Too Much Hegemony: A Novel Theory of the Unintended Consequences of Dominant Narratives

Abstract

This article builds on Gramscian conceptualisations of power. It does so by introducing `Hegemonic Excess Theory’ as a tool for understanding political crises. For Antonio Gramsci and his adherents, the political and economic establishment fosters consent and allegiance amongst subordinate classes through the dissemination, inculcation and appropriation of seductive and pacifying ideologies. In this article, I argue that subordinate groups may adopt such ideals too well and to such an extent that it undermines key objectives of the establishment. As such, Hegemonic Excess Theory encapsulates the idea that the leading class’s very success in imparting certain ideals among the population can magnify, become unwieldly, backfire and cause crisis for the political elite. I illustrate this through the 2016 Brexit vote, with a particular focus on how xenophobia and anti-migrant narratives and policy, including from the Remain campaign, played a pivotal role in sections of the electorate voting against the interests of the domestic and transnational establishment’s commitment to the neoliberal enterprise of the EU. While not necessarily insurmountable, this has caused a significant crisis for the ruling class. In the conclusion, I contend that Hegemonic Excess Theory has considerable analytical value in understanding political crises far beyond Brexit.

Un excès d’hégémonie : Vers une nouvelle conceptualisation des effets indésirables des discours dominants à travers l’étude de cas du Brexit

The government, Her Majesty’s Opposition, virtually all major corporations, the vast majority of businesses, the President of the United States, a series of International Organisations all supported Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. ¹ In short, the political and economic establishment was overwhelmingly, though certainly not universally, in favour of remaining in the EU. It is not difficult to see why: even accounting for its social democratic provisions, the EU is a transnational neoliberal project with, above all, a commitment to the free movement of capital and labour within its territory. ² The puzzle that thereby informs this article is as follows: given a largely unified commitment among the ruling class for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU, why did this not come to pass on such a vital economic and political issue? In other words, why was the economic and political establishment unable to render large parts of the electorate compliant?

One potential explanation frequently found in the media and academic literature is that the Brexit vote was an act of resistance – a counterhegemonic move on the part of the so-called ‘left behinds’ to shake off neoliberalism and globalisation. ³ There may be a degree of merit to this position, but I confront this (mostly) leftist conceptualisation of the Brexit vote as counterhegemonic by offering a different reading that considers the vote to be a conservative and reactionary move that, ironically, is consistent with the dominant narratives long offered by the establishment, especially in relation to hostility towards immigration. In this article, I make the argument that the Brexit vote can be explained, at least in part, by the tool I propose here that I term Hegemonic Excess Theory (HET). To put it another way, the central contention of this article – and the key premise of HET – is that ruling class policy objectives can become derailed as a result of citizens embracing its ideals too zealously, ruling class narratives gaining too much traction, and citizens acting upon such ideals in ways that exceed and ultimately operate against the expectations of the establishment.

In proposing Hegemonic Excess Theory, the central contribution of this article is to build on Gramscian understandings of power by introducing a novel analytical tool for conceptualising the emergence of political crises. I do so by drawing on Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony – a theorisation that arose through his preoccupation with configurations of political, cultural and economic class leadership and its continually shifting relationship with coercion and consent. For Gramsci, the leading class’s capacity to rule and its legitimacy cannot merely be achieved by state coercion; it must be sought and continually sustained and reconfigured through a dynamic interplay whereby the leading class co-opts potential rival classes and enfolds them into its umbrella, in part by disseminating conformist ideals. In such a way, the leading class facilitates its objectives through the always precarious process of garnering consent to its rule among subaltern classes, who, in turn, subscribe to and reproduce the ideological mores of the powerful. ⁴

In the case of contemporary Britain, such ideals include nationalism, xenophobia and reverence for sovereignty. The problem for the Remainer bloc is that, now unleashed, the nationalism and xenophobia cannot be temporarily reboxed or reigned in. Consequently, the very ideals propagated by hegemonic institutions now become unmanageable, mutate, magnify and proceed to undermine the interests of the same institutions. As such, where Marx captured the contradictions of the capitalist political economy, ⁵ I draw on Gramsci to point to an empirical example of an internal contradiction in the establishment’s hegemonic narratives. I do so through undertaking an in-depth case study analysis focusing on establishment narratives and policy on immigration in the context of the Brexit vote. ⁶ In locating a contradiction within hegemony, the purpose is not to offer a corrective to Gramsci; clearly, a great strength of Gramsci’s analysis is his recognition of the contradictions and frailties inherent within hegemony and the operation of power. ⁷ The point is to pinpoint and highlight a particular contradiction, offer it up to in-depth analysis through an empirical case study, and give it a nomenclature. Most importantly, I suggest that HET has broader significance through its utility to advance understandings of the contradictions of power in cases beyond Brexit.

Before proceeding, I wish to clarify HET and its relationship with counterhegemony. HET encompasses the idea that (some) citizens incorporate and internalise what Stuart Hall called the ruling class’s ‘dominant codes’ (or hegemonic narratives) to a degree that surpasses the expectations of the encoder. ⁸ Where citizens have internalised dominant codes, one would routinely expect, especially regarding such significant matters as Brexit, that this manifest in high degrees of compliance with establishment goals. HET, by contrast, captures the observation that the overzealous incorporation of such ideals can create outcomes that are unanticipated by the establishment and are potentially crisis inducing. As exemplified by Brexit, such unanticipated outcomes, exactly because of their unforeseen and destabilising facets, may superficially exhibit a counterhegemonic character. I, however, contend that such counterhegemonic credentials are largely (but not necessarily entirely) illusory because, as I demonstrate, the action does not emerge out of a fundamental confrontation with establishment ideals but is congruent, albeit in an excessive manner, with hegemonic discourse. This is why, as in the case of Brexit (or the election of Donald Trump), there is not a fundamental immediate challenge to finance-led accumulation as the dominant mode of operation. It is also a reason that, even amidst the trappings of crisis, the initiative of power, at least in the short-term, is passed to an alternative faction within the ruling class. Nevertheless, even with the immediate wielding of power by the alternative faction and inevitable attempts to generate new hegemonic formulations, many of the characteristics of crisis endure.

The article is structured as follows. Following a survey of relevant literature, I illustrate the conceptual pertinence of HET through three key moves. I first establish that, despite the presence of a far smaller rival faction, there indeed was a largely unified establishment that heavily supported Remain. The second move avers that the 2016 Leave vote did (and does) constitute a crisis for the neoliberal ruling class. The third move contends that hegemonic notions of xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment were crucial to understanding the vote. In demonstrating this, I maintain that the Brexit vote should not simply be understood as anti-hegemonic; rather, I illustrate how anti-migrant sentiments were baked into the Remain campaign and the EU as an International Organisation. The central point is that such sentiments transmute, become out of the grasp of the establishment, and can backfire in respect to their objectives. In the conclusion, I consider the utility of HET in accounting for crises beyond the confines of Brexit, including the election of Donald Trump.

Brexit and Gramsci

This article engages with two already abundant literatures: Brexit and Gramscian critique. Brexit is a topic that immediately spawned a wealth of academic work. For this article’s purposes, the most pertinent literature concerns the question of why people chose to vote the way they did. ⁹ Relatedly, numerous works quantitatively explore the demographic profiles associated with Leave and Remain voters. ¹⁰ More concretely, scrutinising the reasons people voted for Brexit, Areal investigates the role of personality traits and trust in government. ¹¹ Several pieces interrogate the significance of attitudes towards migration. ¹² Simpson and Startin, meanwhile, explore the influence of the British tabloid press. ¹³

A key debate in the media and academia is the extent to which Brexit was delivered by the marginalised within society as an anti-establishment manoeuvre. Goodwin and Heath, for instance, find that ‘Brexit was delivered by the “left behind” – social groups that are united by a general sense of insecurity, pessimism and marginalisation, who do not feel as though elites, whether in Brussels or Westminster, share their values’. ¹⁴ Likewise, Mckenzie frames the Brexit vote as ‘a howl of anger, revealing the frustration of those who had been left out of successes and rewards that capitalism had created for a cosmopolitan middle class’. ¹⁵ Taking overtly Gramscian approaches, both Salter and Dell also consider Brexit to be a counterhegemonic move in the face of neoliberalism. Dell laments there being ‘no outlet’ for working class grievances given that ‘the leftist political establishment has been incorporated into the larger European neoliberal project’. ¹⁶ It is with no viable alternatives, he argues, that ‘Brexit can be seen as a vehicle for the working class to voice their desire for a counter-hegemonic push’. ¹⁷ Salter considers the role of British academics in being implicated in reproducing EU hegemony. For him, left-leaning Remain-supporting academics failed to anticipate or subsequently understand the counterhegemonic factors fuelling the Leave vote. ¹⁸

Bhambra, on the other hand, is critical of the trope of the ‘“legitimate” claims of the “left behind”’. ¹⁹ As she demonstrates, the categories of the ‘left behind’ and ‘working class’ are often constructed in the media and academia through the prism of ‘racialised identity politics’, thereby excluding people of colour from such categories. ²⁰ In considering the concerns of the now caricatured ‘working class’ (with people of colour omitted) as ‘legitimate’, this serves to give credence to often dog-whistle racist discourses about globalisation or people being ‘strangers in their own land’. ²¹ Powell also casts doubt on the counterhegemonic credentials of the Leave vote, writing that ‘if the “leave” vote was a revolt, it was one incitefully interpellated in ways that privileged xenophobic nationalism, and was marshalled by an authoritarianism with hegemonic claims that threaten both democratic process and political accountability’. ²² While not dismissing the idea that some people voted Leave as an act of resistance, this article offers an analysis of the conservative and reactionary complexion of the vote that is closer to that provided by Bhambra and Powell.

Given such debates over class dynamics and the politics of resistance and collaboration, there is good reason why Gramscian analysis is pertinent to deconstructing Brexit. The central idea I trade with here is Gramsci’s conceptualisation of hegemony. From the start, I want to acknowledge that engaging with Gramsci offers particular challenges: for understandable reasons, Gramsci’s most famous work, Prison Notebooks, can feel (and is) ambiguous, scattered and oblique. As such, it is fair to say that contemporary understandings of Gramsci derive as much from concise interpretations and annotated ‘readers’ as his own original writings. ²³ Moreover, especially in the discipline of IR, Robert Cox was pivotal in distilling and disseminating his ideas. ²⁴ As seen from such works and Gramsci’s own writings, his enduring concern was for how the proletariat, in the process of taking the reins of power, could unite and lead various ‘kindred and allied groups’, ²⁵ particularly the peasantry, within a successful revolutionary movement. ²⁶ To this extent, as also captured in his pre-prison era work, he outlined the necessity for the proletariat to operate as the vanguard via the Communist Party in order to captivate, absorb and win favour with various groups who have a stake in the revolutionary system. ²⁷

If his writing on a proletariat-led hegemony is the work of praxis – a guide to how the revolutionary movement may succeed – the concept is now, including within this article, more widely understood and deployed for its analytical value. In this sense, Gramsci moved beyond the Leninist conceptualisation to also draw on the notion of hegemony analytically to capture how dominant classes (other than the currently exploited proletariat) are enmeshed in a perpetual, precarious and continually fluctuating process of fostering consent among subordinate and potential rival groups. Crucially, acquiescence is not merely established through the violence (or the threat of violence) of the judicial and repressive infrastructure of the state; rather, consent and even zeal for the leading class’s rule, is generated through ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, ²⁸ appropriation of ideals and, ultimately, networks of intellectuals disseminating among civil society the values, ideas and aspirations of the dominant class. ²⁹ In this way, when successful, the ideology of the ruling class comes to be adopted as ‘common sense’ by large parts of the population. ³⁰ Though always contested, where hegemony is at its peak, this manifests itself in a comparatively tranquil political order where subordinate classes ascribe to the objectives of the leading class and consent to be governed. The leading class may, in turn, flexibly absorb or placate any arising political antagonisms.

Work on Gramsci has proliferated to an extraordinary degree in recent years in a range of disciplines. This ‘second wave’, ³¹ has led researchers to apply Gramscian ideas of hegemony to such disparate issues as nursing, ³² social work ³³ and accounting. ³⁴ There has also been a range of work on more conventional politics and IR topics, such as race, ³⁵ (post)colonialism ³⁶ and world order. ³⁷ Other recent explicitly neo-Gramscian (and even neo neo-Gramscian) work has addressed energy transitions, ³⁸ climate justice ³⁹ and American hegemony. ⁴⁰ Accompanying this, there is considerable debate about the applicability of Gramscian and neo-Gramscian approaches to IR, ⁴¹ as well as the utility of Gramsci’s thought beyond hegemony. ⁴² While the literature is too vast to capture here in its entirety, it is necessary to note that, despite the creative manner in which Gramsci’s thought has been deployed, there is not currently a theorisation of the destabilising consequences of an ‘excess’ or ‘surfeit’ of hegemony. It is this theorisation of HET as a particular contradiction within hegemony and potential tool for conceptualising crises that is the central contribution of this article.

Despite this gap, especially given this article’s central argument regarding the misinterpretation and transmutability of hegemonic narratives, it is crucial here to consider Stuart Hall’s theorisation of the potentialities (and actualities) of workers’ varying interpretations of hegemonic messages, including possible ‘aberrant’ readings. ⁴³ Importantly, although he was dealing with the category of media consumers or television audiences – whereas I am dealing with citizens as members of the electorate – Hall advanced crucial insights into the unpredictable and potentially destabilising process of populations receiving hegemonic messages and processing their meanings. It is such insights that, as I elaborate now, can be related to Brexit and political crises more generally.

In his classic essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Hall draws on Gramsci to consider the circumstances in which there may be ‘misreadings’ of hegemonic discourses. In doing so, he offers a typography of interpretations of hegemonic discourse as signified or ‘encoded’ in the media. The first he labels the ‘dominant or hegemonic code’ whereby the media consumer digests the message ‘full and straight’; they uncritically buy into the narrative and are satisfied by the ideals disseminated by the ruling class. ⁴⁴ In the case of Brexit (which occurred after Hall’s death in 2014), this could include subscribing to the dominant messages conveyed by the government that voting Leave would be disastrous for the economy or national security (I analyse such discourses later). Hall next articulates the ‘negotiated code’ whereby the media consumer incorporates ‘a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements’: the decoder accepts the general premise and legitimacy of the hegemonic message but maintains ‘the right to make a more negotiated application to “local conditions”’. ⁴⁵ Hall gives the example of a worker who may accept the overall hegemonic message requiring the curtailment of workers’ rights and pay but still insists on the necessity of industrial action in their own workplace. ⁴⁶ To relate this to Brexit, this might include a general acceptance that Brexit would be damaging to GDP or house prices but ambivalence about how this pertains to one’s own circumstances. Finally, Hall elaborates on the ‘oppositional code’. Here, the consumer reads against the grain and adopts a stance that directly challenges the encoded hegemonic message. ⁴⁷ Crudely, the citizen may hear the veneration of the EU single market but stand against it as a device for deepening capitalist inequality.

Interestingly, in all three categories, Hall considers that the consumer comprehends the dominant message. In the oppositional code, for example, the reader ‘detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative frame’. ⁴⁸ That is, the act of making a contrary reading of the hegemonic message entails understanding (but rejecting) the message. In Hall’s words, ‘it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way’. ⁴⁹ Likewise, in both the dominant and negotiated readings, the consumer ‘gets’ the message. Hall at several points uses the word ‘misunderstandings’ but then dismisses the word as ‘inadequate’. ⁵⁰ In his words, ‘literal or denotative “errors” are relatively unproblematic’ and merely constitute ‘a kind of noise in the channel’. ⁵¹ By contrast, ‘connotative and contextual “misunderstandings” are, or can be, of the highest significance’. ⁵² I, however, want to say something different: in the case of Brexit, I show that there is an understanding and embrace of dominant narratives in a manner that approximates the ‘dominant code’: suspicion for migration, reverence for sovereignty and controlling borders and so forth. But this successful imparting of the dominant code does not render the citizen entirely pliable. In fact, it is armed with such ideals that the citizen (or, at least, some citizens) proceeds to act in a way that is contrary to the establishment’s interests. Such a citizen cannot be said to have made a ‘negotiated’ or ‘oppositional’ reading; it is exactly because they have taken an overzealous dominant reading that they elect to vote for Brexit. This is more than ‘noise in the channel’: there is a crucial and destabilising disjuncture between the citizen decoding the hegemonic message and acting upon it.

Intriguingly, Gramsci considers the implications of a disjuncture between internalising ideals and action, asking:

is it not frequently the case that there is a contradiction between one’s intellectual choice and one’s mode of conduct? Which therefore would be the real conception of the world: that logically affirmed as an intellectual choice? or that which emerges from the real activity of each man, which is implicit in his mode of action? ⁵³

Gramsci answers his own question:

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. ⁵⁴

Gramsci seems to be suggesting here that where there is a disconnect between action and internalised belief, it is the action that reflects the truer revolutionary ideals of the worker, and the intellectual belief that is less critical or self-aware. Again, I want to say something different: it is not that the action (in this case, voting for Brexit) that is somehow reflective of the truer self in solidarity with other workers. In fact, it is the opposite: it is a bastardised outcome of too willingly and enthusiastically embracing the ‘dominant code’. The disjuncture between action (voting Leave) and message (‘vote for Remain’) is because of a surfeit in the internalising of hegemonic messages that proceeds to induce action that is beyond that anticipated by the encoder. In the following sections, I empirically demonstrate this phenomenon of hegemonic excess through the case study of Brexit.

The Establishment’s Support for Remain

The goal of this section is to establish that the political and economic establishment overwhelmingly supported Remain. I, nevertheless, wish to nuance this with two supplementary points: first, that there was a rival (albeit far smaller) faction within the establishment that advocated Brexit and led the Leave campaign. In this respect, despite the Leave campaigns’ proclivity for framing the vote as ‘the people’ versus an out-of-touch elite, ⁵⁵ both campaigns were overwhelmingly establishment. Second, the very fact that the UK’s membership of the EU was to be decided by a referendum, thereby necessitating the Remain campaign to explicitly articulate a defence of EU membership, reflects a fractured consensus on the matter.

In considering such issues, it would be misguided to say that the wielders of capital universally supported Remain. Unsurprisingly, fragments of the capitalist class, especially amongst hedge funds, bet on a so-called ‘Hard Brexit’ or, before the vote, sought to ‘short’ against potential market volatility to be created by a Leave victory. ⁵⁶ Likewise, although until the last decade or so they had been relatively marginalised, there have long been voices within the Conservative Party that have been hostile to the EU. Notwithstanding this, and as recognised by others working on Brexit through a Gramscian lens, there are strong grounds to portray the Remain camp as a considerably unified edifice. ⁵⁷ As Salter writes:

all the major investment banks and transnational corporations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank, the OECD, the CBI, the Bank of England, Lloyds and the European Round Table of Industrialists, to name but a few, unanimously supported Remain. . . ⁵⁸

On the domestic political front, there was also unity amongst the leadership of almost every ‘mainstream’ political party, from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, to the Green Party (the Democratic Unionist Party and United Kingdom Independence Party, unsurprisingly, supported Leave). At an international level, Barak Obama and other world leaders publicly stated or implied their preference for Remain, while, inevitably, the EU itself and its constitutive state leaders wished for the United Kingdom to remain.

Alongside the broad support among the political and economic establishment, there was considerable optimism that Remain would prevail in the vote, with opinion polls, the public, and bookmakers largely anticipating a Remain victory. ⁵⁹ And Cameron would surely not have permitted the referendum if he had anticipated defeat and such an ignominious end to his premiership. One suspects that even the most prominent Leave supporting Conservative MPs, namely Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, may have been doubtful about both the merits of the Leave cause and its prospects of winning: Johnson famously drafted two opposing Daily Telegraph columns (one in favour of Remain, one for Leave), ⁶⁰ and Gove’s then wife rebuked him on hearing the result that he was ‘only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’. ⁶¹

In many respects, the vote to remain was framed as common sense (obviously a Gramscian term – a matter I turn to shortly). Emblematic of this is the government sending a booklet to every household in the United Kingdom entitled ‘Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK’, outlining the benefits of EU membership for ‘protecting jobs’, ‘a stronger economy’ and ‘providing security’. ⁶² The common sense approach was also underpinned by the habit of portraying contrary voices as unhinged, with David Cameron famously calling United Kingdom Independence Party ‘a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’. ⁶³

Nevertheless – and it is crucial to observe this – the very fact that the Remain campaign needed to articulate seemingly common sense reasons for remaining in the EU indicates a significant breakdown of ‘common sense’ in Gramscian terms. ⁶⁴ That is, for an institution or facet of social life to be operating on the plane of common sense, its function scarcely needs articulating beyond an implicit level, and certainly does not require a binary referendum on its role (the political class is not required, for instance, to make an explicit case for the existence of a police force). To this end, although the United Kingdom had long been framed as an ‘awkward partner’ in the EU and there had been sporadic episodes of euroscepticism, ⁶⁵ the notion of the United Kingdom leaving the EU had, for decades, not been a serious prospect. Such a consensus had begun to fracture and open struggles over this emerged, first within the Conservative Party itself, and later amongst the wider public. Indeed, I would suggest that a central (misguided) motivation for Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership was so that, in the aftermath of inevitable victory, the matter could be shifted away from party and public contestation and back into the domain of common sense.

Even in recognising these frailties, the central point of this section – and I do not think it controversial – is to maintain that there was an overwhelmingly pro-Remain establishment. The reason for highlighting this is to demonstrate that the Leave victory was contrary to such a bloc’s interests and stated wishes. While the idea that the Leave vote was, at least in part, caused by an excess of hegemony is established later in the article, this first move lays the foundations for a key component of HET: the phenomenon can create political outcomes that are incompatible with, or contrary to, the specified goals of hegemonic actors and institutions.

Brexit as Crisis

I turn now to a second component of HET: the assertion that it has the capacity to be crisis inducing. To do this, it is necessary to demonstrate that the case study, Brexit, is indeed a crisis. Helpfully, there is no shortage of academic work that frames Brexit as a crisis. ⁶⁶ But first, a caveat: I do not wish to say that the crisis is insurmountable: hegemony is necessarily dynamic and pliable, and the ruling class, in line with Gramscian expectations, has entered into a partially successful salvaging mission to appropriate and absorb Leave into a new hegemonic, and still neoliberal, edifice. ⁶⁷ After Brexit, power did not transition at a governmental or economic level to anti-establishment forces, and clearly the dominant mode of capitalism remains intact. Moreover, with the two main parties recognising the ‘will of the people’, there has been a significant reshaping of bi-partisan official elite stances on Brexit since the referendum. And despite an initial wobble where a (then) left-wing Labour opposition was influential in eliminating the Conservative Majority in the 2017 General Election, the Conservative Party, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, subsequently won an 80-seat majority in 2019, in large thanks to the mantra of ‘getting Brexit done’. ⁶⁸

Notwithstanding the right’s electoral success and the endurance of finance-led accumulation, there are undoubtedly many characteristics of a crisis across various levels of governance, including party political, constitutional, economic, societal, and, most importantly, state integrity levels. In the ruling Conservative Party, Brexit compounded intra-party factionalism among so-called hard-Brexiteers, soft-Brexiteers and Remainers, ⁶⁹ culminating in Johnson’s purging in September 2019 of large numbers of the parliamentary party when their whip was suspended after a tussle over the parliamentary standing order. More broadly, Brexit has led to constitutional crises, such as the proroguing of parliament and, certainly under Theresa May’s premiership, repeated impasses between executive and legislature.

It is also not controversial to say that Brexit has led to economic and societal crises. As Dhingra and Sampson show, even before the new EU-UK trading relationship in 2021, the vote led to ‘higher import and consumer prices, lower investment, and slower real wage and GDP growth’. ⁷⁰ There are estimates that, to June 2022, ‘Brexit had reduced GDP by 5.5%, investment by 11%, and goods trade by 7%’. ⁷¹ According to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s most recent assumption, the post-2021 trading relationship will see a reduction of ‘long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to remaining in the EU’. ⁷² Such outcomes clearly have destabilising social consequences: analysing the rise in non-tariff barriers to trade, Bakker et al. find that, from December 2019, Brexit led to a 6% increase in the price of food products over the space of two years, ⁷³ with ‘households losing £5.84bn’. ⁷⁴ In terms of labour, it has (directly or indirectly) contributed to shortages of farm workers and fruit pickers ⁷⁵ ; an ongoing staffing crisis in the National Health Service; ⁷⁶ and additional boarder checks have caused long traffic jams at ports. ⁷⁷ It is also undoubtedly exacerbating a cost-of-living crisis that is being met with industrial action throughout many sectors. ⁷⁸ This ensuing economic and living standards crisis is contrary to a hegemonic order in which a pliant working and middle class, even when in subordinate positions, could expect to be somewhat cushioned from such whirlwinds.

Perhaps the largest crisis (from the perspective of the political establishment), however, has been the heightened fragility of the United Kingdom as a union. This is especially significant in Gramscian terms given his ontological privileging of the state. ⁷⁹ In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s then First Minister, said that a new Scottish independence referendum was now ‘highly likely’. ⁸⁰ There is presently an Scottish National Party-Green majority in Holyrood in favour of a new referendum and, at the time of writing, even with turmoil in the Scottish National Party, the latest polling suggests that any referendum would be close, with 42% indicating they would vote for independence and 44% against. ⁸¹ A strong card for the Scottish National Party to play is that 62% of votes cast in Scotland in the 2016 referendum were for Remain. ⁸² This enables the Scottish National Party narrative that Scotland was ‘ripped . . . out of the EU and the single market against our will, with massive damage to trade, living standards and public services’. ⁸³ Current Scottish First Minister and Scottish National Party Leader Humza Yousaf has reinforced this position, maintaining that ‘the only way to meaningfully reverse the damage [of Brexit] . . . is for an independent Scotland to re-join the European Union’. ⁸⁴ In line with the idea that hegemonic EXCESS can be crisis-inducing for the establishment, there is, in short, no doubt that the Brexit vote has given ammunition to political forces that wish to dismantle the United Kingdom.

With respect to Northern Ireland, Brexit has created constitutional crises and arguably heightened the chances of a fracture from the United Kingdom. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU, including from both the single market and the customs union, created the requirement for the EU to conduct checks on certain goods entering its territory. With the return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland untenable, the Johnson administration’s solution was the Northern Ireland Protocol – the establishment of checks between Britain and Northern Ireland. Theresa May had previously said that ‘no UK Prime Minister could ever agree’ to such a deal and that it would ‘undermine the UK common market and threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK’. ⁸⁵ The Northern Ireland Protocol has angered many in the Unionist community in the north of Ireland and led to the collapse of the Executive in 2022. The Democratic Unionist Party has subsequently refused to enter into a power sharing agreement in the Stormont Assembly, thereby making devolved power in Northern Ireland inoperable. ⁸⁶ At the time of writing (November 2023), there remains no Executive in place and the Assembly is essentially at an impasse. Again, then, we see how Brexit has created thorny constitutional difficulties for the political establishment, including challenging the integrity of the state.

Beyond this, Brexit, like the election of Trump in the United States, both reflects and has given rise to strong recriminations and societal antagonisms. At an extreme end, Jo Cox MP was murdered during the campaign. At a more quotidian level, it has also created intergenerational antipathy (so-called ‘boomer blaming’) ⁸⁷ and fractures within friendship groups and families. ⁸⁸ In respect to hegemony, which aspires to docility among the populace and high degrees of societal harmony, this reflects something of an ideational crisis within the United Kingdom.

To join the dots back to Gramsci and hegemony, one of his central achievements was to demonstrate that power is not solely economistic. In his words, in seeking an ‘equilibrium’, ‘the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic corporate kind’. ⁸⁹ But, as outlined here, the sacrifices inherent in Brexit do not create equilibrium and only offer a heightened existential threat to the integrity of the state. As such, even when accounting for the appropriation of Brexit as the ‘will of the people’ and the central policy thrust of the governing party, this has led to anxiety for the ruling class at an economic, constitutional and ideational level that may be too much to bear. Even in recognising the necessity of sacrifice and fluidly adapting to challenges, there is, as Gramsci writes, ‘also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential’. ⁹⁰

Xenophobia as Crucial to Brexit

I have, thus far, offered two propositions: first, that there was a pro-Remain establishment; second, that the Brexit vote was crisis-inducing for this bloc. These two positions enable key aspects of my argument that the Brexit outcome was neither desired nor satisfactory for the overwhelming majority of the establishment. My next goal is to elucidate the central feature of HET by demonstrating that such a crisis arose not solely out of a public disdain for elite dominant narratives but, conversely, was congruent, though in an exaggerated and excessive manner, with the ideals espoused and implemented by the establishment. I demonstrate this excess of hegemony in relation to discourses and policies on migration, a pivotal dimension of the Brexit vote.

Demonstrating the salience of immigration (or, at least, fantasises about immigration), approaching the referendum, polls demonstrated that it was considered the most significant issue facing the country, with a third of voters deeming it to be one of the most important issues in deciding how to vote. ⁹¹ In an October 2016 Ipsos poll, 81% of Leave voters and 43% of Remain voters stated a wish to see reduced immigration. ⁹² In other words, one cannot consider the referendum to be merely a dry constitutional matter pertaining to membership of an International Organisation; it is impossible to overlook the idea that immigration – and a stated desire to reduce it – was central to the vote. This is not to say that immigration was the only issue, but, in a close-run race, it was incontrovertibly a decisive one.

Notwithstanding the central importance of immigration, there, as previously stated, remains a tendency in the literature to maintain that the Brexit vote was a counterhegemonic move. Attempting to portray the vote as an anti-neoliberal manoeuvre, there are those who downplay the central role of xenophobia and racism in the Leave victory. Dell, for instance, contends that support for Brexit ‘is not representative of a larger far right thrust in the political consciousness of the working class in the UK, but rather part of this larger rejection to the neoliberal system itself, as well as the establishment that is seen to represent it’. ⁹³ This is too exculpatory. Not all Brexit voters are racist and, as Bhambra shows, it is deeply flawed to point to working class racism over middle class racism when Brexit ‘was disproportionately delivered by the propertied, pensioned, well-off, white middle class based in southern England, not the northern working class who have been more commonly held responsible for the outcome’. ⁹⁴ But whichever way one cuts it, xenophobia was crucial to the vote. Indeed, if Brexit was counterhegemonic and anti-neoliberal rather than racist and xenophobic, this would suggest, rather implausibly, that Black and minority ethnic voters (69% of whom voted Remain) ⁹⁵ and migrants are considerably more comfortable with neoliberalism than their White counterparts.

Demonstrating that xenophobia was crucial to courting the Leave vote is not a difficult task. Leave-supporting newspapers published anti-migrant vitriol ⁹⁶ ; United Kingdom Independence Party used racist and emotive anti-migrant imagery, most notoriously with the infamous ‘breaking point’ poster ⁹⁷ ; and Leave-supporting cabinet ministers emphasised the risks of Turkey joining the EU, with the official Vote Leave campaign highlighting ‘the threats to UK security’ of Turkey’s membership. ⁹⁸ The very notion of ‘taking back control’ – the devastatingly effective slogan of the Vote Leave campaign – was a clear nod to more restrictive border measures. It is unsurprising, then, that the aftermath of the vote saw significant racist violence. ⁹⁹ While the xenophobia of the Leave campaign is well known, I contend that this is not a discourse that is oppositional to the Remain bloc’s position. Rather, as I explore now, anti-migrant hostility was also baked into the hegemonic Remain bloc’s position at both domestic and EU levels.

Salter suggests that the Brexit vote illuminates ‘the collision between the hegemony of the EU and the emerging counterhegemonic challenge in the UK’. For him, this represents an antagonism between ‘two opposing cultures of localism and cosmopolitanism’. ¹⁰⁰ Reflecting on both Trump and Brexit, Colgan and Keohane likewise point to the tensions between ‘cosmopolitanism and national solidarity’. ¹⁰¹ The Remain campaign was certainly not characterised by cosmopolitanism, in the (non-Gramscian) sense of exhibiting openness or solidarity to migrants. Although there may be differences in the tone of the language, the anti-migrant position of the Leave campaign does not constitute a challenge to the rhetoric of Remain but is largely compatible with its ethos. Let us start with the Conservative Manifesto for the 2015 election, the election in which Conservative victory led to the referendum. The manifesto commits to ‘regain[ing] control of EU migration by reforming welfare rules’. It outlines how: ‘we will insist that EU migrants who want to claim tax credits and child benefit must live here and contribute to our country for a minimum of four years’; it promises ‘new residency requirement for social housing, so that EU migrants cannot even be considered for a council house unless they have been living in an area for at least four years’; and commits to ‘end[ing] the ability of EU jobseekers to claim any job-seeking benefits at all’, adding that ‘if jobseekers have not found a job within six months, they will be required to leave’. ¹⁰² This clearly reflects an anti-migrant chauvinism that reproduces the trope that migrants are over-reliant on welfare provisions and constitute a drain on domestic resources.

