Brexit and the Death of Centrist Liberalism

Abstract This paper makes the argument that Brexit is one of a series of challenges to centrist liberalism taking place across the core nation-states of the modern world-system. Offering a world-systems analysis on Brexit it draws upon two key themes from it to analyse the meaning of Brexit for the geocultural ideology which has dominated the modern world-system since the French revolution, what Wallerstein called centrist liberalism. First it situates Brexit in the longue durée regarding the manufacture of the United Kingdom and the development of its unifying national culture. The colonial and imperialist history of the United Kingdom are foundational to its national culture and have generated an uneven and increasingly contested support for popular imperialism. Brexit is, therefore, presented as a reaction to the abandonment of the social compact that underpinned British national culture over the course of the late C19 and C20, driven by the transformation of British political economy through powerful neoliberal policies. Second, whilst acknowledging the unique nature of Brexit, the paper situates the UK as a part of the core of the modern world-system to argue that the meaning of Brexit has to be situated in the context of the ongoing transformation of the political economy of the core since 1979-80, and the political responses that this has generated.