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Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit
Taking Control argues that neither side in the Brexit debate really understood the European Union or what was involved in reclaiming Britain’s sovereignty. The EU is neither a supranational nanny state, nor an internationalist peace project. It is the means by which Europe’s elites transformed their own states in order to rule the void where representative politics used to be. Leaving the EU is a necessary but not sufficient step towards closing the chasm between rulers and ruled.
This book makes the democratic case for national sovereignty, arguing for a radical, forward-looking reconstitution of the British nation-state through strengthening representative democracy. It is essential for anyone who wonders why British politics is so dysfunctional and who wants to do better.
This book makes the democratic case for national sovereignty, arguing for a radical, forward-looking reconstitution of the British nation-state through strengthening representative democracy. It is essential for anyone who wonders why British politics is so dysfunctional and who wants to do better.
- GenresPolitics
282 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 6, 2023
2 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Philip Cunliffe
14 books9 followersPhilip Cunliffe is senior lecturer in international conflict at the University of Kent.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 28, 2023
The day the chairman of the BBC resigns after he admitted fixing a funding stream from a foreign donor to a British Tory Prime Minister for his leadership campaign seems like a good day to write a review of a book that does a sterling job of revealing the emergence of the elite supranational technocratic control that has replaced the democratic politics of the Westphalian nation-state. The authors’ fundamental message is that in the neoliberal era democracy has been hollowed out to be replaced by technocratic authoritarianism, and to throw off this yoke we must revive national sovereignty. To do so, they argue, we must build a set of public institutions and political movements through which we can find a shared identity and recover solidarity from our current state of hostile atomisation.
The red warning they provide here is that we will be unable to change our current catastrophic direction if we stick with supranational organizations such as the EU. The authors’ sophisticated and persuasive take on the EU – as neither a foreign superstate nor a benign federal association of nations – reveals how technocratic elites enforcing global neoliberal policies have in a relatively short space of time hollowed out nation-states that functioned as at least partial democracies. If we agree that partial democracy is better than no democracy at all, neoliberalism has used complex and at times rather mysterious institutions like the EU to widen and deepen the ‘void’ between supranational ruling elites and those who they govern. Such a thorough cleansing of democratic political institutions has consigned twentieth century social democratic and conservative politics to history’s dustbin, allowing Europe’s globally connected technocratic elites to govern the void where representative politics once stood in its shabby glory.
On the ideological-cultural front, the authors offer a political take on how liberals and leftists joined in with neoliberals to turn the nation-state and the populace – ‘gammon’, ‘xenophobes’ etc. – into our principal objects of fear. They show how the invective thrown at leave voters by remain voters from across the political spectrum reveals the gap between allegedly ‘educated’ liberal classes and those they condemn with neither empathy nor pause for thought as uneducated xenophobic nativists. The invective was so uniform, visceral and compulsive as to make their ‘education’ look more like a strange form of military-style liberal training in rules-based symbolic violence – what in the past I have described as ‘pseudo-pacification’. The authors argue that underneath all this hostile noise no real public debate between the two sides has occurred for decades, thus Brexit simply revealed how hollowed out, disempowered, meaningless and divisive British political institutions and conversations had become.
The anxious, technocratic-authoritarian and rather chaotic response to Covid revealed that the UK was still tangled up in what looked like a global rather than just a European technocratic order, a powerful mixture of multinational science, finance and corporations all nestling comfortably and profitably in neoliberalism’s project of establishing the market at the centre of its ‘rules-based international order’. The authors offer a robust argument here because they understand the crucial distinction between globalism and internationalism – undemocratic supranational technocratic control of thoroughly marketised territories versus rational agreements between independent nation-states. Sergey Lavrov’s recent address to the UN suggests that the rest of the world’s nations are warming to the idea of heading in the latter direction and thus pulling away from the West. Should this come to pass, it would indicate a genuine need for the West’s nations to restart the quest for democratic nationhood and true international cooperation on matters of finance, production and trade, otherwise they will find themselves badly isolated in the coming multipolar world. However, the current dismal scenario the authors outline for us here is that the bulk of the UK political class across neoliberalism’s heavily truncated spectrum remain committed to the continuing rule of the supranational technocratic elite – those who know best despite leading us from one crisis to the next for as long as anyone can remember. On the bright side, the authors also argue quite persuasively that the political class’s ideological grip on the population is weak, although they could have dug deeper into the problem of how this weakness is difficult to exploit because censorship has triggered rather outlandish forms of the sort of ‘conspiracy thinking’ that can misdirect left-wing and right-wing populism.