In line with this, Theresa May, the Remain-supporting Home Secretary, ¹⁰³ spoke in 2012 of her aim ‘to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration’. ¹⁰⁴ This was accompanied by the Home Office’s 2013 deployment of vans circulating sections of London replete with a billboard saying: ‘in the UK illegally?’ and ‘Go home’. ¹⁰⁵ Needless to say, ‘go home’ is a classic racist refrain. In 2012, the government also introduced minimum income requirements for families consisting of a non-European Economic Area spouse to live in the United Kingdom. ¹⁰⁶ This, from a pro-Remain Home Secretary under a pro-Remain Prime Minister, is not indicative of the supposed cosmopolitan ethos that is oppositional to the Leave campaign’s anti-migrant rhetoric. The encoded message, to employ Hall’s terminology, by the Remain-supporting government clearly centred around an open hostility towards migrants.

Such hostility was not just parallel to the Leave campaign but was injected into the campaign itself. The government’s infamous booklet to every household in the United Kingdom, for instance, directly incorporated the government’s anti-migrant stance as a reason to vote Remain. Under the subheading ‘Controlling immigration and securing our borders’, the booklet reads:

The Government has negotiated a deal that will make our benefits system less of a draw for EU citizens. In future, new EU migrants will not have full access to certain benefits until they have worked here for up to four years. The Government will have greater powers to take action where there is abuse of our immigration system.

Some argue that leaving the EU would give us more freedom to limit immigration. But in return for the economic benefits of access to the EU’s Single Market, non-EU countries – such as Norway – have had to accept the right of all EU citizens to live and work in their country. ¹⁰⁷

The booklet also encodes the classic securitisation of immigration by linking EU membership and migration policies to ‘keeping us safer’. In the booklet’s words, ‘EU cooperation makes it easier to keep criminals and terrorists out of the UK’, and it celebrates how ‘The UK is not part of the EU’s border-free zone – we control our own borders which gives us the right to check everyone, including EU nationals’. ¹⁰⁸ Far from offering an anti-xenophobic alternative to Leave, the booklet reproduces conventional anti-migration prejudices. If anything, there seems to be an attempt to beat Leave on its own patch, with the suggestion that remaining in the EU allows Britain to be ‘tougher’ on immigration.

A similar analysis can be made at the transnational level. The EU itself, from one perspective, does offer a cosmopolitan ethos in the sense of facilitating free movement within its borders. Yet, in another sense, the EU has erected highly exclusionary borders, with walls, barbed wire and surveillance to the extent that ‘death becomes a norm through which migration is governed’. ¹⁰⁹ In 2016, the year of the referendum, the Missing Migrants Project reports that 5136 people died or went missing attempting to cross the Mediterranean. ¹¹⁰ Equally, the European Union has engaged in the process of externalising or outsourcing its border control processes to ‘protect European borders from illegal entries’, often with detrimental consequences for human rights. ¹¹¹ Where the EU internally celebrates its enshrined rights and progressive dimensions, externally it is, at best, callous in its attitude towards migrant deaths. In this way, we again see the false dichotomy between a supposedly cosmopolitan EU and a xenophobic Leave vote. Like the Remain supporting government, the EU enforces policies that are hostile to migrants. In sections of the UK electorate voting enthusiastically to restrict migration, this is not contra the EU but in line with the actions of a hegemonic leading International Organisation. This, in other words, pertains to the core of the concept of hegemonic surfeit: in embracing dominant societal narratives, sections of the public do so to a degree that surpasses the expectations of the encoder.

Let us return to Stuart Hall’s typology of the dominant, negotiated and oppositional codes. I have demonstrated that, far from emplotting a cosmopolitan narrative, both the Remain-supporting government and the EU encoded (and implemented in policy) anti-migrant sentiments. Indeed, the government encoded xenophobic messages into the very campaign in which it asked citizens to vote Remain. In this sense, the Remain camp was essentially requesting that citizens be suspicious of foreigners and revere the border control enabled by the EU. In a very meaningful sense, such encoded messages were successful: it is clear from the previously cited polling that immigration and a desire to reduce it were central priorities for large swathes of the electorate. In other words, and to deploy Hall’s categorisation, there appears to be a large-scale decoding of the dominant message. The problem for the Remain bloc is that this successful decoding of the message did not translate into the desired behaviour of the citizen, namely voting to remain in the EU. But why would it and how could it? The Remain campaign disseminated a xenophobia that, if such a thing is possible, was supposed to be more acceptable – somehow more palatable – than that of the outlandish Leave campaign. It is as if the Remain campaign asked its constituency to dislike foreigners but only within delimited parameters. The ruling class seems to have been adept at disseminating the core message but not in regulating its volume. Backfiring on the establishment, the hegemonic message was absorbed to an excessive degree.

