Beyond the English? The UK’s Pluri-National Euroscepticism

A central argument of this book is that the ongoing crisis of Britishness is fundamental to understanding contemporary Euroscepticism. In this chapter, we develop this theme by turning our attention to the idea of the UK as a contested multi-national polity and its co-deterministic relationship to Euroscepticism. If, as Ben Wellings has argued in Chapter 2, a British state ‘awkwardness’ has been replaced by a populist English nationalism as the organizing principle of UK-EU relations, then this raises fundamental questions for the other nations and polities of the UK: Is UK-based Euroscepticism an inherently English ‘problem’? How and in what ways are other national positions within the UK on Europe being represented? And is English Euroscepticism further fuelling secessionism from the UK across its other nations? We explore these questions in this chapter pointing to both the opportunities and challenges that Euroscepticism poses for representative politics in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Moreover, we consider the extent to which a strand of British Euroscepticism remains durable and distinctive, thus not reducible to an English variant supplemented by other different national manifestations.