The Nested Games of Brexit

This book offers a novel perspective on the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, providing insights to the ways in that domestic concerns interact with European policy to produce sometimes counter-intuitive outcomes. The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both political parties in the UK. This innovative volume considers the extent to which the interrelation between the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for reshaping political action. The nesting of these two levels matters, firstly in allowing for the mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly, in explaining why seemingly unimportant or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have fundamental impacts on the first order's preferences. Bringing together scholars from a wide range of approaches and covering various aspects of the Brexit process, this book offers a significant contribution to improving our understanding of an event that will shape British and European politics for a generation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

Agnès Alexandre-Collier is Professor of British Politics at the Université de Bourgogne, France. Pauline Schnapper is Professor of British Politics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. Simon Usherwood is Professor of Politics & International Relations at the Open University, United Kingdom.

Introduction - The nested games of the UK's EU referendum: ruptures, reconfigurations and lessons for Europe 1. Brexit and Trump: contesting new cleavage formation 2. Brexit, nationalism and disintegration in the European Union and the United Kingdom 3. Labour and the Interplay of Brexit and Electoral Politics 4. Post-Brexit nationalism: challenging the British political tradition? 5. Theresa May, the Brexit negotiations and the two-level game, 2017-2019 6. From UKIP to the Brexit party: the politicization of European integration and disruptive impact on national and European arenas 7. The post-referendum reconfigurations of conservative cleavages around black and Asian minority ethnic MPs 8. Northern Ireland and Brexit: where sovereignty and stability collide? 9. Disintegration reversed: Brexit and the cohesiveness of the EU27