In pursuing this line of thinking, I want to also take a moment to return to Gramsci’s notion of common sense. As I pointed out earlier, it seems that over the last decade or so, the UK’s membership of the EU has shifted from being a largely taken-for-granted feature of the architecture of governance to becoming a matter of high stakes contestation. Conversely, what has not shifted in either establishment or public discourse are the ideas that immigration necessitates state control and that borders require securing. There are, of course, shades within such discourses, from the vitriolic (‘Breaking point’) to the more technocratic. But, as I have demonstrated, it is not only those associated with the Leave campaign who trade in the vitriolic (‘Go home’). In other words, the United Kingdom remaining in the EU fractured as a matter of common sense, but the idea that the state must do something about immigration has not. This slippage played into the hands of Leave: the very fact that Remain politicians explicitly linked leaving the EU to such common sense or fundamental ills as food shortages or economic crashes led to the traction of such claims as being ‘Project Fear’. In this respect, now that EU membership was a terrain of struggle, the claims were so plainly dire that they could be dismissed as incredulous (i.e. not common sense). By contrast, both the Leave and Remain campaigns reproduced the idea that immigration must be dealt with as self-evident, only to compete over who would be tougher to this end. The terrain of struggle was not over whether migration should be controlled; the asymmetric intra-elite struggle was over the efficacy, and even ruthlessness, by which each camp would address migration. In decoding the dominant messages on migration, it cannot be a surprise that this assisted the Leave bloc – a group already readily associated with anti-migrant credentials. Again, then, we turn to the crux of HET: the dominant narratives hit home in a way that surpassed expectations and induced behaviour that was out of step with the goals of the establishment. This has been both crisis inducing and at the expense of the desire of the vast majority of the establishment to remain in the EU.

Conclusion

This article is a first move in developing the theory of HET. It encapsulates the idea that populations, or sections of a population, internalise hegemonic doctrine too well and to such an extent that it backfires on the objectives of the ruling class. In this respect, hegemonic ideals may be internalised amongst the populace but, now unleashed, become out of the control of the establishment. Such ideals may mutate, amplify and operate in unpredictable ways. The idea that there are contradictions within the operation of hegemony is certainly not a new one, and Gramsci himself was clear about this. Nevertheless, the value of HET lies in pinpointing and conceptualising a specific contradiction that is disruptive to the smooth operation of power.

I have illustrated the pertinence of HET through the case study of Brexit. As with any newly established theorisation, ensuing research is required to further refine it and expand on its analytical potential. To this end, the theory, I contend, has applicability beyond Brexit. Deeper case study analysis would clearly be required, but it is not a stretch to suggest that it has utility, for instance, in explaining the election of Donald Trump. Here we see hegemonic ideals of hostility to immigrants, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, machismo, veneration of personal-wealth and supposed ‘business acumen’ manifest themselves in a political outcome that is far from satisfactory for the establishment. Like Brexit, Trump may merely represent another faction within the establishment – and he doubtlessly satisfied the immediate thirst of certain sectors of capital – but, in important ways, he is profoundly destabilising for hegemony: he is divisive, unpredictable, a threat to the prospects of the Republican establishment and, whether directly or indirectly, played a role in the storming of the Capitol. This is a far cry from the tranquil waters of a successful hegemonic order. Beyond Trump, there is a long history of ‘respectable’ conservatives unleashing ideologies and charismatic Caesars that they mistakenly believe they can domesticate. HET, I propose, may be a useful tool to evaluate this phenomenon.

The theory may also have utility in the analysis of micro-power relations. Take England supporting football hooligans: they are violent, damage private property, are considered a threat to social order, and are generally detrimental to the nation’s reputation. Research, including by Stuart Hall himself, demonstrates that hooligans are routinely represented in the media as mindless, bestial and irrational. ¹¹² As Tsoukala writes, ‘despite their long-lasting links to far-Right ideology, football hooligans are scarcely seen as persons acting with any political consciousness’. ¹¹³ This dominant representation of football hooligans as brainless is certainly expedient for the establishment, but is it possible to say that, rather than being apolitical, they have internalised hegemonic ideals too well? They love the country, love the monarchy, have a penchant for consumerist branding, ¹¹⁴ and have antipathy for the ‘woke’. ¹¹⁵ I recall also the 2011 London riots: for many involved this was, without question, an anti-hegemonic scream, emerging from both racial and class oppression and sparked by the police’s killing of Mark Duggan. Yet, in another sense, the riots were characterised by a ‘consumerist feast’ in which acquisition of electrical products, trainers and fashionwear were particularly prominent. ¹¹⁶ Can the materialistic, consumerist and vanity-led dimensions of the riots also be said to stem from too much hegemony? In this article constituting an opening move in formulating HET, it is only tentatively that I suggest its applicability to such micro-power relations. Nevertheless, the concept may have utility for accounting for many of the dynamics at play here.

Finally, I wish to address a possible criticism of HET: that it does not sufficiently recognise the agency of individuals or groups to resist hegemonic ideals. First, I by no means claim that hegemonic ideals are internalised by all people or all sectors of society. There were, ironically, people who voted Remain (in line with the ruling class) exactly because they oppose hegemonic ideals articulated by the dominant Remainer bloc. Likewise, it is undoubtedly the case that some Leavers, especially advocates of so-called ‘Lexit’, were informed by anti-hegemonic, anti-globalisation, anti-neoliberal principles. Even in recognising this, the point is that some members of the population voted Leave because of an excess of hegemony. Even if the numbers are relatively small, this is no trivial matter when Brexit, or even Trump’s Presidency, were decided by small margins. The significance is that even if we consider hegemonic excess to be a marginal phenomenon – and I suggest it is bigger than this – this can still have oversized implications in derailing ruling class objectives. Rather than negating the agency of individuals, it does the opposite: individuals may incorporate hegemonic ideals, but they have the agency to take this in different directions, do with it what they will and operate in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, in analysing the case study of Brexit (and in pointing to Trump), the phenomenon of hegemonic excess has not given rise here to progressive or emancipatory politics. Future studies may consider how the phenomenon may be funnelled or utilised practically by genuinely anti-establishment actors, rather than just an alternative faction within the establishment. With this hope, I look forward to Hegemonic Excess Theory being incorporated into an array of future research about power and its unanticipated consequences.