A Brexit from Britain or Europe? An assessment of identifications with Europe among British expats living in the Netherlands Theodore P Stell 5783755 MA International Relations in Historical Perspective GKMV16017 MA Thesis June 2019 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell (Cover Photo: Source – Creative Commons) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my supervisor Marloes Beers for all of her academic guidance; as well as a very big thank you to Eli van Dantzig, for all of his help, motivation and mind-mapping, from the project’s very beginnings right to its end, especially during the many hours of proofreading. I must of course thank all of my British expat interview participants. This project really would not have been possible without you. I thank you for your time and hope that my words reflect your stories well and may also offer interesting new perspectives. Page 2 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell ABSTRACT The majority of studies concerning the UK’s Brexit have focused on its impacts on the UK domestic population. However, Brexit is much more than a domestic issue; it is also a unique occurrence in EU history that a member state leaves the EU for the first time. For the 785,000 British expatriates living in the continental EU, Brexit entails the first ever en-masse loss of European citizenship. This may consequent a choice between Britain and Europe, between national and supranational identities. European identity has long been contested, but if expats from the most Eurosceptic EU member state come to feel more European than British, Brexit may prove to be a litmus test for the existence of just such a European identity. As such, this current study asked in what ways the Brexit process of February 2016 to March 2019 had affected identifications with Europe of British expats living in the Netherlands. The study used a case study of the Netherlands, interviewing a diverse sample of twelve British expats. The interviews used a novel, narrative, semi-structured approach, which guided expats through their responses to four main events of the Brexit process in order to track changes to their connections with the UK, connections with Europe and practical connections (housing, employment, finance). The interviews were each about an hour long and conducted between March and April 2019. The study’s results corroborated previous work on Brexit and expats, finding that as the Brexit process proceeded, Britain was viewed more negatively and the expats’ identifications with it weakened. However, the current study went further, finding that expats’ identifications with Europe strengthened during the Brexit process. By basing the research on the Brexit timeline, the study tracked when these identification changes occurred. It found that the expats’ negative identifications with the UK occurred first, immediately after the Leave result of June 2016. However, the strengthening identifications with Europe, only occurred in the later stages of the Brexit process, during the Brexit negotiations of 2018 and early 2019, as the threat of Brexit to the sustainability of their European lifestyles became clearer. This was demonstrated through actions such as an increasing necessity to learn Dutch, concern for the ability to move to another EU country in the future and finding ways to retain EU citizenship. Page 3 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell In sum, the shifting identifications of the expats from Britain to Europe show that it is possible for people from even the most Eurosceptic EU populations to identify with the EU. However, the timing of the identity shift is significant because it suggests that a person only becomes aware of their identifications with the EU and Europe when their EU benefits are removed from them. Otherwise, Europe is perhaps taken for granted as a part of everyday life, without enough salience to encourage identifications, attachment or loyalty. Page 4 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 ABSTRACT 3 TABLE OF FIGURES 6 INTRODUCTION 7 HISTORIOGRAPHY 9 Is there a “Europe”? 9 Brexit and Nationalism 11 Expatriates and European Identity 12 Identifications of British Expatriates 12 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING IDENTITY 13 METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES 16 STRUCTURE OF THESIS 18 CHAPTER 1 – ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE EU REFERENDUM, FEBRUARY 2016 22 Connections to the UK 24 Connections to Europe 24 Practical Connections 26 Conclusion 26 CHAPTER 2 – EU REFERENDUM LEAVE RESULT, JUNE 2016 28 Connections to the UK 29 Connections to Europe 32 Practical Connections 34 Conclusion 35 CHAPTER 3 – DEFEAT OF WITHDRAWAL DEAL, MARCH 2019 36 Connections to the UK 37 Connections to Europe 39 Practical Connections 41 Conclusion 44 CHAPTER 4 – EUROPEAN IDENTITY 45 British expats’ identifications with Europe 46 How would you describe the term “European”? 46 Are you more European or British? 