The past decade has been marked by a growing popular backlash against international institutions. Examples include the 2015 Greek bailout referendum, the 2016 Brexit referendum, or more recent decisions from the new US administration to withdraw from various international treaties and organizations. The implications of these challenges to international institutions, in which countries unilaterally try to renegotiate the terms of or withdraw from existing international agreements, reach far beyond the countries in which they originate. Not only do the success and consequences of such disintegration bids depend on how the international institution’s other member states respond to a unilateral bid to unilaterally change or terminate the terms of an existing international agreement. Such challenges also pose considerable political contagion risks by encouraging disintegrative tendencies in other countries.
Because our theoretical tools to understand such international disintegration processes are underdeveloped, DISINTEGRATION therefore conducted a broad, systematic, and comparative inquiry into the mass politics of disintegration to better understand these challenges and their reverberations abroad. The project explored when and how one country’s voter-endorsed disintegration experience encourages or deters demands for disintegration in other countries, how these contagion effects are transmitted through domestic elites and domestic discourse, and how the remaining member states respond during disintegration negotiations. Moreover, it put these challenges into the wider context of the popular backlash against globalization and studied how such disintegration bids compare to other challenges faced by international institutions.
To answer these questions, DISINTEGRATION engaged in large-scale data collection designed to capture the evolution of public opinion, elite discourse, and negotiation positions both across and within countries. The project had a strong comparative focus, and paid particular attention to Brexit and Swiss-EU relations, which have been heavily contested in recent years. The project studied these two ongoing processes and their reverberations abroad in real time.
DISINTEGRATION has develop a theory that helps us understand the transnational dynamics and interactions that unfold between governments, elites and the public when one member state seeks to change the membership terms of or to withdraw from an international institution on the basis of widespread popular support, making both theoretical and empirical contributions to an area of both academic and real-world significance.
