The Politics of EU Diaspora in the UK Post-Brexit: Civic Organizations’ Multi-Scalar Lobbying and Mobilisation Strategies

This paper explores and analyses the political engagement of EU nationals in the UK post-Brexit, with a particular focus on the civic organizations’ multi-scalar modes of lobbying and mobilisation. It draws on research on migrants’ activism, civic associations and transnational social movements literatures to delve into the particular processes of EU diaspora mobilisation as triggered by a major geo-political event such as Brexit. Although literature on the political dimensions of diaspora formation and mobilisation has established a transnational analysis, much of existing work remains organized around a polarised home-host country framework, both in terms of units of reference as well as politics. In these accounts nation-state as an origin of a diaspora and a gravity political structure is taken as a given, but migration research has long demonstrated the complexity of diasporas as groups whose heterogeneity and intersectionality challenge any fixed categorization, and which are better seen as transnational sites of struggle and fluidity. The case of the mobilisation of EU nationals in the UK post-Brexit displays such features, with European identity underpinning the general stance and ground of commonality, alongside national and regional identities fracturing this general stance, and claims of home and belonging to Britain adding to the complexity. Following the authors’ work on EU nationals’ political engagement and EU diaspora formation (Vathi and Trandafoiu 2020; forthcoming) this paper explores the way civic organizations have led the mobilisation of EU nationals at local, national and supranational level. Our findings demonstrate that this mobilisation combines bottom-up and top-down mobilisation strategies to engage with differently invested and politically-charged stakeholders that characterise the transnational political fields post-Brexit. Apart from multi-scalar dimensions of these civic organizations’ work and of the way EU nationals themselves engage, we identify different strategies of impact. These are inter-linked and performed in a non-linear fashion, and include: • emotionalizing (e.g. using metaphors or humour to express victimisation or resilience; offering wellbeing classes); • politicising (e.g. launching campaigns with relevant key words of the political discourse surrounding EU citizens’ rights; engaging the counterpart ‘British in Europe’); • channelling (e.g. triggering bottom-up engagement with MPs; establishing and increasing online membership of EU nationals and reaction of pro-EU bodies); • contesting (e.g. launching legal action against state institutions; documenting cases of discrimination). The findings are interpreted in relation to existing literatures, elaborating on the way diasporas mobilisation in the 21st century should be conceptualised, and their importance for stakeholder empowerment.