Brexit: Misunderstanding Sovereignty
The question of sovereignty lay at the heart of the United Kingdom’s EU membership referendum of 2016. Pro-Brexit advocates, popularly called Leavers, wished for the UK to “take back control” from the EU governments and bureaucrats. This position was best articulated by David Frost, the UK government’s chief Brexit negotiator from 2020 until his resignation in 2021, in a speech in February 2020:
“Some argue that sovereignty is a meaningless construct in the modern world, that what matters is sharing it to gain more influence over others. So we take the opposite view. We believe that sovereignty is meaningful and what it enables us to do is to set our rules for our own benefit. ... [That] is the point of the whole project” (Frost, 2020).
But what is the sovereignty that these Leavers strove to secure, and why might others deem it illusory?
Source: Financial Times, 2016
The answer lies in the distinction between de jure and de facto sovereignty. The former is the narrow view held by the Leavers, wherein sovereignty refers to the UK’s legal or formal right to control its borders, its money, and its laws. Leavers fancied a new “Golden Age” for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, free from the so-called shackles of the EU.
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Brexit: Misunderstanding Sovereignty
Their campaign was centred around cutting back immigration resulting from free movement of peo- ple within the EU, redirecting money spent on the EU budget to increase funding for the NHS, and ending the supremacy of EU law.
On the other hand, de facto sovereignty alludes to the effective autonomy of a state in internal and external matters. Formal sovereignty must not be confused with effective autonomy — there is no guarantee that a de jure sovereign United Kingdom is able, de facto, to prevent external influences from shaping its internal processes and decision-making.
Yes, EU membership inevitably eroded the UK’s formal sovereignty. However, EU members willingly accept reductions in de jure sovereignty for the purpose of improving citizens’ welfare and advancing state interests. This was the case for the United Kingdom as well: it chose to join the then-European Economic Community in 1973 - despite shunning it in the 1950s for fear of it encroaching on state control - to remedy the country’s economic woes and increase international political influence.
The UK’s arrangement with the EU was based on economic, social, and cultural interrelation- ships that intentionally lessened its formal sovereignty, but this was not so much a violation of sovereignty as a cooperative agreement that enhanced progress and autonomy in a broader sense. As an EU member state, successive UK governments have worked with and within the EU to achieve national objectives that they could not have realised by themselves, such as creating the single market, expanding the EU, constraining Iran’s nuclear programme, and helping to devise a bold EU climate change strategy.
Considering all these successes, what objectives, other than the Leavers’ yearning for a superficial on-paper sovereignty, has Brexit truly achieved?
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Paree Desai
Source: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2018
Prior to Brexit, apart from the EU free movement immigration policy, the UK Government was able to dictate the vast majority of policy over matters of utmost importance to constituents, including health, welfare, monetary policy, pensions, education, and defence. More significantly, the UK government controlled approximately 98% of its public expenditure, a fact that was curiously glossed over in the Leavers’ arguments (Niblett, 2016).
Instead, a central component of the Leavers’ campaign misled the public by claiming that the UK contributed £360 million per week to the EU budget, a sum that would supposedly be freed up after Brexit and used to increase funding for public services like the NHS (Reuters, 2018). A crucial piece of information that the Leavers failed to mention was that this figure was merely a theoretical estimate of gross contribution. The UK’s net contribution to the EU, which includes grants and rebates from the EU to the UK, was £181 million a week. Thus, the UK truly only “took back control” of half the amount of money that was promised.
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Brexit: Misunderstanding Sovereignty
Source: Independent, 2017
Furthermore, the damage to the national economy due to Brexit far outweighs the gain from not contributing to the EU budget. A recent study modelled the economy of a doppelgänger UK that did not leave the EU and compared its results to the current situation (Springford, 2022). It revealed that for the second quarter of 2022, UK’s GDP was 5.5% lower than that of the doppelgänger UK. Similarly, investment and goods trade were reduced by 11% and 7% respectively. The OECD has also calculat- ed that the UK will record the lowest growth in 2023 of all the G20 countries except Russia, whose economy is being drained by its war on Ukraine. This is a substantial downgrade for a state whose GDP per capita between 1973 and 2016 grew faster than the two other largest EU economies, France and Germany, and also surpassed growth in the US (Hendry et al., 2016. So “taking back control” has not served the national economic interest.
Not only has the United Kingdom suffered a massive economic setback, but in return it has also not really achieved complete autonomy to set its own rules. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) which replaced the provisions of the EU integrated market has been distinct from EU law at the cost of a shallow trade agreement. The TCA removes tariffs in UK-EU trade, but has been rather unsuccessful in negotiating regulatory barriers. For example, trade in financial services requires the acceptance of the EU financial services rulebook and the role of European supervisory authorities (Eeckhout, 2022). The Leavers’ desire to “take back control” and the EU’s desire to maintain control resulted in what is essentially a no-deal in financial services. Not only is this more detrimental to the UK than to the EU, but it also shows that Brexit did not give the UK more power to set its own rules with respect to the EU. Another instance where the TCA is constrained by the EU is through non-regression clauses for environmental, labour, and social standards.
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While these standards do not explicitly mention EU law, it is obvious that they are based on them. If the UK relaxes regulations in those matters, the EU can retaliate. If the UK fails to keep pace with new EU regulations, the TCA can be revisited. What this means for the UK is that it must follow EU standards, but it no longer has a seat at the table when new regulations are decided upon — in this case, an increase in UK’s de jure sovereignty has led to a decrease in its de facto sovereignty.
Besides economic and trade issues, Brexit has created great instability within the four regions (Eng- land, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) that make up the UK. Relations between the central government based in England and the other 3 territories have always been tumultuous. By going through with Brexit, the UK government overrode the will of the people of Scotland and Northern Ireland, the majority of which voted to remain in the EU during the 2016 Brexit referendum. This resulted in increased calls in the two regions for independence from the UK; opinion polls fluctuated around the 50% mark of remaining in or leaving the Union (Rycroft, 2022). As a consequence, the state of the Union is fragile and there is potential for internal conflict in the coming years, which also translates to decreased internal political autonomy. Thus, by not accounting for the fact that the achievement of de jure sovereignty would create tension within the UK, Brexit has once again harmed the UK’s de facto sovereignty.
Source: New Statesman, 2019
To conclude, this article has not comprehensively analysed each and every consequence of Brexit, but it has made it clear that Brexit was easier in rhetoric than in reality. Brexit is largely the achievement of worthless paper sovereignty at the cost of economic and political interests and autonomy.
