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Taking back control? The myth of territorial sovereignty and the Brexit fiasco

ABSTRACT The UK referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) in 2016 was based around the issue of regaining a putative control or sovereignty that had been lost with membership in that supranational organization. Irrespective of the fact that many people seemed to vote in the referendum on the basis of attitudes towards questions not directly related to EU membership, such as immigration from countries outside the EU and a general disenchantment about governance, the negotiations over leaving focused on how to go about disentangling the UK from the rules and regulatory authority of the EU. These turned out to be far from easy. Much of this reflects the fact that sovereignty itself is invariably contingent. Only in few historical cases, usually associated with autarkic regimes exercising control over large territorial empires, has any sort of absolute territorial sovereignty even approached possibility. The purpose of this paper is to use the case of Brexit to examine three aspects of the contingency of territorial sovereignty: (1) the major ways in which sovereignty has been organized historically; (2) the character and role of sovereignty in the Brexit ‘debate’; and (3) why the focus on territorial sovereignty and its recapture should be so persuasive to so many people notwithstanding its geographical complexities.