Professor Roger Cotterrell of Queen Mary University of London, argues that the current “Brexit” debate and the EU referendum campaign can be usefully seen through a “community lens.”

Implications of the EU referendum result are so immense that stock-taking will surely go on long into the future. Writing this it is easy to imagine books being planned and special issues of journals being rushed to completion. So much remains uncertain that analysis is likely to become quickly out of date. And the array of arguments during the campaign will continue to encourage speculation.

However, some of these arguments and responses to them have already told much about contrasting views of the nature of UK society held in different population groups within it. An initial comment can only be a reaction to things heard and read. But in advance of in-depth retrospective research, the experience of living through the Brexit campaign (and following the battle of claim and counter-claim) already provides some insights in the light of socio-legal theory, whatever legal and political changes unfold in the future. Indeed, socio-legal theory helps to explain much about what seem to have been the most fundamental divides in public opinion (reflected in political arguments) and also about why both sides so often seemed to be talking past each other, impervious to each other’s arguments; inclined to dismiss them or fail to see why they mattered so much to the other side.

A socio-legal outlook that sees law as essentially existing to represent and protect social relations of community recognises that the bonds that guarantee stable, relatively enduring social relations can be of several radically different kinds. They can be based on (i) a shared attachment to certain beliefs or ultimate values, (ii) common or convergent instrumental (e.g. economic) projects, (iii) the need merely to be able to co-exist in some common environment (e.g. of geography, common language, shared historical or ethnic experience, or inherited traditions or customs), or (iv) purely emotional attachments of individuals to something or to each other (or, conversely, their shared emotional rejections). If we think of the innumerable ways in which these ‘pure’ types of communal bonds can combine in actual social life, it becomes easy to think of communal networks or groups made up of such combinations, often with one of the four pure types of community dominating. So, we can think, for example, of communal networks primarily (but not necessarily entirely) organised for economic purposes, or of other communal networks primarily centred on the need to co-exist in a particular environment (e.g villages or cities) but again with other elements of community potentially relevant.

Seen through this ‘community lens’, the United Kingdom is a large communal network. But it is so complex in its mass of interwoven communal relations that few people see more than a part of what holds it together in some kind of communal solidarity. People view it in different ways and it is entirely possible to see the UK, like most political societies, as a network especially held together by any of the four types of community, or by all of them. Some people may choose to emphasise one type of community as important because of personal experience linked to their interests, emotional allegiances, beliefs, or sense of their conditions of existence in their environment.

Many people, reported as advocating ‘remain’, seemed to rely on the image of the UK as a primarily economic communal network; economic relations were central. But such instrumental relations can be vulnerable (lasting only as long as the common or convergent projects that give them meaning), so it can seem attractive to broaden them, forging transnational economic links, extending and proliferating economic networks to cushion and sustain the stability of this kind of community. By contrast, seeing communal networks as centred on co-existence in a common environment may suggest the need for close attention to the nature of this environment and threats to it. It may be seen as vulnerable when inherited traditions or ways of life seem challenged from inside and outside, when the pace of change seems too great. When the nation is thought of in this way, immigration may become the crucial issue as it was for many Brexiters – in other countries, falling population can equally be a concern.

Because different types of community point to different regulatory problems, popular legal concerns may vary depending on the image of the national communal network that prevails: in the UK context, for example, legal frameworks for economic wellbeing versus legal frameworks for maintaining the character of the national population. From one viewpoint, the EU provides legal structures for secure economic relations; from another it helps to undermine the national environment of co-existence. Affective understandings of the nation surely also played a part in the referendum – deep feelings (not policy arguments) about how the UK is and should be. What of the fourth basis of community – shared beliefs or ultimate values? On the whole, this seemed strikingly absent from debates. Relatively little was said prominently during the campaign about national values, or European values. The ‘instrumental community’ of economic interaction and the ‘traditional community’ of co-existence in the inherited environment of the nation seem to have been most prominent. And because the four pure types of community and their legal implications contrast sharply it is unsurprising that debates so often seemed like a dialogue of the deaf.