Ethnologia Europaea

This issue of Ethnologia Europaea presents an exciting and timely themed section on “Brexit Matters” which discusses the departure of the UK from the EU in a comparative mode. Brexit “matters” in many ways, as the contributions to this section show by considering from an ethnographic perspective previous “exits” or disintegration processes in the ongoing history of European ruptures, thereby contextualizing and historicizing current developments in the UK. Please see the guest editor’s introduction for a more detailed discussion.

The anthropology of Brexit reflects a complicated Brexit process that has involved all of the nations of Europe in various ways, and has been linked to other social, political and economic forces worldwide. With reference to four views of Brexit by anthropologists long known for their ethnographic work in the UK, France, Hungary, Ireland and the former Yugoslavia, this introduction to a special issue reviews the Brexit process as both a chronicle of what has already been achieved by anthropologists and as a possible stimulus to future research. It argues that the anthropology of Brexit should be viewed from many perspectives, including but not limited to the comparative examination of power, culture and political economy.

The Brexit process has affected the lives of “middling” mobile Europeans living in the UK, who have experienced uncertainty as their legal status and social position have shifted. Based on ethnographic research during the years 2015–2020 among French citizens living in London, I draw upon the concepts of liminality, social drama, and precarity to analyze the effects of the unfolding events triggered by the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union (Brexit) on their everyday lives and trajectories. Although there is much diversity among the French in London, my longitudinal perspective suggests that the social drama of the Brexit process raises questions about the precarity of the mobile EU middle class and the strength of their European and national affiliations.

In the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum in 2016 the majority of votes cast in Northern Ireland were in favor of the UK staying a member state of the European Union. This support was strong, and remains so, in the Northern Ireland borderlands, where ethnographic research shows particularly widespread identification with Europe among Irish nationalists. This article explores ways that Northern Ireland borderlanders see their relatively strong association with the Europe of the EU within the context of the Brexit process that has engulfed all of the people of the British and Irish isles since 2016. Borderlanders fear that Brexit may bring back a “hard border,” which would subvert over twenty years of peace, reconciliation and cross-border economic and political development.

Yugoslavia (YU), a multinational federation, collapsed into civil war and ultimate dissolution in 1991, exactly when the European Union (EU) was coming into existence as a multinational federation. What failed in YU, and is threatened in EU, is the concept of a federation composed of nation-states in the European sense of that term, in which the nation (as ethno-religious community) is sovereign in its own state (territory plus government). If the EU remains defined as a single polity of nation-states whose sovereignty is subordinated to regulatory processes from Brussels, which nationalists can charge are damaging to the interests of their particular ethno-nation’s control over their own state, its future seems as unpromising as was Yugoslavia under socialism.

The 2016 election victory of Donald Trump and the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union (Brexit) both signal tremendous alterations in global politics. What really connects these international changes to the steady popularity of Viktor Orbán in Hungary? This article describes how a newly emerging and growing transnational political process known as illiberal democracy has influenced Hungary and other states since the late 1990s. By utilizing fieldwork materials from the mid- to late-2010s, it is asserted that both the process of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have boosted not only the legitimacy of extreme right but contributed to the solidification of illiberalism in Hungary.

The articles in this special issue contribute not just to a better and much-needed understanding of Brexit and its impact on ordinary lives, inside as well as outside the UK. The Irish, (ex-)Yugoslavian, Hungarian and French histories throw the Brexit conundrum into interesting and timely perspectives. They teach us to appreciate that we can no longer afford to regard Brexit as an exception to the rule. We have to take it seriously as both a sign of the times and a harbinger of the future. The rise of populism has thrown this question into sharp relief. More and more member states experience Eurosceptical tendencies, and although the strength and form of these vary substantially among nations, they all pivot around popular and political emotions that hanker for more national sovereignty and less European integration.

This article explores migration struggles along Europe’s humanitarian border in the context of Syrian displacement in Lebanon. Based on ethnographic field research it traces how humanitarian government is negotiated, appropriated and resisted in the daily struggles of individuals seeking to leave the region towards Europe. In this respect it sheds light on Syrian activism in Lebanon’s humanitarian sector, strategies to get a place in a humanitarian admission programme, projects to leave the country towards Europe and decisions to stay in Lebanon. The article shows how the arbitrariness of humanitarian government is not limited to institutions or campsites but penetrates as a ruling logic the everyday of social life and contributes to zones where access to human rights is not a given, but a daily struggle.

The article discusses the civic engagement of humanitarian assistance to refugees during the migration movements of 2015. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of an event of voluntary aid for refugees, I examine how the activities can be understood as a civil society intervention in the political event of “the long summer of migration.” I argue that the voluntary refugee relief of 2015 should be conceived as “vernacular humanitarianism.” As such, the participants carried out activities of self-organized prefigurative politics, in which they experimented with the materialization and realization of their ideas about social relationships, community and the treatment of refugees, while they were simultaneously entangled in arrangements of collaborative governance, where they contributed to the local authorities’ migration management.

The transcription of oral interviews into textual data is a complex process. Translating spoken language with all its extralinguistic features into some sort of written text presentation – through transcribing it – is time-consuming and fraught with ethical, methodological and theoretical issues. This article’s argument is two-fold: first, it calls for more transparency from researchers in explaining what happens on the way from interview to published text. There are many ways to transcribe, and they fit different purposes. We should be clear as to why we choose different methods. Second, it argues that our disciplines as well as our readers would benefit from us allowing more space to the researcher in transcribed interviews.

How did the corona lockdown affect the practising of time in everyday life? And how did new experiences of time challenge the established rhythms, pasts, presents, and futures that permeate daily life? During spring 2020, most of us tried to synchronise with new kinds of time in order to protect family members, avoid anxiety, and continue on as best we could. Many of the everyday micro-practices that sequence time into tacit and taken-for-granted rhythms came to a standstill during lockdown, and new daily routines and ideas of past and future were invoked. Through the prism of the Danish lockdown, this article investigates how contemporary lives unfold through multiple temporalities, and how that shapes and changes how we practice and experience time.