The Art of Brexit

Abstract

AbstractBrexit is widely acknowledged as an important event in recent international relations (IR) and emblematic of polarization in Western societies. This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the two sides of the Brexit debate (Leave and Remain) have little in common and that the division of British society into entrenched Euroskeptic/Europhile camps neatly corresponds to cleavages between liberal “cosmopolitans” and conservative “nationals.” Rather, I show that “Euroskeptic” positions are also found in “Europhile” culture. I focus on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s popular and prolific “Art of” collection of miniseries (nearly 40 hours of programming over a decade), which offers a significant but hitherto unexplored archive. I explore this novel empirical material by combining interpretive research with a “societal multiplicity” framework, which overcomes the methodological nationalism of some Brexit analyses, to demonstrate that this seemingly cosmopolitan, liberal programming also reproduces tropes of “Anglo-British” chauvinistic exceptionalism. I argue that this exceptionalism (across the divides) contributed to a mode of societal differentiation that helped drive Brexit and will continue to affect Britain's options and preferences for interaction and combination with other states and societies. This provides theoretically informed empirical analysis of IR “where we least expect it” and shows the policy value of cultural IR.