Drivers of consensus: responses to Brexit in Germany, France, Ireland and Poland

Brexit was potentially a highly divisive issue for the EU27 with states having different relationships with the UK. And yet in the period from the UK’s referendum in 2016 until the exit of the UK in 2020, the EU27 maintained a remarkable degree of unity. This article examines relative EU27 unity in the face of the Brexit process. The article is based on interviews and other research on four selected EU member states: Germany, France, Poland and Ireland. The article considers four different factors drawn from the theoretical literature that might account for EU27 unity and then examines how they played out in each of the four states. We then compare across the cases and conclude that they all shaped national responses to Brexit, but that how they mattered and the patterns of effects were differentiated among the cases. This points towards the importance of seeing Brexit as a multifaceted phenomenon.