Andrew R. Glencross

• Professor at Lille Catholic University

This forum urges international relations (IR) practitioners to rethink the nature of both failure and success, and their own responsibility in building an academy that enables scholars of all backgrounds to thrive. Reflecting on their own experiences, the contributors detail factors that commonly stymie promising work in IR. These range from the qu...

Recently, the EU launched a number of initiatives to prevent the weaponising of supply chains and build resilience against interruptions. This article explores attempts to ensure security of supply in three sectors: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and critical raw materials. The analysis contrasts the measures taken in each sector in order to highl...

The article analyses the renewed importance of bilateralism for the UK’s engagement with individual EU member states in relation to security and defence policy. By systematically scrutinising the bilateral agreements with 18 EU countries concluded between the EU membership referendum in 2016 and the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2022, we ar...

This article examines Brexit from the perspective of the role played by multiple historical narratives about the UK and its place in Europe, as well as the wider world. Existing accounts associate the 2016 referendum result with the rise of populism and the spread of particular anti-EU narratives grounded in Englishness, the Anglosphere and, more p...

This article provides a Weberian ideal-type framework to capture elite strategies for managing hard Euroscepticism and their consequences for EU disintegration. It does so by drawing on policy evolution theory to conceptualise two ideal types representing contrasting strategies: taming Euroscepticism by technocratic adaptation or embracing it. This...

This article examines Brexit from the perspective of the role played by multiple historical narratives about the UK and its place in Europe, as well as the wider world. Existing accounts associate the 2016 referendum result with the rise of popu⁠lism and the spread of particular anti-EU narratives grounded in Englishness, the Anglosphere and, more...

This article uncovers the origins of 'cakeism' i.e., the notion the UK could keep certain EU benefits or not suffer costs after Brexit. The analysis demonstrates how the assumptions behind cakeism originated after 1992 in policy circles associated with the Conservative Party. They argued that a free-trade alternative to the EU was easy to put in pl...

This article uses a geopolitical lens to assess the EU’s response to COVID-19 by exploring the Commission’s creation of an emergency medical stockpile, dubbed rescEU. The article describes the creation, financing and distribution of this stockpile, which comes under the aegis of the Civil Protection Mechanism, in its first year of operation, 2020–1...

This article argues that the desire to promote a ‘European way of life’ constitutes a defining feature of contemporary European integration. What might be misinterpreted as an inward turn is in fact part of the temptation for the EU to become a ‘civilizational state’, one promoting a distinct identity against rival value systems. The analysis highl...

This article applies insights from comparative federalism to analyse different models for managing future EU–UK relations. The argument is that the stability of the EU–UK relationship before as well as after Brexit is best understood by examining the presence of federal safeguards. Drawing on Kelemen, four types of safeguards are identified as the...

This article examines the possibilities for negotiating the UK–EU health-security relationship after 2020. Health security, in the sense of measures to prevent and mitigate health emergencies, had played a marginal role in the UK–EU negotiations, but COVID-19 has greatly amplified this policy area’s significance. At the beginning of the pandemic, B...

This article explores why there was no domino effect after Brexit and reflects on what this means for the health of European integration. It shows how the UK responded to the uncertainty surrounding the Article 50 talks by testing EU unity, prompting both sides to discuss a no-deal outcome. Evidence from Eurobarometer surveys demonstrates that atta...

This report emerged from a workshop in Brussels where ACE staff presented research on the future of the UK’s bilateral relations after Brexit. The report itself examines the central policy challenges arising from the UK’s need to renew and rethink bilateral relations with key European countries after the UK has left the EU. The bilateral relationsh...

This article analyses the genealogy of the expression ‘Love Europe, hate the EU’, which is taken as a spatio-cultural critique of the European Union that has important consequences for how European integration is contested. Closely associated with the Brexit movement, but also popular among other populist movements opposing the European Union, this...

Through the case of EU foreign and security policy we reconsider the concept of great power. According to common wisdom, the EU cannot be a great power, whatever the pronouncements of its top officials may be. We argue that ‘great power’ has been miscast in IR theory as a status rather than as a social role, and, consequently, that the EU can indee...

