European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas: Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit Debate

• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Ben Rosamond
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13029

European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas:

Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit

Debate

BEN ROSAMOND

Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K

Abstract

Debates about the economy are central to political exchange and political choice is typically

presented as a matter of selecting among rival economic competence claims. The capacity to speak

with authority about the economy or to draw upon accredited economic expertise is an important

source of political advantage. However, the Brexit process is a form of politicized market contes-

tation that has taken place against the backdrop of signif‌icant challenges to expert authority. This

article shows how key parts of the Leave campaign developed three strategies within the discursive

politics of Brexit: setting aside the economy as a central issue in Brexit; advancing alternative

economic knowledge to that of institutionally advantaged professionals; and creating a cadre of

alternative economic experts. The article suggests that attempts to use the inherently depoliticizing

logic of causal ideas derived from authorized economic knowledge has not prevailed over the

central normative beliefs that drive ‘Brexitism’.

Keywords: Brexit; economic ideas; expertise; politicization; European Union

‘That’s your bloody GDP, not mine’(audience member at a pre-referendum public event

in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2016, quoted in Evans and Menon, 2017, p. 62)

Introduction

It is no longer controversial to argue that ‘ideas matter’in European integration.

1

How

ideas might matter and through which theoretical optics the ideational dimensions of

the European Union and EU governance are best studied are, quite rightly, subject to

ongoing lively discussion. Literatures exist on, inter alia, the direct inf‌luence of ideas

from Economics on EU institutional design (Maes, 1996; Majone, 1996); the centrality

of policy consensus around certain key economic ideas to key innovations in European

integration (McNamara, 1999; Verdun, 1999); the power of particular economic scripts

in setting the appropriate parameters of policy choice in the EU, even in times where

those ideas seem to be associated with sub-optimal outcomes (Matthijs and

McNamara, 2015; Nedergaard and Snaith, 2015; Ryner, 2015; Helgadóttir, 2016;

Schmidt, 2017; Matthijs and Blyth, 2018); the importance of economic ideas as shapers

of national governmental preferences in intergovernmental bargaining (Maes, 2004;

Schäfer, 2016); and the adoption and use of economic concepts by key EU institutional

1

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the JCMS Annual Lecture at the EUSA Sixteenth Biennial Conference

held in Denver, CO on Europe Day, 9 May 2019, I am most grateful to the editors and two anonymous referees for their

helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier draft.

JCMS 2020 Volume 58. Number 5. pp. 1085–1106DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13029

© 2020 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

actors as ways of def‌ining and legitimating institutional purpose (Carstensen and Schmidt,

2018; Jabko, 2006; Snaith, 2014; Rosamond, 2015).

For the most part these strands of literature have focused on the causal, constitutive and

performative inf‌luence of economic ideas. The type of ideational matter in play is typi-

cally some combination of cognitive/causal ideas and/or normative beliefs. The former

correspond to technical claims about the way in which the world works (‘if x, then y’),

which in turn instruct actors on how to behave and respond to situations. Normative be-

liefs are claims about how the world should be and what is morally or ideologically ap-

propriate to do in light of prevailing circumstances. The central constructivist point is

not only that causal ideas and normative beliefs provide actors with navigable scripts in

the quest for valid solution sets, but also that ideas are themselves the source of collective

understandings of the very problems that need resolution. Work on the EU and European

integration in this vein has focused almost exclusively on the interaction between eco-

nomic ideas on the one hand and national and supranational policy elites on the other, that

is the ideational politics of market making and market regulation.

Using the debate about British withdrawal from the EU (Brexit) as a case, this article,

in contrast, is interested in the role of economic ideas and ideas about the economy in

what might be termed the politics of ‘market contestation’. The term is used here to con-

note two things. The f‌irst concerns the general debate about whether the UK should be

embedded in the EU space of competition and thus whether key aspects of economic gov-

ernance, as they affect the UK, should be conducted supranationally. The second conno-

tation of market contestation is the debate between different visions of how post-Brexit

economic relations should be organized. These are not sequentially discrete moments –

both discussions were in play before and after the referendum of June 2016. Nor are they

necessarily empirically separable for analytical purposes. Indeed arguments supporting

the UK’s departure from the EU are typically bound up with technical and normative

claims about both future international economic ordering (Adler-Nissen et al., 2017)

and the future trajectory of UK growth models (Rosamond, 2019). These are political

economy questions, ultimately indivisible from debates about the extent to which societal

allocation should be delivered through the market; why, how and where markets should

be regulated; and the degree to which market processes and regulation should be subject

to popular/democratic scrutiny.

Economic debates are integral to political contestation, but they tend to matter in a quite

distinct way. ‘It’s the economy,stupid!’is a well-worn aphorism, but it captures a recurrent

feature of electoral politics in most democracies. Perceptions of economic well-being

(whether self-evaluations of individual economic circumstances or collective understand-

ings of aggregate economic performance) are electorally consequential. Off‌ice-seeking

parties must secure a reputation for economic competence, and typically seek to poke holes

in the competence claims of their rivals. Communicative discourse, whether in the form of

inter-party debate, the defence of governing records or the legitimation of particular policy

choices, pivots on the exchange of economic metrics and often draws upon supposedly au-

thoritative sources of knowledge. To be badged as economically competent is also, for the

most part, a technocratic-managerial claim. If economic policy choices are premised upon

particular values or ideological priors, then these need to be reconcilable with a settled

view of what it is to govern the economy with competence. It is not unusual to institution-

alize these settled views, either through the enactment of quasi-constitutional f‌iscal rules or

Ben Rosamond1086

© 2020 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd