Government on the clock: the importance of timing in Brexit
Andrew R. Hom and Ryan K. Beasley
If a foreign policy matters to the UK government, chances are it is on the clock. While Brexit focused discussions on sovereignty, immigration, and the notion of ‘Europe’, our recent research published in International Affairs shows that time — and especially timing — frequently drove UK policy-making debates, deliberations, and decisions.
The many times of Brexit
References to time saturated Parliamentary discussions and government remarks about Brexit, with ‘ticking clocks’ and ‘deadlines’, ‘transition period’ and the UK’s ‘future relationship’ with the EU, all framed by an ‘unprecedented moment in history’ (all quotes from Hansard can be found in our original article). While ‘time’ is an extremely common noun in English, these remarks were no mere vestiges of rhetoric. Instead, talk of time formed a common thread running through the heart of Brexit, changing the very way that it unfolded.
Some optimistic politicians saw a ‘rosy future’ for Global Britain, promising that ‘time is a great solvent’, as if the simple ticking of the clock would clear away Brexit’s tensions and challenges. Opponents, like MP Yvette Cooper, shot back: time was ‘a weapon’ deployed by the Government to pressure opponents with disingenuous interpretations of Article 50 as starting a clock that demanded hasty votes without full public scrutiny. Existing time rhetoric was not itself sufficient, driving MPs on both sides to invent new time words: Brexiters proposed ‘flextensions’ to deadlines and characterized the prospect of yet another national vote as a ‘neverendum’. Remainers countered that the Government’s four years to ‘get Brexit done’ stranded the country in a ‘Brexternity’ purgatory. Centrists, tired of relentless implementation timeline discussions, complained that such ‘sequenceology’ painted a more confident picture of the near future than was warranted.
The power of timing in Brexit
Building from our previous work on time and foreign policy, our article argues that all of this time talk reveals an active struggle to quite literally re-time UK foreign policy, steering the country toward an alternative future. By ‘timing’ we do not simply mean ‘coincidence’, or ‘striking while the iron is hot’. Rather, we refer to the construction of coherent relationships according to an overarching timing standard that indicates which processes matter most, how to weave them together, and what their ultimate outcome should be.
While the equal units of the clock render many experiences of time commensurable and allow us to coordinate huge portions of social life, calls to ‘take back control’ also act as timing standards. They announce that the key payoff and essential requirement of Brexit is simply to exit the EU for now, and leave the consequences and costs for later. So, instead of unfolding ‘over time’ in the usual temporal accounting of hours, days, months, and years, huge policy decisions like Brexit actually create time, just as they change the course of history.
Brexit’s timing agents
But who makes this time, and how do they purposefully bend it toward their will? In consulting hundreds of Parliamentary records of the Brexit debates, we identify at least three principle forms of timing agency at work:
· Timing entrepreneurs are creative, proposing novel timing standards to enable new foreign policy possibilities, decisions, or initiatives. This requires significant effort and often involves rethinking core commitments to decision-making procedures or political identities. Successful entrepreneurs gain ‘buy-in’ from others and exert direct influence over unfolding situations — think here of the original Brexiters who put almost continuous pressure on the Cameron, May, and Johnson governments.
· Timing malcontemps actively resist or subvert timing projects and their operative timing standards. These actors might object to procedural norms and rules, or reject narratives attempting to stitch together past and future changes. Indeed, Remainers and centrists committed to full deliberation and scrutiny sought to slow down, reverse direction, or otherwise alter the course of Brexit.
· Timing apparatchiks work within existing timing regimes, using the routinized suite of procedures, rules, and identity commitments that guide contemporary decision-making. Like clock technicians, they tidy up or re-arrange existing coordination processes, producing better practical outcomes that reflect established standards. Think here of Speaker John Bercow’s fame for the élan with which he adjusted speaking times, held MPS to time limits, and suggested that they ‘gesticulate’ at each other when the ‘speech-time facility [was] not functioning’ properly.
The hurly burly timing manifest in Brexit advances our understanding of the political art of timing and further reveals foreign policy’s fourth dimension. We conclude that these prominent timing agents worked on all sides to time and re-time British foreign policy. In shaping and shoving the Brexit clock they were concerned not simply with when to do something, but with what to do and how to proceed.
Andrew Hom is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Ryan Beasley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews.
Their article: ‘Constructing time in foreign policy-making: Brexit’s timing entrepreneurs, malcontemps and apparatchiks’ was published in the March issue of International Affairs. Read the article here.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