Theresa May promised a new role for the United Kingdom in the world, dubbed “Global Britain.” But what challenges arise from supposedly being more open to the world while decoupling from the European Union? This article explores how much the UK can meet the expectations stemming from a new, unabashedly global posture. Examining the rhetoric of Brit...

There are long-standing debates amongst scholars of European Union politics over the relative importance of member states and supranational institutions in determining what happens in the EU. This paper treats the case of ‘Brexit’ as a case study, considering the positions of the EU institutions, France, Germany and the V4, focusing particularly on...

British political debate since the EU referendum has hinged on what type of Brexit to pursue: hard or soft. Yet, unlike in instances of treaty rejection, the EU made no counter offer to avoid a breakdown in relations that would follow the hardest of exits. This remarkable unity in not discounting the possibility of a hard Brexit demonstrates that U...

This paper applies the concept of post-democracy coined by Crouch to shed light on the emerging political dynamics of macroeconomic policy coordination in the Eurozone as they applied to France during Hollande’s presidency. Firstly, the paper explains the nature of EMU reform, characterized here as post-democratic by institutional design, before an...

While the British electorate was asked to vote on a simple-sounding question during the UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016, the issues at play were extremely complex. In order to help potential voters make sense of the debate, the authors ran a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the referendum in the weeks leading up to the vote. Th...

Brexit rests on a profound contradiction, argues Andrew Glencross. Voters rejected government advice to stay in the European Union, but rely on the same parliamentary majority to craft a better alternative. A general election – or second referendum – is likely before the UK leaves the EU.

This chapter examines continuities in British Euroscepticism that after the 1975 referendum on EEC membership resulted in a 40-year “neverendum”. The UK approach to European integration is characterized by a pragmatic and utilitarian element – stripped of a normative commitment to a European ideal of ever closer union. Calls for a new vote on EU me...

To improve the chances of winning the referendum, David Cameron sought to renegotiate the UK’s terms of EU membership. This gambit mimicked the successful strategy of Harold Wilson in the 1975 EEC referendum. Yet the politicization of intra-EU migration meant the onus was on obtaining concessions in this policy area. Traditional Euroscepticism impu...

This paper examines the actions of the European Council during the Eurozone crisis through the lens of political constitutionalism. This analysis examines the role of political inputs in shaping the EU constitutional developments, whether supranational or intergovernmental, to demonstrate the ‘legitimacy paradox’ of new intergovernmentalism. That i...

1. Although most attempts to foster interdisciplinary dialogue are located outside mainstream IR, this article seeks to problematize how the two dominant paradigms of IR theory, realism and liberalism, think historically. The argument proceeds by examining how the disciplines consider what historical knowledge is useful for i.e. how they think hist...

On 23 June 2016 the UK electorate voted to leave the EU, turning David Cameron’s referendum gamble into a great miscalculation. This book analyses the renegotiation that preceded the vote, before examining the campaign itself so as to understand why the government’s strategy for winning foundered. It then evaluates the implications that this decisi...

Nothing was inevitable about the Brexit vote: the campaign mattered profoundly. Cameron’s confidence came from having won two referendums and a general election. Yet the EU campaign illustrates the limitations of relying on a message purely focused on the economic risks of Brexit. This approach ignored voters’ concerns about identity and left out a...

This chapter examines the policy implications of Brexit. The UK faces the conundrum of whether to participate in the single market from outside the EU and how to continue as a single state. Because Scots did not vote to leave the EU, the Scottish government interprets the referendum as a mandate to pursue ways of retaining the benefits of EU member...

This book studies the unprecedented decision of 23 June 2016, which saw the UK electorate vote to leave the EU, turning David Cameron’s referendum gamble into a great miscalculation. It analyzes the renegotiation that preceded the vote, before examining the campaign itself so as to understand why the government’s strategy for winning foundered. It...

The political philosophy behind Brexit was a product of disenchantment stemming from the political inequality associated with post-democracy. The referendum itself was an attempt to allay fears that popular opinion was being excluded on the EU issue. This chapter explains that political representation under post-democracy exacerbates the fundamenta...

This article explores the inter-related debates over Britain's relationship with the EU and that over the future of the UK. It argues that euroscepticism and Scottish independence are based on exceptionalist identities that now revolve around economic policy. Elite euroscepticism cleaves to a neoliberal vision of minimalist regulation, while advoca...

Calls for a referendum on European Union membership have dominated UK politics in recent years. Andrew Glencross looks back at the only previous vote on Britain's relationship with Europe, in 1975, and finds plenty of similarities with the present day, and some stark differences, too. Calls for a referendum on European Union membership have dominat...

This article scrutinizes the merits of holding a referendum over UK membership of the EU. It queries the assumption that direct democracy can somehow resolve the longstanding Europe question in British politics. To do this, the analysis traces the existence of an exceptionalist approach to the EU within Britain, now associated with re-negotiating U...

This article argues that EU constitutionalization has taken place in the absence of political constitutionalism. This concept is defined as the ability of citizens and member states to act as ongoing constitutional agents in determining the evolution of individual rights and national prerogatives. A historical comparison with Swiss and American con...

This article explores how both the sovereign debt crisis and the European Union's response illustrate fundamental characteristics of contemporary European integration. In the face of an unexpected emergency, national politicians took the lead and pressed ahead with more integration. The long-term results though depend on national acceptance of not...

This article examines the relationship between European integration and democratic gover-nance during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. It does so by analyzing the evolving policies of the European Central Bank (ECB) against the backdrop of tension between input and output legitimacy in economic and monetary union. This tension makes the ECB's ac...

This article argues that pessimistic analyses of integration constitute a distinct category of critique separate from euro-scepticism or the democratic deficit literature. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of law, political science, and international relations theory, three strands of europessimism are identified: realist, federalist, and so...

In “Europe’s Troubles,” Sebastian Rosato argues that the high water mark of European integration has passed and that the fate of the European Union (EU) is increasingly uncertain.1 The European project, he claims, had a geostrategic imperative during the Cold War: unable to match Soviet power individually, the small and medium powers of Western Eur...

In 2007 Gaullism gained a new avatar: Nicolas Sarkozy. His election to the French presidency was based on a carefully orchestrated campaign to update this center-right ideology associated with French grandeur, a dirigiste industrial policy, and European leadership. Five years on the French economy limps along with anemic growth, public finances and...

The European Union (EU) and the antebellum US represent attempts to overcome anarchy without substituting hierarchy. Understood as ‘states unions’, these two systems are shown here to share foundational indeterminacy over sovereignty and the constitution of the people (i.e. the boundaries of the political community). Existing scholarship appreciate...

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It...

This article explores whether the supranational EU polity can be legitimised without the nation state. It claims that modern political representation depends on establishing a tripartite distinction between state, government and civil society. This is contrasted with competing notions of the modern state, notably Rousseau’s idea of popular sovereig...

One of the most perceptive insights in the late Samuel Huntington’s much-misunderstood essay The Clash of Civilizations was its discussion of “torn countries,” those whose elites - as in Turkey today or early 1990s Mexico - face a stark choice between embracing or rejecting Western free-market liberal democracy. What Huntington seemingly took for g...

While the EU is as beset as ever by internal divisions, European elites’ ambitions for strengthening integration now revolve around greater foreign policy engagement and effectiveness. This is the central paradox of the Lisbon Treaty: an arrangement supposed to legitimize further integration through foreign policy success at a time when Europe is s...

This paper examines how law and political science have studied the role played by sovereignty claims in the EU constitutional order. Typically, it is argued, the two disciplines have studied sovereignty in the EU from parallel perspectives, with the former emphasising the dimension of the internal sovereignty of the EU and the latter focusing on me...

This paper assesses the success of an innovative national e-participation project in Estonia. To carry out this task, the paper combines quantitative (aggregate user data, content analysis via tagging) and qualitative (individual user survey and interviews with public officials) data analysis. The analysis is conducted with two principal research o...

Drawing on international relations theory, law and historical analysis, this book compares European integration with the antebellum USA to assess what makes the EU viable despite contestation over the rules of the game of integration. It reveals that changing the system of representation is no shortcut solution for the EU's constitutional woes.

Altiero Spinelli believed European integration needed to draw inspiration from the US constitutional founding. The article uses Spinelli's analogy to assess how useful it is to compare the predicament of European integration with US constitutional politics. The analysis reveals both how Spinelli exaggerated the extent to which the US Constitution e...