However, their central point is still persuasive – tied to Western-based globalist institutions that suffocate and override sovereignty and democratic accountability, nation-states cannot serve their populations. To restart genuine opposition, we need new political traditions, movements and parties, the return of open debate and a move towards genuine accountability and democratic authority. Overall, the book is short, accessible, informative and persuasive, and it covers the bases with a great deal of succinct explanatory power. It does have its flaws and omissions. It could have emphasized how democracy would be a genuine historical precedent and offered at least a couple of concrete suggestions of what the new politics might look like, or how they might combine tradition with novelty. It also suffered from a rather thin grasp of economics, how finance and credit have always been and always will be essential to growing economies, and how accountable economic management from the core of finance and investment is essential to all national societies that even dream of fairness and truncated inequality. Their grasp of psychosocial and cultural elements was also just a bit thin. For instance, they get the relationship between fear and atomisation the wrong way round – anxiety rather than fear is the bedrock of the human condition and the so-called ‘politics of fear’. Fear does not cause atomization because neoliberalism’s specific form of atomization – a prior process of economically functional social disintegration and competitive individualism working on primal anxiety to create imaginary hostile objects – causes or more precisely sets the probabilistic conditions for objectified fear. However, the authors can be forgiven for buying into this common misconception because the process invariably enters a feedback loop that makes the initial direction of causality rather difficult to discern. I must emphasize that these are personal quibbles. The authors are specialist political theorists and do acknowledge the limited scope of what is a thoroughly readable, accessible and forensically revealing account of the material they set out to cover. The book is essential reading for anyone frustrated by what looks like political inertia and interested in the forces currently preventing us from exercising some degree of genuine democratic political control over our destiny.
The red warning they provide here is that we will be unable to change our current catastrophic direction if we stick with supranational organizations such as the EU. The authors’ sophisticated and persuasive take on the EU – as neither a foreign superstate nor a benign federal association of nations – reveals how technocratic elites enforcing global neoliberal policies have in a relatively short space of time hollowed out nation-states that functioned as at least partial democracies. If we agree that partial democracy is better than no democracy at all, neoliberalism has used complex and at times rather mysterious institutions like the EU to widen and deepen the ‘void’ between supranational ruling elites and those who they govern. Such a thorough cleansing of democratic political institutions has consigned twentieth century social democratic and conservative politics to history’s dustbin, allowing Europe’s globally connected technocratic elites to govern the void where representative politics once stood in its shabby glory.
On the ideological-cultural front, the authors offer a political take on how liberals and leftists joined in with neoliberals to turn the nation-state and the populace – ‘gammon’, ‘xenophobes’ etc. – into our principal objects of fear. They show how the invective thrown at leave voters by remain voters from across the political spectrum reveals the gap between allegedly ‘educated’ liberal classes and those they condemn with neither empathy nor pause for thought as uneducated xenophobic nativists. The invective was so uniform, visceral and compulsive as to make their ‘education’ look more like a strange form of military-style liberal training in rules-based symbolic violence – what in the past I have described as ‘pseudo-pacification’. The authors argue that underneath all this hostile noise no real public debate between the two sides has occurred for decades, thus Brexit simply revealed how hollowed out, disempowered, meaningless and divisive British political institutions and conversations had become.
