Our task was not helped by the fact that the civil service had been prevented by the Cameron government from making any preparations for a leave vote. In fact, the civil service and No. 10 generally were still in a state of shock. The only real European policy experts all came from the ‘Remain’ side of the fence. While their professionalism was not in doubt, it was clearly going to be a huge task for them to pivot to embrace the new reality of the UK’s changed status with the EU. It wasn’t long before the UK’s long-serving Ambassador to the EU, Ivan Rogers, was moved on. His expertise was never in question, but in the weekly meetings with the Prime Minister in her study behind the Cabinet Room, he barely sought to disguise his dismay at the UK’s decision. Treating Brexit as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized was never going to go down well with the Brexiteers still drunk on their own success. What Ivan saw as pragmatism, the Brexiteers saw as pessimism. He quickly became public enemy number one and was swiftly replaced.

On the night of 23 June 2016, gathered together in the Thatcher Study at No. 10, the Cameron team saw the results in. I sat next to the Prime Minister, David Cameron; his daughter, Nancy, in her pajamas and cuddling a favourite toy, was under the round oak table made purposely to seat the G8 leaders at Lough Erne. ‘Dad, we are losing,’ said Nancy, as the results began to trickle and then pour in. Around 2am, when Sunderland declared a decisive result for Leave (61 per cent to 39 per cent), the trend was clear. John Curtice called it for Leave – who won by 52 to 48 per cent – roughly 17 million to 16 million (600,000 votes between the two) with a strong turnout of 72 per cent. At 3am, Cameron gathered a small group of us in his Den; it was game over. The answer to the question of whether the British people wanted to stay in the European Union was ‘no’. The decision to give them that choice was made by Cameron in a speech made at Bloomberg HQ on 23 January 2013, unleashing one of the most divisive periods we have known.

Civil service headcount expanded, but, as it grew, relationships between civil servants and ministers deteriorated and individual civil servants became targets as perceived blockers to true Brexit. Stasis in decision-making in Theresa May’s carefully balanced Cabinet degenerated into public disagreements between ministers as collective responsibility disintegrated. Ministerial churn accelerated. Ministerial frustration at Parliament’s refusal to pass any sort of Brexit agreement under the May government boiled over, and judges found themselves in the firing line as the process of exiting was litigated. The devolved governments were reminded that conventions were just that, without legal force. Northern Ireland suffered two Executive collapses in the Brexit period, the second a direct result of Brexit tensions, which left it governed by civil servants for half the time between 2017 and 2024. Under Boris Johnson, ministers went further – prepared to embarrass the Queen over the prorogation that the Supreme Court eventually found unlawful, introducing legislation to allow them to break international law and flirting with breaking domestic law.

It started with good intent; the battleground a different and older Union and an earlier referendum in 2014 over Scotland, not Europe. I didn’t see this at the time, but think if it hadn’t come hot on the heels of the Independence Referendum the civil service would have taken a different and more careful approach in 2016. We would have been more protective of the principle of impartiality and seen the EU Referendum as the deeply political and divisive vote that it turned out to be. It had been okay in Whitehall to express a view in the Scottish Referendum – we wanted the Union to stay together. So, just as we were happy in September 2014, people were upset at the result in June 2016. It was normal to express views in the open that leaving the EU would have grave and damaging consequences, especially economically, as it had been normal in 2014 to say the same about Scotland. For both the commonplace presumption was that the people who had voted to leave had not understood how things worked. We rolled from default remain to default remain.

The Leave vote gave voice to those whose dissatisfaction had been muted by the rules of UK electoral politics. It represented, amongst other things, a howl of protest from people who had given up on the political process and who turned out to demand that they should no longer be overlooked. In so doing, they transformed our politics. The referendum catalysed a division in British politics which, while not new, had hitherto not structured party competition decisively. That role had been played by class. As Peter Pulzer famously put it, ‘class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’. However, the 2016 vote saw similar proportions of left- and right-wing voters opt for Leave (52% and 48%, respectively). People were divided not by class but by social outlook, with 72% of social conservatives but only 21% of social liberals voting to leave.