This article explores how proposals for democratizing the EU according to a supranational, contestational model are likely to disrupt its existing political system. The current EU is characterized by a dual system of representation that combines the representation of member states with that of individual citizens. Democratization typically entails...

This article analyses the 2005 French referendum debate on the EU Constitutional Treaty as an instance of depoliticization. Particular emphasis is placed on the argumentative strategy of President Chirac as, despite the Treaty's focus on institutional reform, he eventually chose to justify the document in terms of social policy: an ultimately uncon...

This paper assesses the success of an innovative national e-participation project in Estonia. To carry out this task, the paper combines quantitative (aggregate user data, content analysis via tagging, traffic sources) and qualitative (individual user survey and interviews with public officials) data analysis. The analysis is conducted with two pri...

This paper explores the conceptual relationship between democracy and sovereignty. It does so by examining this interrelationship in the case of the US and EU understood as anti-hierarchical "states unions". In such systems, the retention of the units' sovereign status is fundamental yet subject to ongoing contestation, leading to ambiguity over th...

Studies of European integration that dwell primarily on the successful constitutionalization of European law (Weiler, 1999; Goldstein, 2001; Stone Sweet, 2004) are apt to offer a partial representation of what makes the EU viable. Viewing the EU in terms solely of successful integration through law does not reveal much about the viability of this p...

This book addressed a crucial yet currently undertheorized research question: what makes the EU viable? Such a task was shown to matter not only because of the succession of crises, resulting at times in inanition, that the European integration project has endured in the past six decades. Understanding viability is also essential in order to judge...

Had he lived today, Tocqueville would probably have made the same remark about the EU. The precariousness of this political system is well known but nevertheless this chapter retells the story of integration, albeit in a brief and idiosyncratic way. While the broad narrative is a familiar one, it is less so when recounted as the contest over the ru...

To understand the nature of contestation over the rules of the game of politics in the antebellum US it is necessary to scrutinize the historical record of political and legal arguments in this period. What was under dispute in these moments of acute tension was the shared understanding structuring the rules of US politics: the allocation of compet...

Viability, in its most basic sense, means the ability to exist or more specifically to survive in a particular place. As a theoretical concept it is more commonly used in economics, usually as a synonym for feasibility, than in political science. In the latter discipline it is applied to understand transition states, new political entities (such as...

Traditional theories of state-building baulk at explaining recent trends in European integration, which is why a range of scholars prefer to adopt a tabula rasa attitude, devising new concepts or metaphors that emphasize the uniqueness of this polity. Nonetheless this sui generis approach has been much criticized of late for failing to perceive the...

The sui generis interpretation dominant in mainstream European Union studies is often accompanied by a blithe assumption that the European Union (hereafter, the EU) has the political wherewithal and willpower to keep its show on the road.1 Hailed as unique among international treaty organizations, it has even been described by one recent commentato...

This penultimate chapter has three aims. Firstly, it questions whether the hitherto successful maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium is self-reinforcing or liable to potential future disruption. In particular, this necessitates an examination of what might threaten the ability to maintain a compromise between supranational and intergovernmental visi...

This article explores how proposals for democratizing the European Union (EU) according to a supranational, contestational model are likely to disrupt its existing political system. The current EU is characterized by a dual system of representation that combines the representation of member states with that of individual citizens. Democratization t...

Both member states and the EU share the claim and burden of representing citizens because the EU is a hybrid polity combining federal and confederal principles. Since these principles are antagonistic it is vital to understand how they are balanced, what imperils this equilibrium and what consequences this structure has for democracy. Interpreting...

It is commonly assumed that sovereignty is indivisible and hence that in any polity there has to be an institution able to claim ultimate political authority. By implication, indivisibility also means that confederation (a union of states) and federation (one state with more or less autonomous units) are mutually exclusive categories: “there can be...

This entry contrasts two forms of organizing political authority: federation and confederation. The two are distinguished as follows. A confederation is a union of equal, sovereign states (each recognized by the international community) that have formed, for limited general purposes, a common government. By contrast, a federation consists of a syst...

This paper seeks to understand the role of the ECJ as a focal point in the inter-relationship between law and politics in the EU system. By conceptualising the Court as a fiduciary, operating within a strategic space, rather than an agent, it shows how member states have tried to respond to the Court’s ability to set the policy agenda. In particula...