The anxious, technocratic-authoritarian and rather chaotic response to Covid revealed that the UK was still tangled up in what looked like a global rather than just a European technocratic order, a powerful mixture of multinational science, finance and corporations all nestling comfortably and profitably in neoliberalism’s project of establishing the market at the centre of its ‘rules-based international order’. The authors offer a robust argument here because they understand the crucial distinction between globalism and internationalism – undemocratic supranational technocratic control of thoroughly marketised territories versus rational agreements between independent nation-states. Sergey Lavrov’s recent address to the UN suggests that the rest of the world’s nations are warming to the idea of heading in the latter direction and thus pulling away from the West. Should this come to pass, it would indicate a genuine need for the West’s nations to restart the quest for democratic nationhood and true international cooperation on matters of finance, production and trade, otherwise they will find themselves badly isolated in the coming multipolar world. However, the current dismal scenario the authors outline for us here is that the bulk of the UK political class across neoliberalism’s heavily truncated spectrum remain committed to the continuing rule of the supranational technocratic elite – those who know best despite leading us from one crisis to the next for as long as anyone can remember. On the bright side, the authors also argue quite persuasively that the political class’s ideological grip on the population is weak, although they could have dug deeper into the problem of how this weakness is difficult to exploit because censorship has triggered rather outlandish forms of the sort of ‘conspiracy thinking’ that can misdirect left-wing and right-wing populism.
However, their central point is still persuasive – tied to Western-based globalist institutions that suffocate and override sovereignty and democratic accountability, nation-states cannot serve their populations. To restart genuine opposition, we need new political traditions, movements and parties, the return of open debate and a move towards genuine accountability and democratic authority. Overall, the book is short, accessible, informative and persuasive, and it covers the bases with a great deal of succinct explanatory power. It does have its flaws and omissions. It could have emphasized how democracy would be a genuine historical precedent and offered at least a couple of concrete suggestions of what the new politics might look like, or how they might combine tradition with novelty. It also suffered from a rather thin grasp of economics, how finance and credit have always been and always will be essential to growing economies, and how accountable economic management from the core of finance and investment is essential to all national societies that even dream of fairness and truncated inequality. Their grasp of psychosocial and cultural elements was also just a bit thin. For instance, they get the relationship between fear and atomisation the wrong way round – anxiety rather than fear is the bedrock of the human condition and the so-called ‘politics of fear’. Fear does not cause atomization because neoliberalism’s specific form of atomization – a prior process of economically functional social disintegration and competitive individualism working on primal anxiety to create imaginary hostile objects – causes or more precisely sets the probabilistic conditions for objectified fear. However, the authors can be forgiven for buying into this common misconception because the process invariably enters a feedback loop that makes the initial direction of causality rather difficult to discern. I must emphasize that these are personal quibbles. The authors are specialist political theorists and do acknowledge the limited scope of what is a thoroughly readable, accessible and forensically revealing account of the material they set out to cover. The book is essential reading for anyone frustrated by what looks like political inertia and interested in the forces currently preventing us from exercising some degree of genuine democratic political control over our destiny.
May 24, 2024
I appreciated the authors' defense of sovereignty & democracy & would've preferred four theoretical chapters on that rather than a partisan Brexit history, but their proposals to Brexit from the UK, NATO, & the remnants of the British empire are much appreciated, yet their desire to deny sovereignty & democracy to Scotland & Wales much less so
September 10, 2023
A partial account of Brexit, that evades many of the difficult issues and represents a theoretical regression from the authors previous unorthodox Trotskyist Marxism https://bit.ly/3Le2Oa6
August 31, 2023
Bracing, awkward, radical reassessment of Britain's post-Brexit dilemma from a group of grumpy lefties. The authors are contemptuous of self-righteous remainers and deluded leavers alike. Neither, they say, understands the terms of the dispute, the context of the 'sovereignty revolt' and the failure of Britain's democratic institutions that produced it.
It'll probably wind you up in more places than one but you might find yourself reassessing your own position on this conjunction - its risks, its potential, the urgency of a democratic re-alignment.
The book is the outcome of an online project called the Full Brexit and two of the authors contribute to the excellent and increasingly influential Bungacast podcast and co-wrote the book The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, another terrific read.
It'll probably wind you up in more places than one but you might find yourself reassessing your own position on this conjunction - its risks, its potential, the urgency of a democratic re-alignment.
The book is the outcome of an online project called the Full Brexit and two of the authors contribute to the excellent and increasingly influential Bungacast podcast and co-wrote the book The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, another terrific read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews