In 2016, the UK voted by a majority of 52 percent to leave the European Union. ‘Brexit’ the Prime Minister declared, ‘means Brexit’. Three years later the project is still not defined and no form of it has succeeded in getting through Parliament. The resulting political turmoil has pushed the largely unwritten constitution to its limits and may break up the United Kingdom itself. Brexit comes in several, incompatible, versions, from hyper-globalism to national protectionism. It is predicated on the return to a unitary nation-state, an English concept that contradicts the vision of the UK (especially since 1999)  as a plurinational, post-sovereign union.

Michael Keating is Professor of Politics at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and Director of the Centre on Constitutional Change (CCC). Among his publications since 2000 are Plurinational Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001); The Independence of Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Rescaling the European State (Oxford University Press, 2013) and (edited) Debating Scotland. Issues of Independence and Union in the 2014 Referendum (Oxford University Press, 2017).  He is currently leading a major project on the UK constitution and Brexit and preparing a monograph on constitutional accommodation in the UK and Ireland for Oxford University Press.