47 Conclusion 48 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 50 Page 5 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell Methodological Evaluation 53 Recommendations for Further Research 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY 56 Primary Sources 56 Secondary Sources 57 APPENDIX 1 – Interview Schedule 61 APPENDIX 2 – Newspaper headlines used in interviews 63 APPENDIX 3 – Interview transcripts (arranged alphabetically) 65 Appendix 3.1 – Colin 65 Appendix 3.2 – David 77 Appendix 3.3 – Donna 89 Appendix 3.4 – Douglas 105 Appendix 3.5 – Eleanor 117 Appendix 3.6 – Isaac 130 Appendix 3.7 – Isobel 138 Appendix 3.8 – Joseph 150 Appendix 3.9 – Kevin 166 Appendix 3.10 – Lewis 179 Appendix 3.11 – Penelope 193 Appendix 3.12 – Sean 206 TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1 – headlines used for the Leave result, June 2016 63 Figure 2 - headline used for release of Chequer’s Deal, July 2018 64 Figure 3 - headline used for first defeat of Withdrawal Deal, January 2019 64 Table 1 - Interview Participant Demographics 20 Page 6 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell _________________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION ________________________________________________________________________ In February 2016, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, announced that the United Kingdom would hold a non-binding in/out referendum considering its membership of the European Union (EU). This referendum was held in response to a perceived rise in Euroscepticism among the British population over the preceding years. In the 2014 European Parliament elections, UKIP, the UK’s main Eurosceptical party, achieved its best ever result, gaining more seats than any other British party. Then Cameron’s Conservative Party won the 2015 General Election with a campaign which promised that an EU referendum would be held after a renegotiation of the UK’s position in the EU (Conservative Manifesto, 2015). Perhaps then it is not surprising that when the referendum was held on 23 June 2016, a 52% majority voted to leave the EU, triggering a process of UK-EU withdrawal negotiations which have become commonly known as Brexit. A unique occurrence in British history, the Brexit process has already resulted in the resignation of two prime ministers, damage to the pound sterling and divisions both in Parliament and the public. However, Brexit is much more than a domestic issue; it will also be a unique occurrence in EU history, with a member state leaving the EU for the first time. For the 785,000 (Office of National Statistics, 2018) British expatriates living in the EU (not including Ireland), Brexit entails the first ever en-masse loss of European1 citizenship. This is a population which has made use of those open borders which many Leave voters opposed, in order to live and work in continental Europe. For these expatriates (hereafter: expats), Brexit poses a threat to their everyday lives, with the resulting loss of European citizenship meaning the possibility of tougher residency and employment rights and higher cost of living (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2016; Mindus, 2017). Yet the majority of academic Brexit studies have focused on impacts for the UK’s domestic population. However, there have been a few studies of British expats’ reactions to Brexit. Of these, the study of Katie Higgins (2018), a geographer from University of Sheffield, has been cited most 1 In this text the terms “Europe” and “European” are used in reference to the EU Page 7 of 218 A Brexit From Britain or Europe? Theodore P Stell in social and political research in order to illustrate such expat reactions. Her study is possibly the most significant since the EU referendum, having administered a survey of over 900 British expats across twenty EU member states between 13 and 20 July 2017. Higgins found that a majority of these experienced feelings of shame, loss and dislocation concerning Britain; they were no longer proud to be British and felt they could not identify with Britain anymore, feeling a need to distance themselves from the country. The study also found that many respondents exhibited a ‘growing sense of affection and attachment to their Europeanness’ (Higgins, 2018: 4), but did not expand on this for ‘reasons of space’ (Higgins, 2018: 4). This current study, by contrast, will further investigate these feelings of distancing from Britain and growing identifications with Europe during the Brexit process, in order to explain them and investigate if one leads to another. From the perspective of international relations (IR), it is important to focus on the impact of the Brexit process on British expats because they are caught in the middle between Britain and Europe, between their national and supranational identities. European integration, as well as the forms it should take, has always been contested, as Zimmerman and Dür (2016) illustrate with the essays that they compiled in Key Controversies in European Integration. European identity is not exempt from this contestation, with questions asked over what a European identity is, how it can exist alongside national identity, or if it exists at all.