Parliament is the central institution of UK democracy. It is both a representative body, reflecting the diverse views of the nation, and its senior decision-making forum. In the years after the Brexit referendum, when both the public and the governing party were deeply divided, Parliament struggled to navigate these representative and decision-making roles. The arguments, both inside Parliament and about Parliament’s role, were frequently heated and controversial. Many Brexiteers had argued in favour of boosting Parliament’s sovereignty, and yet the institution emerged battered and bruised from the process – having been repeatedly maligned, shut down by a Prime Minister and reinstated by the Supreme Court, and described as ‘broken’ on the opening page of the 2019 Conservative manifesto. This chapter explores how such contradictions came about. It concludes that the blame laid at Parliament’s door by campaigners, journalists and politicians was often unfair, and damaging of public trust. The Brexit process left much rebuilding to be done.

Perhaps the greatest turning point for Parliamentary involvement in the Brexit process was the 2017 general election. Having won an unlikely majority in 2015, Cameron bequeathed to May a relatively functional dynamic in Parliament. But, tempted by artificial sentiment in polling, May and her team decided to call the 2017 election in an attempt to secure a greater popular mandate for her administration. That decision was fatal. The prior polling was erroneous, or at the very least misread the public appetite for an election, and the campaign May ran was self-defeating. The loss of the Conservative majority at the election left May in the treacherous position of needing a confidence and supply deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Even in normal times, the instability of such an arrangement creates complications and often disaster for the ruling party. When you add in the unique circumstances of Brexit, plus the fact that the Northern Irish questions in Brexit were the most difficult and contentious elements of the negotiations, May’s dependence on the DUP was fatal.

The Framers’ overarching theories for the control of faction included representation as a filter of popular passions, union, and an extended republic to limit the influence of factions by multiplying the number of distinct and competing interests, and divided sovereignty between the state and national governments. The theory of representation was familiar from their British heritage, but their theories of an extended republic and divided sovereignty between the national and state governments diverged from accepted political principles of the eighteenth century.

Of humble origins and mixed race, Bernardo Monteagudo (1789–1825) was born in Tucumán, in the River Plate (Argentina today). He graduated in law from the University of Chuquisaca and soon became involved in the wars of independence against Spain, first in Upper Peru and then in Buenos Aires, where he stood out for his radical republicanism, which he originally displayed as a polemicist in newspapers. Embroiled in the internal conflicts of the revolutionary movement in the River Plate, he was forced into exile in 1815. In 1817, he joined the army of José de San Martín, which drove the Spaniards out of Lima in 1821, when Peruvian independence was declared. Monteagudo became San Martín’s right hand and was practically in charge of governing Lima while San Martín continued the fight against the royalist forces elsewhere. Monteagudo’s authoritarian rule provoked wide resentment and, following two days of riots, he was expelled from the city in 1822. Written a year later as a defence of his actions in government, his Memoir offered a systematic examination of the conditions that, in his view, made democracy unworkable in Peru.

An anonymous and rarely cited text, Fe política de un colombiano was consulted by the editors at the John Carter Brown Library, whose catalogue attributes it to Eloy Valenzuela (1756–1834), a Catholic priest from Santander, Colombia. However, it is highly unlikely that Valenzuela, who was close to Simón Bolívar at the time of publication, penned a pamphlet which appeared to be criticizing (though not in explicit terms) the Convención de Ocaña, convened by Bolívar to replace the existing 1821 Constitution. The main message of the Fe política was against the concentration of power in the executive, then perceived to be Bolívar’s purpose in convening the Ocaña Convention. On April 1, 1826, the Gaceta de Colombia registered its publication stating that “the author … was born in one of the departments of the antigua Venezuela.” Its author might have been Javier Francisco Yanes (1776–1846), particularly as in his Manual político del venezolano, Yanes used the Fe política without attribution, in a book that is seemingly generous in acknowledging the work of others. But if the Gaceta de Colombia was right, this would rule out Yanes’ authorship as he was not born in Venezuela but in Cuba.

