As the Vote Leave slogan, “Take Back Control”, suggested, the overt meaning of the project for British exit from the EU, developed by the British right-wing over a quarter of a century, was a nationalist attempt to recover autonomous sovereign power for the UK state from its enmeshment in the shared sovereignty of EU legal and state institutions. “Regaining” sovereignty was also the most widely acknowledged motivation for voting Leave in 2016 (Centre for Social Investigation 2018), but since restricting immigration – long described as immigration “control” – was not only the second most popular reason for voting Leave but also (as we shall see in Chapter 4) the dominant way in which regaining sovereignty was justified by the Leave campaigns and the Brexit press, the majority for Brexit was both widely informed and in its narrow margin (51.9 versus 48.1 per cent) probably also decided by anti-immigration politics. While racism and hostility to immigration did not define Brexit as a project or process, they are central to understanding it, and no serious appraisal can avoid comprehensively examining their relationships to its overtly dominant nationalist theme. This I do over three chapters: this chapter discusses the ideas behind Brexit and the Eurosceptic/Europhobic campaign in the decades up to 2016; Chapter 4 analyses the referendum itself; and Chapter 5 examines the Brexit process and conflict following the referendum, between 2016 and the UK's formal exit in 2020.

British nationalism, Atlanticism and Europe

The movement for Brexit is part of a wider tendency towards economic and political nationalism in powerful states in the twenty-first century, which has increasingly threatened international cooperation. In this sense, Brexit can be compared to other policies, especially but by no means only of authoritarian regimes; but as the only secession from the unique international state entity which is the European Union, it is also very distinctive. Likewise, Euroscepticism is a major European political current and exists in most member states, but nowhere else has a Europhobic movement become dominant or come close to producing withdrawal from the EU; indeed, so far the British experience has acted as a deterrent rather than an incentive to others. Geopolitical repositioning linked to changes in ruling parties and regimes can also be found elsewhere, but Brexit is unique in its simultaneous transformation of international and domestic constitutional arrangements.