Current Sociology

Please welcome Lorenza Antonucci (School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, UK) and Simone Varriale (School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK), our two Sociologists of the Month for June 2020. Their article for Current Sociology, Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit is Free Access this month.

Lorenza Antonucci

Simone Varriale

How did you come to the field of sociology?

L. Antonucci: Sociology is one of closest disciplines to the interdisciplinary field of ‘social policy’ – which is my academic home. My high school was a run-down rented apartment with excellent teachers who introduced me to some of my favourite sociologists, like Edgar Morin and Immanuel Wallerstein. I attended an elite business school with a public studentship – a choice that left my anarchist dad horrified. I quickly discovered that Bocconi’s orthodox economics was not for me and that the financial insecurity I experienced growing up, its inequality, and how welfare states could address it or not, were my real research interests. I left Italy for good at 23, studying and working around Europe until I found my academic home in UK social policy. Sociology has always remained part of this journey; some of the most relevant social policy scholars, like Esping-Andersen, are also sociologists. I also mingled with youth sociologists during my PhD on the inequality of young people’s experience at university (‘Student Lives in Crisis’). I tend to work with scholars from different fields (sociologists, political scientists and economists) because that’s where I learn the most. My interest has always been not just on institutions, but on the effects of policies on people’s lives. Sociology has a lot to contribute on this second aspect.

S. Varriale: I became a sociologist by accident. I was doing an MA in Media Studies in Italy when I first encountered British cultural studies and Bourdieu's work on class and culture. Those ideas about culture as a site of social struggles made immediately sense to me, a first-generation university student living on a state-funded scholarship and coming from a family with little interest in high culture. I ended up reading as many sociology books as I could find in the university library. Some years later, I was lucky enough to be awarded a scholarship for a PhD in Sociology at the University Warwick, in the UK. Here I researched how listening to Anglo-American pop music became a new form of social distinction in Italy, one connected to classed, gendered and racialised tensions among young people with unequal economic and cultural capital, as well as to new narratives about the 'modernity' of North American and North European culture vis-à-vis Italy's 'backwardness’. This project became my first book (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137564498) and developed into a broader interest for how global inequalities are culturally mediated and experienced in unequal circumstances, a topic that I recently explored in relation to post-2008 European migrations from Southern to Northern Europe (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038038519858044). The post-2008 austerity context, with its emphasis on South-North and East-West divisions within Europe, had a profound impact on both my research and my biography. It also broadened my theoretical interests, leading to growing engagement with decolonial and intersectional theory.

How did you come to research this particular topic?

L. Antonucci: A couple of years ago I tweeted about the fact that EU scholars – and the European side of Brexit – were surprisingly excluded in academic debates on Brexit. At that time I had co-authored an article that problematized the narrative of Brexit as a working class vote, showing that it was the ‘squeezed middle’ – but I still felt that intra-European inequalities were left out from the debate, both in the media and in academia. Simone Varriale replied to my tweet sharing the same concerns and we engaged in a fruitful exchange that spontaneously led to the drafting of the article. We found that our approaches (Simone’s focus on cultural sociology and EU migration and my approach centred on economic sociology and European public policy) complemented each other and led to a stronger argument. My writing was also motivated by the feeling of being ‘voiceless’ at multiple levels: as a EU migrant affected by the result of a referendum I could not vote in, but also as a non-middle class EU migrant who was eager to see these experiences voiced, especially in British sociology.

S. Varriale: The idea emerged from a chat with Lorenza (who I met on Twitter). We were both researching intra-European inequalities from different angles, and we both found the growing sociological coverage of Brexit unsatisfactory. The debate had a strong British-centric character and, as we discuss in the article, it quickly became a contest between (British) class analysis and (British) postcolonial sociology. There was a strong focus on white citizens, a postcolonial critique of this focus, but no engagement with the issue of Brexit's impact over non-UK EU citizens. We found the exclusion of 'EU migrants' from both class and critical race analyses paradoxical, given the stigma towards 'low-skilled' and 'East European' migrants that dominated the political debate over Brexit.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

L. Antonucci: The article overcomes theoretically the opposition between ‘race’ and ‘class’ in the sociology of Brexit, showing that Brexit comes from the intersections of these elements and also that intra-European inequalities are central to the understanding of the causes and effects of Brexit. The article discusses the positionality of the UK within the EU project, showing how this gives to Brexit a very different sociological meaning vis-à-vis inequality. The UK is discussed as a core country that has shaped EU policies and with a labour market that relies on patterns of EU migration from the periphery (Southern and Eastern European countries). This allows discussing the profile of EU migrants as nuanced and intersected with elements of class, race and intra-EU positionality: not necessarily white, diverse in their class composition and with a status that is very influenced by the positionality of their countries of origins.

S. Varriale: The article re-situates intra-European migration within the sociological debate on Brexit (and within sociology more generally), stressing the wider European inequalities that foster these migrations and their unequal character, not only in terms of racialised distinctions between Eastern and Western EU migrants (which dominate media and political debates over Brexit), but also in terms of intersecting inequalities of class, gender, age and race (as not all EU citizens are white Europeans). This focus on intersecting inequalities and intra-European divisions is important to understand both the unequal impact of Brexit over EU migrants, and its impact on broader world-system dynamics within the EU, Europe and beyond. We also pay attention to how economic and political inequalities within Europe are legitimised via racialised narratives about more 'meritocratic' and liberal countries versus more 'corrupted' and traditionalist ones. These narratives have a long history (tied to Europe's uneven colonial-capitalist development), and they are a key driver of unequal migrations within the EU/EEA area.

