Brexit and the
misunderstanding of sovereignty
by Peter Verovšek on 9th
December 2020 @PeterVerovsek
While the negotiators haggle over a
deal to avoid a new-year car crash, the fundamental problem is the obsolete
notion of sovereignty held in London.
Peter Verovšek
Twenty-twenty has been a difficult
year by any measure. While the impacts of the coronavirus and the blockage of the European Union’s rescue package by
Hungary, Poland and Slovenia over protection of the rule of law have dominated the headlines,
the issue that will likely have the most lasting effect on Europe’s future is
‘Brexit’. The saga of the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU, which has dragged
on for four and a half years since the referendum in June 2016, will finally
end on January 1st, after which the EU will treat the UK as a non-member.
From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic
centrality of fishing—which makes up less
than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over
the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but
understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic,
English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived.
Co-operation of partners
Traditionally, sovereignty referred
to the ability of a state to make decisions about events within its borders
without external inference. Globalisation has however progressively robbed
individual states in isolation of control over their economic affairs. Global
manufacturing and commerce increasingly depend on the co-operation of trading
partners, to ensure goods pass across borders and are accepted for sale in
foreign markets. From this perspective, free-trade agreements and institutions
such as the EU’s single market do not reflect a loss but a pooling of
sovereignty: control is extended beyond the boundaries of the state.
Even within global politics
sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make
arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’,
while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human
rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and
interests of the population, not control.
The understanding of sovereignty
propounded by the UK government is mindless of these global developments. The
success of ‘take back control,’ the key slogan of the
Leave campaign in 2016, lay not only in the outdated idea that sovereignty is
the capacity of a state to make unfettered decisions within its borders—an idea
that particularly a post-imperial state might be inclined to entertain—but,
within that, the singularly English conception of parliamentary sovereignty.
‘Westminster model’
The key feature of the ‘Westminster
model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law.
Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote;
Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can
override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could
even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.
In this conception, the problem with
the EU is that its treaties, with their protections of human rights and market
freedoms, limit the UK’s legislative freedom by quasi-constitutional
constraints which ‘no Act of the UK Parliament by itself can amend’.
For David Frost, the UK’s chief negotiator,
‘Sovereignty is about the ability to get
your own rules right in a way that suits our [sic] own conditions.’
This vision explains why the UK
negotiators reject any compulsory mechanism for conflict-resolution, whether in
the form of non-regression clauses or via entities
outside of Parliament’s control, such as the Court of Justice of the EU. It also
clarifies the brazen repudiation of international law contained
in the Internal Market Bill, which gives the UK the
right unilaterally to break the legally binding withdrawal agreement it signed with the
EU a little over a year ago.
As Nicholas Westcott points out, this view of sovereignty is
‘closer to that used by North Korea than to that of any other free-trading
western nation’. In addition to the rights violations it enables, it also fails
to distinguish between theoretical and effective control. In prioritising
absolute internal legislative freedom, it sacrifices the effective protection
of British interests which membership in the EU offered by giving the UK a vote
on conditions in her main export markets, as well as in international affairs.
Seat at the table
The counterintuitive result is that
Brexit actually reduces Britain’s effective control in a misguided attempt to
increase it: sovereignty is about having a seat at the table. In addition are
the envisaged negative impacts on living standards in the UK as well as the EU, albeit to a lesser degree.
Given all this, the European public
can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central-
and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a
similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson
without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will
be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous
environment, in Europe and around the world.
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About Peter Verovšek
Peter J
Verovšek is an assistant professor of politics / international relations at the
University of Sheffield. His work focuses on 20th-century continental political
thought, critical theory, collective memory and European politics. He is the
author of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in
the Wake of Total War (Manchester University Press, 2020).
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