When historians seek to explain an event, they often divide their explanation into three parts. In the long run—what the French Annales School called the longue durée—there are deep historical structures, mental frameworks or other slow-to-change systems. In the intermediate term, there are background conditions—more susceptible to change and more shaped by politics than the longue durée, but still mostly beyond the ability of a single individual to affect, at least in any rapid way. Then, of course, there are the short-term factors, the immediately precipitating causes, which are often political.
On Brexit, there is a lot to say about all of these. But the background conditions have received the least attention. Brexit is often described as the result of populist anger, as a populist backlash, or even a populist rebellion. Indeed, President Obama spoke of Brexit in precisely those terms late last week. But the more Brexit reflects those background conditions, the less satisfactory this explanation becomes. After all, if British opinion on the EU has not changed dramatically, it is hard to say Britain is in the midst of a sudden burst of populist anger.
The gold standard of British public opinion data is the British Social Attitudes survey, the thirty-third and latest edition of which was launched just before the referendum. This survey covers 2015, meaning the field work was done in the late summer of last year. It’s not an opinion poll: It’s intended, among other things, to smooth out the random fluctuations shown in rapid polling by surveying in depth over a period of several months. And among much else, the survey contains a chapter on “Britain’s Euroscepticism” (which is itself a revealing fact: too much scholarly work focuses on “Euroskepticism” and thereby blithely assumes that the EU should automatically be popular. Dislike of the EU is not explained: it is diagnosed.)
The chapter draws on data from both a straight up/down question on the EU that the survey has asked since 1983, and a more nuanced one asked since 1992. In 2015, 22 percent of the public wanted Brexit; 43 percent, stay in but reduce its powers; 19 percent, leave things as they are; 8 percent, increase the EU’s powers; and 3 percent, work for a single European government. How far do these preferences diverge from what the public wanted over the past two decades? Not very far, it turns out.
From 1996 through 2015, an average of 18 percent of the public wanted to Brexit (4 percentage points less than 2015); 37 percent to stay in but reduce its powers (6 less than 2015); 21 percent to leave things as they are (2 more than 2015); 10 percent to increase the EU’s powers (2 more than 2015); and 5 percent to work for a single European government (2 more than 2015). So the British public in 2015 was slightly more Euroskeptic than the post-1996 average, but not wildly so. It was markedly more Euroskeptic in 2012-13, at the height of the Euro crisis. Indeed, by 2015, the EU’s popularity had recovered a bit.
One thing that stands out is that, ever since 1995, with the marginal exceptions of 1997 and 2003, half or more of the public has wanted to leave the EU or reform it substantially. Thus, David Cameron’s strategy for winning the referendum was to convince that lukewarm 43 percent that he had successfully secured real reform. For good reason, the reforms he won weren’t seen as real enough, but the public he faced wasn’t much more Euroskeptic than normal. The question in 2016, and indeed since 1995, has been how those skeptical reformers would vote if it turned out reforms were impossible.
The other thing that stands out is how pro-EU Britain was from 1989 through 1995. In that last year, for example, Brexiters and reformers combined were only 37 percent; 56 percent wanted the status quo or to increase the EU’s powers. The collapse in pro-EU sentiment didn’t come in 2016: it came in 1996. Why?
One possibility is that the EU’s late 1980s popularity reflected (and caused) the declining popularity of the Thatcher government. Another is that it was a “New World Order” sentiment, an ahistorical euphoria caused by the end of the Cold War—interestingly, U.S. opinion on the UN peaked in the same years.
But the primary answer seems obvious: the BSE, or “mad cow” crisis. The crisis (otherwise known as the “beef war”) was a long and involved affair, which saw exports of British beef banned on the continent on March 25, 1996, over fears that the BSE disease afflicting British cows could cause Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, an invariably fatal degenerative neurological disorder. The rights and wrongs of this dispute are, for our purposes, less important than the fact that, in its wake, British sentiment on the EU swung sharply against Brussels, and has remained fairly stable in its negativity since then.
So did Brexit win because of mad cow disease? Not exactly. What the BSE affair did was crush the early 1990s support for the EU in Britain. But that support was itself unusually high, at least as compared to the 1980s. In other words, BSE didn’t create anomalously low support for the EU; it ended a period of anomalously high support, and ensured it didn’t solidify into permanent majority backing for a more powerful EU. It seems to have convinced quite a few voters that the EU was out to do Britain down, and that the only safe answer was to reduce its powers: support for that alternative spiked in 1996.
If we want to understand why the EU was not very popular in Britain in 2016, the answer is simple: After 1995, the EU was never very popular in Britain. If we want, in turn, to understand the EU’s long-run unpopularity in the U.K., we need to look at that longue durée, because the U.K. is reliably one of Europe’s most Euroskeptic nations. But the fact is that, as far as British opinion since 1995 goes, there was nothing unusual about the conditions under which the 2016 referendum took place.
Of course, that leaves other important issues—like immigration—unexamined. And it doesn’t answer a more basic question: if the EU didn’t lose because of a sudden groundswell in anti-EU opinion, then why did it lose?
Ted R. Bromund is senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. He recently reported on the Brexit debate for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