What do you see as the wider social implications of your research? How could things change in the future?

L. Antonucci: The article has wide social implications. The most important one is probably the future of the EU project and the inequality in the distribution of resources between EU countries, now exacerbated by the COVID-19’s crisis. In the last few weeks we have seen the Dutch minister of finance reprimanding Southern European countries for their budget issues. This has re-opened the intra-European North-South divide that, as described in the article, has been part of the EU project since its creation and has accelerated post-2010 austerity. In the meantime, the UK’s approach is in continuity with we described in the article: it conveniently relies on EU migration from the Eastern periphery to pick crops – the very same migration that was voted against with Brexit – while adopting a pose of exceptionalism vis-à-vis EU coordination on the COVID19 crisis. For the future, the lack of redistribution of EU resources, especially during the crisis, can lead to other ‘exit’ tendencies, this time from the vexed periphery. Another important development will be the evolution of the ‘European Semester’ – a policy process to which we allude to briefly in the article – that greatly influences member states’ capacities to redistribute within their countries.

S. Varriale: We provide an innovative framework for the study of intra-European inequalities, one that combines a focus on their economic, political and cultural dimension with an attention to transnational linkages. The relevance of this perspective is being made sadly evident by the COVID-19 crisis, which brings into sharp relief many of the social processes we explore in the article, such as the North-South divide within the EU – with Northern 'core' countries denying support for the instruments of debt-sharing proposed by Southern peripheries – and the asymmetrical impact of systemic crises like Brexit (and now COVID-19) over migrants and ethnic minorities, especially among their weakest members, who are overrepresented in the insecure and low-paid employment sectors of many European nation-states. The media framing of COVID-19 has also evoked longstanding racialised narratives about both Europe's others (notably China) and European peripheries, which we discuss in the article. For example, the early introduction of lockdowns in Italy was framed as a form of Southern European 'laziness' by some British media commentators.

What are some potential areas for future research in this area?

L. Antonucci: The article offers a theoretical perspective for future empirical research, in particular in linking migration studies and inequality. Building on this framework, future research could explore both the lives of British nationals and EU migrants – rather than separately – and draw links between the British working class individuals and EU working class individuals. This would allow engaging with cross-cultural definitions of class, while also problematise Anglo-Saxon-centred notions of ‘the working class’. Another important agenda concerns the North-South dimension within the EU and how it will evolve after Brexit, also given the current crisis. There is a lot of macro work on EU affairs and EU public policy that could benefit from the micro approach of looking on people’s lives and their inequalities.

S. Varriale: In the article we focus on unequal European migrations drawing on our own and others' research on intra-EU migration before Brexit. But our claim is that these inequalities will become even more relevant after Brexit. This is made evident both by the 'points based' migration system proposed by the UK, which will advantage EU migrants with high incomes and STEM degrees, and by the introduction of various forms of welfare restriction and control for EU migrants in other European countries. These developments offer us the occasion to rethink freedom of movement as an unequally distributed privilege and to challenge the rhetoric of 'mobility' – as distinguished from 'migration' – that still informs academic debates and policy-making on intra-EU migration. Another issue for future research is the longstanding perception of Britain as a more 'meritocratic' and liberal country among Eastern and Southern European citizens. It will be interesting to see how post-Brexit migration policy (but also the poor way in which the UK is handling the covid-19 crisis) will transform this narrative and, more generally, Britain's position in global hierarchies.

Do you have further reading suggestions on this topic?

L. Antonucci: We have spread the results of our research in the Brexit Abroad podcast and in pieces for Discover Society and the LSE blog (see the links below). Some colleagues have put forward analyses of Brexit after we published our work. I recommend in particular the focus piece on “Class, Race and Brexit” in Discover Society by Michaela Benson and the work on Brexit of my colleagues at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS).
I have recently touched on how the North-South divide is playing out in the current pandemic crisis for a new podcast on “Social Policy, Inequality and the Crisis” with Danny Dorling and Cleo Valentine: https://soundcloud.com/user-259685650/episode-0-how-to-redistribute-during-a-slowdown.

S. Varriale: The following article was written roughly at the same time of our article for Current Sociology, so it ended up supporting our discussion of unequal migrations and South-North hierarchies: (2019) 'Unequal youth migrations: exploring the synchrony between social ageing and social mobility among post-crisis EU migrants', Sociology, 53/6: 1160-1176 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038038519858044).
We have also discussed our article (and expanded on its ideas) in this podcast with Michaela Benson (http://brexitbritsabroad.libsyn.com/brexit-inequalities-unequal-europes-and-unequal-europeans) and in these pieces for Discover Society (https://discoversociety.org/2019/12/04/brexit-and-inequality-why-are-the-eu-and-eu-migration-missing/) and the LSE British Politics blog (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/11/15/eu-migration-through-the-lens-of-inequality-how-britain-shaped-the-unequal-europe-it-wants-to-leave/).