The past year has been turbulent for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and for the European political context in which it operates. The party underperformed expectations in the 2015 general election, but now finds itself as a key part of the ‘Brexit’ campaign in the British EU membership referendum campaign it has long desired. Meanwhile, in terms of the focus of political discourse in Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has supplanted debates over austerity—which had created some unusual bedfellows. To understand the state of British Euroscepticism in this heightened climate, it is necessary to observe how UKIP is dealing with the new regional policy situation. Obviously, the party is not in a position to directly affect EU migration policy, but the kind of political claims that they make against this background will have a role in shaping political debates about the EU in Britain.
Through most of its short history, UKIP’s has been organised around the fundamental argument that the ills of British society could be largely ameliorated if only the country were ruled exclusively from Westminster, free of foreign imposition from Brussels (emphasizing sovereignty as much as populism). This kind of nationalism—an avowedly forward-looking version, of which UKIP is fond, likely to further distance themselves from the extreme right—is reflected in this passage from the party’s 2010 manifesto:
While UKIP is realistic about the difficult economic and political challenges Britain faces, we take a positive view of Britain’s place in the world – a stark contrast to the defeatist and apologetic stance taken by other parties. UKIP recognises Britain as a global player with a global destiny and not a regional state within a ‘United States of Europe’.
Note the contrast made here between the image presented here and the regressive, isolationist populism of which UKIP is accused by mainstream competitors. It is Europe that is seen as a fundamentally provincial space, against a global economy that is linked with the future (‘a global destiny’). This assertion is also presented as an evident fact or empirical claim, rather than a normative position of the party (‘recognises’).
Through early-2015, this was precisely the type of framing evidenced in UKIP discourse on migration. In a series of migration-related EP plenary debates between 2011 and 2013, Farage variously claimed: that opposition to the free movement of peoples is ‘fair, principle and democratic’; that the Union Jack ‘has represented liberal democracy far more than any other Member State of this European Union and it will go on long after your star-spangled banner has disappeared’; and that ‘when there is a crisis, between the theory of European integration and the practicality of nation-state, it is the nation-state that wins’. Farage’s fellow UKIP MEP (and now-Chair of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group) Paul Nuttall put this in even more direct terms when he argued in 2010 that ‘one of the totems of a sovereign state is that it controls who can and who cannot come into its own country. Unfortunately, several governments in the UK have given away this power to unelected, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels’. The cumulative effect of these statements is to equate the nation-state model of decision-making with democratic accountability in general
On the surface, and in terms of policy, little has changed since the Syrian Refugee Crisis became the focal point of European debate: Fervent opposition to the free movement of people within Europe remains the primary preoccupation of UKIP rhetoric in the EP. However, closer reading reveals a noticeable shift in the way that they advance this claim. In a December 2015 debate related to the EU negotiations with Turkey over refugee management, Farage claimed that ‘I have seen the idealised Schengen area lead to the free movement of Kaleshnikovs’. Here he is drawing upon images of mass migration associated with the refugee crisis and linking it uncritically with terrorism. Moreover, the principled opposition between national democracy and supranational tyranny found in the older rhetoric has been replaced by an opposition between a naively optimistic (‘idealised’) European vision and hard realities.
According to this line of reasoning, it is the way that the Union operates in practice that hinders any workable efforts against terrorist activity. As another UKIP MEP, Jonathon Arnott, noted in opposing common EU asylum standards: ‘The situation with Syria is particularly complex, but is not by the helped European Union’s naïve and misguided approach. I had no option but to vote against this resolution, which will in my view prove to be counterproductive’. According to this narrative, the EU is not an alternate vision of the future at odds with the time-tested institutions of national democracy. It is, rather, a Cold War era fantasy, a backward-looking approach unable to cope with contemporary threats like transnational terrorism. In this vein, Farage has referred to the British EU referendum as ‘the first time in many decades that there will be a fundamental debate on the existence of this Union and the need for it in the modern world’.
This narrative is reinforced by more specific complaints about EU policy from UKIP MEPs. For example, about external border control, according to MEP Diane James’ 2016 claim: ‘Schengen and Frontex are clearly unable to withstand or cope with this enormous migrant pressure. Reactive European Union policy-making is just not working’. Now, rather than promising a tyrannical future where Europe usurps traditional sovereign prerogatives, UKIP alleges a farcical present where EU agencies are unable to fulfil the basic functions for which they were created. In discourse analysis we would call this a move from primarily deontic to strong epistemic modalities, identifying the party with level-headed expertise contra the naiveté of Europhiles. Or in less charitable terms we might see it as a long-term sleight of hand, where the overbearing EU monster constructed in earlier UKIP rhetoric is revealed by those same orators as nothing but a paper tiger.
This shift, from an emphasis on democratic (il)legitimacy to an emphasis on the practical failures of the EU, is more than empty talk. One of the most important activities of political parties is to use their public status to narrate political events in a way that shapes political competition in their favour. In this process, epistemic claims tend to be much more effective than normative claims, principally because they are more difficult to directly challenge: Detailed empirical discussion is difficult in the context of political debate, particularly when the logical basis for the initial claim is often elided. This discursive strategy is almost transparent in some of the UKIP rhetoric; what use are high-minded defences of the principle of open borders if in reality it has led to the ‘free movement of Kaleshnikovs’ as Farage claimed? In essence, this is an adoption of the strategy used by others in Europe to defend austerity against the claim that it was undemocratic. In both cases, an external imperative is invoked to override any normative opposition, and those who do not accept it are delegitimised as ‘naïve’, ‘idealistic’, etc. We have seen this already in Farage’s referendum campaign claims about the grave risks of staying in the EU, and we should expect to continue to see it even if British voters elect to remain.
Daniel T. Dye holds a PhD in International Relations from the American University School of International Service, currently based in Washington, DC. He writes on British and European party politics and political discourse.
Image: mia!