This chapter moves from low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats to higher-ranking officials and their ‘great projects’ (al-masharī‘ al-kubra) – the revolution’s signal achievements in governmental media. The chapter describes how this type of achievement was considered extraordinary, given the struggle to coordinate across fragmented and conflicting state institutions. Moreover, the chapter analyses one of the Ministry of Culture’s greatest and longest-lasting projects: to build a new Egyptian human being (binā’ al-insān al-miṣri). I argue that the need to cultivate the Egyptian masses was not purely born from a desire to civilise, but by a political imperative to build a new people to be governed by the revolutionary command. In contrast with Younis’s pejorative description of the people envisaged by the Revolution as a ‘mass’ (gumū‘) or a ‘herd’ (qatī‘), this chapter presents the meliorative side of the same project: the yet-to-exist People as a collection of ‘righteous citizens’ (muwaṭinīn ṣāliḥīn).

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

The epilogue examines the persistence of the term ‘achievements’ in Egyptian governmental media today, which is indicative of the concept’s resilience. This persistence raises an important question around the social and historical reasons undergirding the continuity of achievement praxis. Why are cultural and media institutions reproducing the achievement state in Egypt? The answer would seem to be that the current bureaucratic apparatus inherited, via institutional means, certain ways of thinking and working established after the 1952 revolution. This simple answer belies my ethnographic experience, because contemporary bureaucrats – with few exceptions – have a very faint sense of the history of the bureaucratic apparatus prior to their own entry into the workforce. A more likely answer, I suggest, is that the institutional context within which bureaucrats work did not change in some identifiable ways since 1952. The continuity of achievement praxis is tied to the institutional environment in which it thrives, rather than a conscious will among state officials transmitted across generations.

Centring the devastating case of five-year-old Michael Komape’s drowning in a pit latrine at school, this chapter discusses the ‘dis/empowerment paradox’ inherent in South Africa’s ‘transformative constitutionalism’. Through the example of the Komapes’ 2018 case against the Minister of Basic Education (2018), it reveals the limitations of transformative constitutionalism rooted in Euro-American liberalism, which resonates with a neoliberal political economy that has failed to relieve the impoverished majority of their dehumanising precarity. While the chapter highlights the failure of the South African government to relate and respond to the suffering of the people it is meant to serve, more profoundly, it exposes the limitations of transformative constitutionalism due to its inability to even ‘see’ (let alone, validate) the world-sense of its majority population as legitimate law-sense. The Komape case thus reveals three key insights: (1) the resistance of private law to transformative ideals, (2) the reluctance of South Africa’s legal culture to embrace decolonial transformation and pluralism, and (3) the tension(s) between the legal consciousness of ordinary South Africans and the dominant legal culture. The case therefore underscores the need for Ntu Constitutionalism: a system grounded in indigenous normative priorities and robustly representative of South Africa’s marginalised communities and their needs.

Chapter 2 provides the image of the incentive bargaining of the firm with the state (or government) as the fifth player in the three countries. Section 2.1 compares the industrial policy, which is a typical measure for the state to directly affect the incentives of management, of the three countries. Historically, all three countries have extensively used industrial policy to stimulate industries from a macro perspective and motivate the management of individual firms to take risks. Section 2.2 compares the three different incentive mechanisms of the firm, including the state. The incentive mechanism of the US firms can be expressed as a monitoring image incentive pattern, or the principal-agent model. The incentive mechanism of Japanese firms can be expressed as a bargaining image incentive pattern, or the company community model. The incentive mechanism of Chinese SOEs can be expressed as a party-state model. The incentive mechanism of Chinese POEs can be expressed as an owner management model.

This is a book focusing on a comparative analysis of business systems primarily involving and surrounding the firms/enterprises across three leading economies in the world, that is, the United States, China, and Japan. The book will discuss one basic question: how does law matter to business practice, together with the markets and social norms of each jurisdiction? The book’s framework is as follows: the firm acts as a forum for incentive bargaining among four major participants: management and employees as human capital providers, creditors, and shareholders as monetary capital providers. Each participant will bargain with each other to maximize its own payoff based on exogenous factors: the situation of various markets (products, labor, intellectual property rights, and capital), social norms (e.g., shareholder value maximization model and stakeholder model), and enterprise law. This book will include the government as the fifth player of this game in the sense that the government provides indispensable resources (physical, social, and legal infrastructures) to the firm, shares the pie via tax revenue, and bargains with the other four players.