A Debate of the Highest Order: The Brexit Referendum as Second-Order Role Contestation

The 2016 Brexit referendum reignited debate on the UK’s international role. Yet the stakes were complex, since neither side challenged Britain’s global leadership role or its strong ties with non-European partners. Research on role contestation has thus struggled to account for the politics of Brexit, focusing instead on non-role-based conflict. We argue that Brexit debates can be understood by reference to second-order role contestation where role compatibility itself is the subject of political disagreements, a phenomenon role theory scholarship has missed by studying role conflict and role contestation in isolation. We distinguish between inclusive and exclusive second-order conceptions, which capture the respective positions of the Leave and Remain campaigns regarding Britain’s European role and its relation to other (shared) roles. Our argument shows that role conflict is often contested politically and that role contestation operates at higher levels of abstraction than conventionally acknowledged.