Brexit: A Note on the EU's Interlegality

Abstract

This study argues that Brexit is as much an internal UK crisis of law, identity politics and democracy as it is the EU crisis of integration. Does Brexit bring us a new insight into how the legal order of the EU and its Member States are interrelated? Does it throw a new light on the EU law’s ability to produce a sense of collective European identity and solidarity which transcends national borders and unite the cultural fragments which constitute its Member States? Using the notion of “interlegality,” and the cartographic mechanisms of “scale,” “projection” and “symbolisation,” this study draws attention to how EU laws and policies become inevitably distorted as they pass between legal spaces which are shaped by different scales of regulation. However, Brexit shows that these distortions do not on their own provide sufficient explanation for either the failure of the EU integration policies in respect to the UK or the success of the Leave Campaign in the 2016 referendum. To understand the double crisis which Brexit represents, we need to explore how the EU’s interlegality is shaped by the imbalance of power and authority which permeates the hierarchical structure of the EU. The paper ends by arguing that to minimise the excessive distortions and to maximise the integrative potential of EU law, we need to envisage the EU’s interlegality outside its existing hierarchy of sources of power which create a primarily top-down flow of legal authority.