Should I stay or should I go? Metaphors of federal disintegration

With the 2016 Brexit referendum, the European Union faced not only the prospect of territorial and institutional shrinking: In the comments of politicians and media observers, Britain and Europe underwent a complicated divorce, after decades of unhappy union. This familial metaphor in a context of (con-)federal constellations is, however, not new: Other situations of federal conflict and disintegration have also been presented through the lens of marital relations – from the U.S. Civil War to the separation of Singapore from Malaysia. The paper will inquire into the political function of federal metaphors and marriage of divorce, highlighting that one and the same metaphor – while fluctuating drastically in concrete political message from context to context – is repeatedly employed in order to grapple with a tension inherent to constellations of federalism: the tension between popular sovereignty and peoples’ sovereignty.