Exit and Voice at the Cosmopolitan-Communitarian Cleavage: Challenges for European polity maintenance after Brexit

This paper considers the implications of Brexit for the wider EU polity, arguing that while Brexit has been discursively compartmentalised by European actors, it nonetheless has a broader significance that should not be ignored. The 2016 referendum in the UK crystallised a secular realignment in voter preferences around three new dimensions: intergenerational, regional and educational, each of which has become more strongly predictive of political attitudes than conventional measures of socio-economic class. Taken together, these realignments indicate the presence of a macro cleavage between cosmopolitan and communitarian conceptions of British and European identity, of which Brexit is just one consequence. This macro cleavage is not unique to the UK, and to the extent that it reflects ongoing shifts in the political structuring of the European polity, it has the potential to erupt elsewhere. The paper considers the prospects for such eruptions and the extent to which the British experience of this cleavage is generalisable, suggesting that while Britain’s choice of exit over voice reflected certain local contingencies, the underlying cleavage ensures that membership crises of a different order, pursued through voice rather than exit, are likely.