ABSTRACT
Brexit campaigners focused consistently on the pressures that would be placed on frontline public services by population increases, the suppressive effect of new sources of labour on wages and the security threat posed by the arrival of criminal gangs and Islamic insurgents via the European Union (EU). In contrast, the leave campaigns were able to imbue their movement with the sense of being a radical and emancipatory insurgency against a corrupt elite and failing institutions in ways that are revealed through the discourse theoretical concept of fantasmatic logics. The EU poses a key conceptual challenge to the nationalist logic of Eurosceptic discourses. Yet empire features in fundamental way in the referendum campaign, as in longer-standing Eurosceptic discourses, by providing the basic metaphor – of the dominator and the dominated – through which the EU and all international politics is understood.
