European Boundaries in Question by Richard Bellamy & Kalypso Nicolaidis

Author:Richard Bellamy & Kalypso Nicolaidis [Bellamy, Richard & Nicolaidis, Kalypso]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138576780
Google: AOt2tAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39230867
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-12T08:48:00+00:00

5. Conclusions

This article has necessarily been quite synoptic in its approach; at the time of writing uncertainty about the Brexit process was rife in all matters, not just in relation to the challenge of protecting the acquired rights of EU citizens or facilitating an effective response to Scotland’s ‘difference’.

At the heart of Weale’s democracy-based contestation of Brexit was the argument that the referendum itself was not a rupture (Weale 2017). Debate and deliberation must continue, for example, on the terms of Brexit as they will apply to the UK, its citizens, its residents and its component nations and regions (Eleftheriadis 2017). Those who argue that Brexit will cause harm must be allowed to express that view, just as those who have positions of responsibility in relation to its pursuit must be permitted to pursue what they believe to be in the best interests of the UK (Renison 2017). This fits well the model of demoi-cracy.

I have sought to show in this article how reconceiving the complex set-ups of both the EU and the UK in demoi-cratic terms highlights the challenges of reconciling the interests of different communities defined by citizenship and territorial differentiation. There are difficult questions to be asked about both the pre- and the post-referendum processes when we consider the differential impacts of Brexit upon various groups of citizens and non-citizens, within, without and across the UK and its various constitutionally defined territories. That is not to say that holding a referendum under the terms of UK law was somehow illegitimate or undemocratic (cf. Rostbøll and Olsen, forthcoming). On the contrary, exit rights can be defended on grounds of legitimacy (Francis 2017). But the questions asked in this article do shine a different light upon the referendum debate and legal framing. The standard taxonomies of EU law do not provide clear answers. But nor does the UK’s current constitutional framework, given the incoherence of a system based partly on notions of devolution and territorial autonomy and partly on notions of (central) parliamentary sovereignty. It was the absence of any simple answers that motivated the critical enquiry into the normative potential of demoi-cracy, in an endeavour to see how best to ensure the autonomy and equality of these interrelated publics. There is no constitutional principle of UK law that prohibits the UK from removing the status, and protection, of EU citizenship from both UK citizens (wherever) and those who are currently resident in the UK as EU citizens but who become third country nationals in the UK on Brexit day. EU citizenship is not an Arendtian ‘right to have rights’ that somehow transcends the limitations of a treaty concluded between sovereign state actors. But one way forward is to argue that demoi-cracy triggers a number of duties incumbent on political actors, as they take the referendum vote forward, in order to guard against the illegitimate domination of one demos by others (Bellamy 2013). These are different – and additional too – the duties of Member States to each other, as argued by Lord (Forthcoming).

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