An Introduction to the Brexit Special Issue: Why Did It Happen?

According to a legend that goes back hundreds of years, England will fall if the ravens who inhabit the Tower of London leave. The wings of those birds are clipped, to hopefully ensure that as the popular World War II song went, “There’ll Always Be an England.”

As we have learned this year, a majority of voters in the British Isles are not primarily concerned about preserving the United Kingdom that also includes Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Their concerns are individual: their jobs, their pocketbooks, their homes, their quality of life, their national identity. The majority in England and Wales apparently believed what the proponents of withdrawing from the EU told them: that Britain’s membership in the EU, and the role the UK it has played in the world, including being a destination and haven for immigrants, are responsible for the predicament many Britons feel they and their country are in.

While the outcome of the referendum came as a shock to many inside of Britain and around the world, psychohistorians, sociologists, political analysts, historians, and others believe the roots of the Brexit vote go back over generations and beyond. The English remain ambivalent about a close relationship with Europe, especially without the threat of the Nazis or Soviets. Within Britain there are also important class distinctions. As Nick Duffel writes in his paper in this issue, “Educating for Division: A View from Post-Brexit Britain,” the emotional brutality of the British educational system created distant and un-empathic leaders out of touch with the middle and lower classes.

The disaffection of many Britons left them vulnerable to the arguments of proponents of leaving the EU—“Leave” as the movement has come to be known, versus “Remain,” the campaign to stay within the European community. Peter Lange writes in his paper,

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“Regressive Modernism, Fear, and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom,” that leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump get their power from dire nationalist warnings, alarms sounded against particular groups of people, cultures, or countries. So, it appears, have Leave leaders.

For Paul Salstrom, the Brexit vote might have been inevitable because the UK, and beyond that, Europe, have long been divided by what he calls tribalism—the sharp divisions among countries and cultures. In “Democracy, Tribalism, and Political Visions,” he also draws parallels between the political climate in the United States and countries in Europe.

In the end, no matter what the reasons for the outcome were on a macro level, each voter had to cast a ballot with a heart, a mind or both. It was a struggle for many. Several contributors to this issue, including Juliana Dresvina, Alice Jorgenson, and Alex Woolf, have written poignantly but also analytically about the choices they and the people they know have made.

What now? What is the future of Britain and the countries that it comprises in an increasingly unsettled continent and world? This issue explores those questions as well.

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