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55 J. Common Mkt. Stud. 38 (2017)
Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion

handle is hein.journals/jcmks55 and id is 1509 raw text is: JCMS 2017 Volume 55. Annual Review pp. 38-53 Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion* CATHERINE E. DE VRIES University of Essex The British are ofcourse testing us, we all know that. They are testing how united Europe actually is. So what is important is that Europe stays together Vice-President of the European People's Party, David McAllister, 19 November 2016.1 Introduction On 23 June 2016, by a small majority the British population voted to leave the European Union (EU), a decision that shocked the political establishment in London, Brussels and beyond. Immediately after the vote, the pound fell sharply as uncertainty among investors about Britain's economic future started to grow. Politically, the situation was not much different. Not only did Prime Minister David Cameron resign, but the referendum result unmasked deep divisions between different regions and amongst the constituent components of the United Kingdom as well as within the two major political forces in Westminster, the Conservative and Labour parties. The new Prime Minister Theresa May was confronted with the daunting task of negotiating British withdrawal from the EU whilst keeping her party and country together at a time when the exact economic costs of Brexit are still highly uncertain. The British economy initially weathered the vote and its immediate aftermath better than expected, perhaps in part because of the May government's decision to delay the triggering of Article 50. Yet, long-term assessments of a post-Brexit British economy are less rosy.2 Although the reasons behind Britain's decision to quit the EU have sparked off ample scholarly interest already (Clarke et al., 2017; Goodwin and Heath, 2016; Hobolt, 2016), the consequences of the vote for public support for the EU and the future of the European project have received less attention in the scholarly literature. Speculation among politicians and pundits has moved in two directions. Some suggest that the Brexit vote might turn out to be a unifying moment for Europe. The political paralysis that emerged from the fundamentally different viewpoints in the European bloc about how to tackle the * I would like to thank the editors of the JCMS Annual Review, especially Tim Haughton, for excellent comments on an earlier draft as well as Sara Hobolt, Christina Schneider, Hector Solaz and Stefanie Walter for insightful discussions about the arguments presented here more generally. 1 The Guardian, 19 November 2016. 2 See, for example, the findings of a survey conducted among economists about the long-term costs of Brexit in the Financial Times, 7 January 2017. 2017 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12579

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