. Hoping to attract more interesting case-studies and empirically based theoretical propositions, the next seminar in the series will be held in Scotland on the 2nd of September with the title ‘Migration and citizenship: evidence from two referendums’, and adopts a comparative sociological perspective on the Scottish Independence Referendum and the Referendum on EU membership, examining their observable and expected consequences on diverse forms of citizenship and mobility.