Abstract
The article focuses on the reasons of Brexit that are related to disintegration processes in the European Union, which are caused by crises in Europe, such as the migration crisis, slowing economic growth in the Euro zone, the growing debt crisis in Southern Europe etc. The article also analyzes the impact of some consequences of the European integration on the British decision to leave the European Union. In particular, the article examines deepening the European integration and the gradual transformation of the EU into a union that is increasingly reminiscent of a federal state, as a factor that prompted British Eurosceptics to actively campaign for Brexit. The bureaucracy and the lack of a mechanism for the direct election of the European Commission and other European supranational institutions in Brussels is also examined in the article as one of the factors of Britain’s exit from the EU. The article demonstrates that during Britain’s membership in the European Union, the problem of mass labor migration from the countries of Central-Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom was one more factor that affected the growing Euroscepticism in the country and made the electorate to vote for Breit. The article examines Brexit in the context of the European disintegration processes and compares Britain with some other European countries, which, like the United Kingdom, are quite reluctant to deepen European integration, but unlike Britain are unlikely to consider such a radical step as exit from the EU. The author concludes that the crisis in continental Europe had a decisive influence on Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, although at the same time Brexit would not have happened without the impact of British domestic policy factors. The internal political reasons for Brexit are not discussed in detail in the article, as its main focus is on the foreign policy factors related to Britain’s reaction on the problems of continental Europe, such as the mass labor migration, the policy of supranational European institutions in Brussels, which is not always effective and agreed with London, and economic inequality between the countries of Southern and Central-Eastern Europe and their partners from Northern and Western Europe.
Highlights
Euroskepticism is the European catchword for skepticism about the European Union.1 Our attempt at understanding Euroskepticism is driven by its policy relevance
We aim to contribute to the literature by further shedding light on this issue by answering the following questions: How stable are the trends from the past in explaining Euroskepticism? What is the relation between negative financial expectations and Euroskepticism? And are there differences between Western and postcommunist EU member states? To our knowledge there is no article that analyzes differences in the relation between utilitarian considerations and Euroskeptic attitudes in post-communist and Western EU countries during the crisis period by using the transmission mechanism of negative financial expectations
The results support our approach by showing that negative financial expectations have a highly significant positive effect on Euroskepticism in the Western EU countries, but a non-significant negative effect on Euroskepticism in the post-communist countries
Summary
Euroskepticism is the European catchword for skepticism about the European Union. Our attempt at understanding Euroskepticism is driven by its policy relevance. We analyze Euroskepticism formation by following the utilitarian explanatory approach In this approach individual attitudes are driven by socio-economic background variables such as gender, age, education, profession, and the degree of urbanization, as well as macro-economic variables pertaining to the country, namely GDP per capita, unemployment, inflation, income distribution and transfers from or to the EU. Before the Great Recession that started in 2007, the rising income inequality within the “old” European Union has been suggested as an important driver of the increase in Euroskepticism (Kuhn et al, 2014). This is in line with the concerns about the rise in inequality expressed in the broad public debate about the recent book by Piketty (2014). Re-examining the data for the comprehensive period of 2006 to 2011 for the EU-27 countries, we cannot confirm that higher
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