Hundreds of people gather in Croydon, south London for one of the Labour Party's final campaign rallies before the general election on 6 June 2017. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.For many people living in the United Kingdom and abroad, Brexit was experienced as a sudden rupture in the normal state of affairs: after forty years of membership, the British people voted (by the smallest of majorities) to leave the European Union. Beyond the anxieties over what this would mean in practice, some also saw in Brexit the spectre of how previous supra-national blocs, such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, began their collapse seemingly out of nowhere.
“My immediate reaction to the results was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more,” writes anthropologist Sarah Green in her reflections on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. “In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all.”
This theme of sudden, unexpected (and yet, in hindsight, wholly predictable) collapse came back time and again during the three months that I spent conducting research among Remainers in London. On my very first night, I was at a talk in Central London titled Brexit: An Unorthodox View. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, Turkish novelist Elif Şafak, and Croatian philosopher Şrećko Horvat were there to bring a European perspective on Brexit and talk about the nascent Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) – Europe’s first transnational movement-party – in which they work as coordinators.
