Introduction: contemporary European historians on Brexit

Reinisch, Jessica (2019) Introduction: contemporary European historians on Brexit. Contemporary European History 28 (1), pp. 1-5. ISSN 0960-7773.

Abstract

This essay introduces a Contemporary European History roundtable of European historians on Brexit as considered in the broad sweep of contemporary European history. On some level, the prospect of Brexit is strikingly anti-historical, in that it defies everything we thought we knew about the history of internationalisation and globalisation in general, and European integration in particular, as a more or less one-directional process. The history of the reverse, of any significant and lasting fragmentation and de-internationalisation, remains to be written. How then can historians write Brexit into longer-term trajectories of European history? How does it compare with other previous moments of crisis in European structures? Will it represent a key turning point in European history, to be viewed alongside the events of the two world wars or post-war settlements, or the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989–90? How do particular historical and national vantage points alter the significance of Brexit? And what will anyone thinking about Brexit miss if it is not considered as part of a wider historical process? This essay draws out themes developed in the roundtable's nineteen articles.

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