In 2013, then Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would stage an “in or out” referendum if his conservative party retained power in the next general election. The move was designed to enervate support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a Euroskeptic or anti-EU party gaining popularity and power by challenging Cameron’s Tories from the right.
When the conservatives won an outright majority in the 2015 general election, Cameron announced that the referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU would take place in June of 2016.
Cameron made clear that he favored remaining in the EU. He would take on the role of lead spokesperson for the remain campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe, in its efforts to persuade British citizens to vote accordingly.
Yet Cameron also announced that he was embarking on a solo campaign to reform the EU. The institution must be shown to have changed, to be more respectful of Britain’s autonomy, in order for a majority of the public to support continuing the nation’s membership in the union, his strategy suggested.
Cameron was set to perform a contradiction, of sorts; he would argue that it was essential that Britain remain within an institution, one that was so compromised that it needed to adjust how it treated the nation by undertaking far reaching reforms. He would head to Brussels not to slay the dragon but to cajole into exempting the island nation from some economic obligations and restrictions, and into performing signs of respecting Britain’s difference.
Cameron’s text:
Britain will hold a referendum on whether to stay in the EU. Support for our membership has declined over many years. So I am negotiating changes which will address the concerns of the British people... Let me explain.
First... (1) We want to sweep away the excessive bureaucracy and the barriers to trade that undermine growth for us all. (2) We want to establish the clear rules that will allow the eurozone to make changes without damaging non-euro countries. (3) We want to deal with the loss of democratic consent for the EU by shifting power from Brussels to the Bundestag, the House of Commons and other national parliaments, so decisions are made closer to the people. (4) And we want to stop people taking out from a welfare system without contributing to it first. Because like Germany, Britain believes in the principle of free movement of workers. But that should not mean the current freedom to claim all benefits from day one and that’s why I’ve proposed restricting this for the first 4 years.
Second, these changes would make a big difference in persuading the British people to vote to remain in the EU...
Cameron used terms that anchor the counter-democratic code of civil society to describe the EU. He represented the institution in terms of the discourse of repression.
The EU’s power is unconstrained by law, he asserted, and it acts toward its member states through power and not cooperation or negotiation. It imposes its will on its member nations. Its excessive power creates a hierarchy between it and its member states.
The EU imposes rules on its member states in an arbitrary way, he continued. It favors Eurozone members over non-Eurozone members, which demonstrates the institution acts towards its members as if in a personal rather than impersonal manner. In this way, it creates hierarchies between its members. These combine to make the EU a network of factions rather than a community of groups that act responsibly toward each other and the greater project.
The binary cultural codes of the EU, its preferred types of citizens, and the characteristics it encourages in migrants:
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