Chris Gifford

The People Against Europe: The Eurosceptic Challenge to the United Kingdom's Coalition Government

This article approaches Euroscepticism as central to a contemporary dynamic of government and opposition. Populist Eurosceptic mobilizations exemplify opposition to depoliticized forms of political rule and demonstrate the tight political coupling of the national and the European. In the case of the United Kingdom, a depoliticized post-imperial governing approach to European integration has proved highly contested. From this perspective, the article examines the recent politics of Europe under the coalition government (from 2010 to 2013) as a period of Eurosceptic mobilization that successfully challenges European policy. What on the surface appears to be a problem of party management for the Conservative leadership is more accurately understood as a broader conflict between government and a populist Eurosceptic opposition. The outcome of this conflict is to further embed hard Euroscepticism within British politics to the point where maintaining governing autonomy on Europe is severely constrained, if not unfeasible.

National and post‐national dimensions of citizenship education in the UK

Citizenship education has been an ongoing matter of academic and political debate in the UK since the 1970s. This debate culminated in the setting up of the Advisory Group in citizenship education under the chairmanship of Bernard Crick. The publication of the Crick Report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (London, QCA, 1998), has influenced the development of citizenship education across the UK from primary level to post‐16. Citizenship education has now been established as a statutory component of the compulsory school national curriculum in England and a set of proposals for Scotland were launched in 2002. In this paper, with particular reference to the Crick Report, I explore the theories and conceptions of citizenship that are evident in this policy area and consider the opportunities it offers for embedding democratic practices within late modern societies.Citizenship education has been an ongoing matter of academic and political debate in the UK since the 1970s. This debate culminated in the setting up of the Advisory Group in citizenship education under the chairmanship of Bernard Crick. The publication of the Crick Report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (London, QCA, 1998), has influenced the development of citizenship education across the UK from primary level to post‐16. Citizenship education has now been established as a statutory component of the compulsory school national curriculum in England and a set of proposals for Scotland were launched in 2002. In this paper, with particular reference to the Crick Report, I explore the theories and conceptions of citizenship that are evident in this policy area and consider the opportunities it offers for embedding democratic practices within late modern societies.

Becoming citizens in late modernity: a global-national comparison of young people in Japan and the UK

The experiences of young people in developed societies such as Japan and the UK have undergone considerable change in the last 30 or so years. Our starting point is that such developments are associated with the globalization of institutions and an individualization of experience, which destabilizes life-course transitions and cultural transmission between generations. However, we continue to assert the importance of the national framework, defined by national cultures and territorial jurisdictions, in mediating global processes. Adapting Connollys (2005. Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) differentiation between types of politics in late modernity, we argue for a distinction to be made between being citizens and becoming citizens. Being a citizen involves integration into pre-existing collective identities such as nation-states which increasingly act to restrict membership to the citizen community. With this in mind, we compare the key sites of social recognition in Japan and the UK for young people and identify some fundamental barriers to citizenship. In addition, we discuss the ways in which conventional social and educational policy responses aimed at integrating young people into work and nation perpetuate their precarious relationship to citizenship. These processes are contrasted with becoming a citizen, which is dynamic, intimately connected to cultural learning and the creation of new civic virtues and sources of recognition.

The United Kingdom’s Eurosceptic political economy

This article explores how a political economy approach can explicate recent events in the United Kingdom’s relation to the European Union. The proposition is that neither critical nor comparative approaches do justice to the extent to which British elites have sought to differentiate the UK from the EU. The UK is here understood as a Eurosceptic political economy, constructed in opposition to European integration and, in particular, Economic and Monetary. The article explores how we have witnessed a hardening of this Eurosceptic political economy in the context of the Eurozone crisis. The most distinctive feature of which, as seen in the referendum campaign, is the extent to which the economic case for withdrawal has been established as part of the mainstream of British political debate.

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.

Reforming citizenship education for new generations

The idea of a bounded and sovereign state that is mirrored by cultural homogeneity is clearly redundant as a basis of citizenship education. Young people’s identities are less likely to be forged through war and epoch-making political struggle, and consequently national allegiance and political participation is increasingly a matter of individual choice rather than collective obligation. The relationship between national institutions and cultures and young people’s identity formation is a central theme running throughout these publications. All the volumes point to the continued centrality of the nation-state as the focus for formal political socialisation yet in contexts that render it complex and confused. Supranational institutions, multinational business and finance, and transnational social movements powerfully cut across national boundaries and directly impact on citizens’ everyday lives. The twenty-first century context is one in which the relevance of national institutions including mainstream politics is no longer taken for granted and the national is only one category that young people draw upon in negotiating a sense of the self in the world. These varied publications point to the myriad ways in which citizenship education and young people’s identities are highly context-dependent, yet are being transformed by universal processes that challenge traditional forms of political membership.

Introduction: The Structure of British Euroscepticism

Recent developments in British politics have once again brought to the fore the UK’s troubled relationship with, and within, the European Union. We have seen the extensive mobilization of Eurosceptic forces including rebellions in the Conservative Party and the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to national prominence. In 2013, David Cameron responded to political pressure and committed a future Conservative government to holding a referendum on British membership. The Party’s election victory in May 2015 confirmed that this would take place before the end of 2017 following a renegotiation of the terms of British membership. With the prospect of a referendum, commentators began to seriously debate the possibilities of a British exit, and the UK’s options outside of the EU. Meanwhile, public opinion was more sensitized to British membership than it had been seen for some time as intra-EU immigration became politicized, when free movement was opened up to Bulgarians and Romanians. In sum, an extensive domestic Eurosceptic mobilization has had direct implications for European policy and the UK’s future as a European member-state.