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This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 898288.
The 2016 United Kingdom referendum on E.U. membership
This case study demonstrates how the lead actors in the Brexit campaigns, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, appealed to the same BCCs to legitimate their narrative claims of delivering national rejuvenation and preventing cultural obliteration, on the one hand, or of ensuring prosperity and preventing impoverishment, on the other. Cameron campaigned mostly in low mimetic genre registers and practiced modern-civil politicking representative of turn of the century British politics. Johnson, on the other hand, campaigned in registers of the romance genre. To a qualified degree, he engaged in societalized politics by casting the British civil sphere as being subverted through colonization and its collective identity as threatened with erasure.
Boris Johnson, the lead of the Leave campaign, infused his romantic plot with a potent populist dimension. Having already constructed the people as the bearers of his plot’s powers of action, he narrated in intimate detail how in reality the EU was an instrument through which elites and the ultrawealthy entrenched their domination over the British people. Conjuring imagery of private jets, subterranean swimming pools, and popping champagne corks, he explained how the “fat cats… like uncontrolled immigration” because it suppresses wages and therefore ensures “there is even more dosh for those at the top.” Additionally, this chummy community of elites were seeking to remain in the EU because “the whole EU system of regulation is so remote and opaque that they are able to use it to their advantage, to maintain their oligarchic position.”
Johnson invoked the polluting signifiers of the BCCs to construct his populist narrative, and it was through such recourse to the BCCs that he inflated the symbolic distance between his plot’s protagonists and antagonists. Concluding this section, we return to one of this article’s central aims: to demonstrate how the BCCs operate as a foundational cultural structure that control, anchor and organize other, more meso-level and context-specific discursive forms.
Building on civil sphere, societalization, and genre theory, this case study introduces a theory of societalized politics to address the swells of populism and ethnonationalism that have energized far-right movements in nations composed of publics committed to democratic norms and practices. The article shows the purchase of conceiving of these developments as civil sphere processes. Investigating events that occurred six months apart, it illustrates the practice of societalized politics in Britain’s referendum on EU membership. Introducing six features of societalized politics, the analysis indicates that publics are responding to elites’ discursive practices that cast their respective civil spheres as imperiled, core-groups’ civil hegemony as being decentered, and the greater community’s collective identity as threatened with erasure.
Toward a theory of societalized politics:
Toward a theory of societalized politics:
Societalized politics also represent democratic institutions as being infiltrated and compromised, and construct antagonists responsible for orchestrating the subversion. Civil sphere theory represents civil discourse as assembled atop a symbolic foundation of binary cultural codes (BCCs). Attending to the ways elites play upon and flip the codes, the article demonstrates how societalized politics introduce flux into this symbolic structure. Finally, it illustrates how societalized politics introduce dimensions of the apocalyptic genre into civil discourse.
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