Quiet unity: salience, politicisation and togetherness in the EU’s Brexit negotiating position

Kyriazi, Anna, Altiparmakis, Argyrios, Ganderson, Joseph ORCID: 0000-0002-5775-6349 and Miró, Joan (2023) Quiet unity: salience, politicisation and togetherness in the EU’s Brexit negotiating position. West European Politics. ISSN 0140-2382

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Abstract

A surprising feature of Brexit has been the united front the EU-27 presented during post-referendum negotiations. This membership crisis arrived when the EU had been facing multiple overlapping political and economic crises revealing deep cleavages both between and within member states. How did negotiations prevent a widening politicisation of European integration? In this article a novel dataset is used, containing national and European newspaper Brexit coverage between 2016 and 2020 to establish how negotiating stances were formed in key EU institutions and five influential member states: Ireland, Spain, France, Germany and Poland. The results indicate that the European Commission could maintain a strong, centralised negotiating position over Brexit because the preferences of these member states were mutually inclusive, their negotiating stances aligned, and each national case was subject to generally low levels of domestic politicisation. As a result, while Brexit shocked the EU, its immediate fallout could be contained even during uncertain times.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/fwep20
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Authors
Divisions:	European Institute
Subjects:	J Political Science > JZ International relations J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2023 12:00
Last Modified:	25 Apr 2024 16:45
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/120643

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