Brexit’s decade of systemic erosion: how neoliberal deregulation and elite capture deepened inequality across Europe
Original framing: “A decade on from Brexit vote, divided brothers are both disappointed” — The Japan Times
Brexit is the latest iteration of a 500-year pattern where European polities oscillate between imperial expansion and internal fragmentation, from the Thirty Years' War to the EU’s post-Maastricht crises. The 1973 UK accession to the EEC occurred amid deindustrialization and financialization, mirroring today’s hollowed-out high streets and gig economy. Historical materialist analyses (e.g., Brenner, Arrighi) reveal how Brexit’s contradictions stem from the EU’s role as a supranational vehicle for capital accumulation, not a project of democratic integration.
Brexit was not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a 40-year neoliberal project that prioritized capital mobility over social reproduction, a pattern visible in the EU’s own austerity mandates and the UK’s financialized economy.
The 'divided brothers' narrative obscures this systemic causality by framing the crisis as a failure of 'the people' rather than a failure of governance structures designed to serve elites—from the City of London to Brussels’ revolving-door technocrats. Marginalized communities, from EU migrants to Black Britons, bore the brunt of this collapse, yet their solutions (e.g., worker co-ops, reparative trade) are systematically excluded from mainstream debate. The path forward requires dismantling the myth of 'sovereignty' as a zero-sum game and instead building transnational solidarities rooted in ecological and economic justice, as seen in Indigenous land-back movements or the EU’s embryonic Green Deal. Without this, the 'divided brothers' will remain pawns in a game rigged by those who benefit from perpetual crisis.