The Strategic Context of the British Referenda on Continued Membership in the EC/EU: An Analysis of the Political Elite’s Motivation

Abstract

The main research objective of this article is to explain the motives behind
the British political elite’s decision to hold nationwide referenda on
continued membership in the EC/EU in 1975 and 2016. In order to do so,
the author applies her own analytical framework using a theoretical model
of dichotomous logics of appropriateness and consequentiality. The article
demonstrates the primacy of domestic parameters during the convening of
these referenda. In both cases, decisions came at a moment when the party
system was no longer able to accommodate EC/EU-related tensions within
the governing parties. In this context, the research points to a
strategisation and an instrumentalisation of the European agenda on
behalf of domestic intra-party politics. The author concludes that while the
official rhetoric accompanying the political elite’s decisions to hold both
referenda on continued membership in the EC/EU operated with the
normative logic of appropriateness, the real basis of these decisions lay in
the utilitarian logic of consequentiality.