Conflicting Sovereignties and the Sustainability of the Brexit State

Abstract

Member states are organised for membership of the European Union. In contrast, the Brexit state will be a form of state organised for not being a member of the EU. It will need to do enough to recover sovereign control of the UK’s laws, borders and money to count as delivering on the 2016 referendum. It will need to review those parts of the UK political and legal order that depend on EU membership either discarding them or giving them some other foundation. It will need to decide between conflicting visions and ideologies of Brexit, as well as different ways of being a European democracy that is not a member of the EU. This chapter identifies four likely sovereignty conflicts within the British state. First between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. Second between constitutional and parliamentary sovereignty. Third between the sovereignty of the UK parliament and the sovereignty of the parliaments and peoples of the UK. Fourth, conflicts between a rejection implicit in important versions of Brexit of sovereignty pooling and a need to pool sovereignty to deal with externalities such as climate change, pandemics, mass migration, arms racing and a financial system free of systemic risk. Without some means of pooling sovereignty to deal with those and other externalities, democracies such as the UK will struggle to meet their most basic obligations to their own publics to secure rights, justice, welfare and democracy. Hence, even after Brexit—perhaps especially after Brexit—the external pooling of sovereignty is likely to remain a source of sovereignty conflicts within the UK. All four sovereignty conflicts might matter less if the Brexit state had more robust democratic procedures that are not themselves vulnerable to disagreement for resolving internal sovereignty disagreements .