The social structure of Brexit and the crisis of globalisation

Abstract

Despite much protracted debate, there is still no consensus among social scientists as to why a majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union in June 2016. This paper constructs a sociology of Brexit and seeks to interpret the fractious constellations on either side of the Brexit disjuncture. Taking as its point of the departure the resurgence of sociological interest in class in the wake of Brexit and with the rise of right-wing populisms in recent years, the paper argues for a compositional, intersectional and historically dynamic class analysis of Brexit’s political fault-lines within the context of Britain’s neoliberal restructuring. An analytical framework is proposed with which to explain how neoliberal globalisation has transformed British society and its concomitant class relations, accounting for the disarticulation of previous political allegiances. The paper explains the Brexit vote in terms of central social-structural components, including class, ethnicity, geographical region, age, and educational attainment. It is argued that the vote in 2016 to leave the European Union is best interpreted as a residue of a post-war class compromise, while the vote to remain in the European Union reflects a class constellation recomposed by neoliberal globalisation, which is unstable and in crisis. The article concludes with a discussion of the overall implications of the argument presented for a sociological reading of Brexit.