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Lessons from Brexit for a Whole-of-Society approach

Dr Mary Martin, Senior Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science

First the earthquake. Now for the aftershocks. The ground moved decisively in the UK on 23rd June with the majority vote to leave the European Union. The result not only shifted the tectonic plates between Britain and the continent of Europe. It also exposed deep faultlines in British society: between young people who are largely pro-European and older people where the majority voted to leave; between the capital and the countryside; between England and Scotland, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and between those who have benefited from globalisation and the liberal international project, and those who feel it has left them behind in a post-industrial landscape scarred by economic and cultural insecurities. 

The result also fractured the UK's unwritten constitution. Direct democracy has trumped – at least for the moment -a tradition of representative democracy. A majority of the UK Parliament supports EU membership but it remains to be seen if and when this majority will dare challenge or modify what amounted to a howl of popular protest delivered against a political elite – residing both in Brussels and Westminster.

Such fissures exposed by the referendum will not easily be patched over. They also run deep across the Continental shelf. They have been evident in popular movements against austerity in Greece and Spain, which have upturned conventional politics and in rising Euroscepticism in France and the Netherlands. The UK vote underlined the risks of confronting divisions through the blunt tool of a referendum. Faced with an apparently straightforward decision to remain or leave, British voters responded with a complex cocktail of emotion, grievance and instrumental logic, which conflated multiple issues including immigration, the future of the National Health Service and a chronic housing shortage. Italy's plans to hold a referendum on constitutional reform later this year should take heed.

The UK vote was ostensibly about Britain's relations with Europe. In practice it revealed a crisis of internal politics. Divisions which underlie public opinion, and which threaten to destabilise hitherto calm social relations called into question the inclusivity of politics and policy-making. Inclusivity is not only relevant Inclusivity straddles the distinction. The warning sign hoisted by the UK vote reads ‘mind the gap' between decision-makers and the people.

If inclusivity is now the goal for the UK's new leadership as it scrambles to craft a post-Brexit future  , it is also relevant not just for other EU member states in their internal politics but in external relations as well.

In the WOSCAP project we have put forward a proposal that a ‘Whole-of-Society' perspective offers an opportunity to reset external actions by the EU in order to make these actions more effective, sustainable and legitimate.   By Whole-of -Society we mean taking into account the views of local communities at grass roots, acknowledging the dynamics of multiple relationships between people and policy makers and within civil society, and accommodating a broader range of stakeholders including marginalised groups and those like business and faith organisations which often exist outside the mainstream of traditional security policy-making.

A Whole-of-Society approach is more ambitious than a Whole-of-Government approach which aims to connect different policy domains, although it shares the same ideas about comprehensiveness , coherence and integrated action. It seeks to counter policy and social fragmentation and improve inclusivity, promote better use of resources and increase public goods. It also implies new modes of engagement between policy, policy-makers and people. It is about reaching out to wider constituencies of people, by rethinking the quality of policy design and implementation, processes of deliberation, consent and communication, and the nature of politics itself.  A ‘social capital' of peacebuilding needs to be created linking the broad  needs  of local populations, with multiple capacities to address them.

The Brexit vote showed how challenging such an ambition might be, particularly  in attempting to bridge divides in experience and expectations in societies which have become polarised not under conditions of violent conflict, but also in apparently settled western liberal democracies.  But Brexit also shows how necessary it is to recognise these divides and give people back a stake in politics, or to put it in the jargon of external intervention – to improve the local ownership of policies., in a real, not just a token way. This is true whether applied to domestic politics or foreign policy.

There may be other lessons for EU external action from Brexit.  British voters made it clear that Europe's record as a peace project on which its external action has been premised since the 1970s, counted for less than economics and did not compensate for a perceived loss of sovereignty and democratic accountability. How should we then assess the credibility and persuasive power of the European peace project in the wider world? Will the first exit of a member from the club  damage the pole of attraction the EU has sought to leverage in trade to crisis management with promises of membership and association agreements ?

The EU's Global Security Strategy launched a week after Brexit restates the EU's claims to be an autonomous and significant global actor in what it describes as a complex , contested and connected world. It attempts to cross a policy divide between internal and external security, stating that  "Internal and external security are ever more intertwined: our security at home depends on peace beyond our borders".

The refugee crisis and terrorist attacks inside Europe have brought home that traditional distinctions between what used to be labelled Justice and Home Affairs in EU policy – and external action is breaking down irrevocably . At a recent stakeholder roundtable organised by the WOSCAP project the European Institute for Peace described how it is canvassing views ion radical extremism among residents of  Brussels' Molenbeek district as part of its remit to foster global dialogues on peace and security. The challenge for EU foreign policy is to embark on a similar shift in thinking . This would move it away from a predominantly ‘inside-out' approach which seeks to apply European norms and policies to third countries, to an ‘outside-in' perspective, reflecting target country expectations, processes and cultures. Across Europe marginalised groups are lashing out against a politics which they see as exclusionary and high-handed. Human security, citizen security and a bottom -up, rather than an elite-only approach which emphasises local need are critical ingredients in countering this marginalisation, whether applied to domestic policies or external relations .

Finally, Brexit has conveyed an important message about the need to reinvest in rather than suppress politics and political debate, however uncomfortable or inconvenient this may be, particularly on sensitive topics such as migration in the European context or contentious governance reforms and justice issues in conflict-affected countries which are the targets of EU external action.  The founding fathers of the European (Coal and Steel) Community sought to defuse toxic nationalist politics with a technocratic model of governance. Western democracies in the past few decades have replaced traditional left-right axes and ideological positions with claims to managerial competence as the basis for election to office. Yet British voters on June 23rd ignored the transactional costs of leaving the EU in favour of a visceral expression of Euroscepticism which the Economist magazine described as "unmistakeably cultural; ineffably emotional".

It predicted that the debates unleashed by the UK vote would reshape politics for decades: "Where once the essential battle was capital versus labour, now it is open versus closed".

In EU peacebuilding and conflict prevention, the limits of managerial governance and the new salience of cultural politics may also be an emerging dynamic which needs to be recognised. In the WOSCAP project's review of peacebuilding interventions in four countries: Ukraine, Georgia, Yemen and Mali, there is evidence that the technical assistance approach, particularly as deployed  in SSR and governance programmes, avoids confronting deep issues of politics and culture, but this may come at the price reduced legitimacy and the achievement of sustainable reform.

 


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