La mobilisation militante contre le Brexit et son impact sur le sentiment pro-européen au Royaume-Uni, du référendum de 2016 à la fin des négociations sur la sortie de l’UE. Le cas de Liverpool for Europe.

Abstract

In June 2016, British voters chose to leave the European Union. However, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum results, the United Kingdom witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon: the mobilisation of pro- European activists. The Remain campaign, which was chiefly led by amateur local groups with little political experience, to some extent rekindled (or indeed gave birth to) a relative enthusiasm for the European Union. However, their goal was shattered on 30 January 2020, when the UK officially left the EU, an event that revealed both a lack of support from the political parties and the dysfunctionality of the campaign itself. The weak resonance of pro-European discourse among public opinion and the strong prevalence of Euroscepticism in UK political life since the late 1980s have revealed vindictive and intransigent successive conservative governments. This thesis aims to analyse the driving forces behind this mobilisation as pro-EU activism has received little academic attention. More broadly, it studies what drives, defines and sustains the pro-European movement in the United Kingdom. Our analysis is based on a diachronic study of the ambiguous attitude of the United Kingdom and of British political parties towards European integration. It examines, how, even though the pro-European movement shares some of the theoretical foundations of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, its militant nature clearly sets it apart from these and earlier pro-European campaigns. Finally, with the support of fieldwork data collected from 2017 to 2021, the case study, centred on a sample pro-European group, Liverpool for Europe, will be at the heart of our reflection. While both Liverpool for Europe and the pro-European movement more generally have clearly failed to reach and influence the political sphere in the UK, they have nonetheless provided a channel of expression and refuge for those who care about Europe and European integration.

Date of Award	5 Dec 2023
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Sponsors	University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Supervisor	Martin J Hurcombe (Supervisor) & Vincent Latour (Supervisor)