Kalypso Nicolaidis - Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit

One of the most original, learned and surprising treatments of Brexit I have seen, interpreting it through the symbolic language of myth. Such a welcome change from the usual Brexit debate. I recommend it most warmly.

Timothy Garton Ash, author of Free Speech:
Ten Principles for a Connected World

Whether we live Brexit as a drama about to slip into a tragedy, a comedy or a heroic epic, here is a highly unusual book that dares say that there is something yet more important: that we use the Brexit odyssey to make sense of our European togetherness. A single urgency marks this endeavour that we treat Brexit as a theatre of recognition, that we be generous and gracious in hearing our rivals stories as stories that matter. Reader, fear not that you will be subjected to academic instruction, confronted with the rights and wrongs of the political saga, or the hows and whys of European integration. You will be simply reminded of tools already at your possession the archetypal, time-immemorial stories from the Greek, Roman and Biblical traditions that are stubbornly settled in our collective imagination. Enjoy the best of treats a story told in the long-lost style of insightful and informed reflection that was typical of the Enlightenment, when a writers erudition supplied both edification and amusement enticing a craving to hear more. Alas, the book is short.

Albena Azmanova, author of The Scandal of Reason

This book is essential reading, for a lot more is going on in Brexit than meets the eye. Hopes of escape, freedom and even self-sacrifice are buried in mythological memories bound into peoples identification with their country and its future. Kalypso Nicolaidis has bravely gone where none has so far dared and has extended her exceptional empathy and intelligence to the imagined powers of escaping and embracing Europe from which none of us can escape.

Anthony Barnett, author of The Lure of Greatness

Dazzling, tolerant, wise, pyrotechnic, thoroughly up-to-date yet steeped in millennia-old story patterns, this book is a must-read for anyone tempted to believe that Brexit or, for that matter, ancient mythology is a simple matter. Like the Hebrew and Greek myths which she evokes, Professor Nicolaidis offers no easy solutions. This is a book which neither Remainers nor Leavers can afford to ignore.

Richard Buxton, author of Myths and Tragedies in their
Ancient Greek Contexts

Kalypso Nicolaidis offers a striking and pithy exploration, aptly recast as epic Greek and Biblical tragedy and as Socratic dialogue, of how the case for Brexit became a mle of myths, both eviscerating and tantalizing. Amidst the plethora of writings on Brexit, her brilliant and highly entertaining narrative stands out as a chastening and revealing account of human hope, hubris, ardour and folly. Nicolaidis tells her rich and finely crafted tale with subtlety, imagination, great historical insight, and compassion for all involved the British tribes and their continental counterparts and tenders her own vision for the future.

Michael Freeden, author of The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice

We understand the present through the stories we have heard from the past. Kalypso Nicolaidis weaves an analysis of many stories into a profound, insightful and often strangely lyrical account of the most bizarre episode in recent British history. The result is a new and different understanding of the phenomenon known as Brexit, showing how competing memories and narratives intertwine as each individual draws on memory to comprehend the weirdness of reality. It is an impressive, important book, an antidote to those who think that rationality rules, or that myths have lost their power.

Iain Pears, author of Arcadia

Truth is the poetic residue of reality and Kalypso Nicolaidis brings us the truth within the Brexit mess. Believe it or not she does it with joy. Read this book to refresh your faith in humankind and see how todays confusion echoes through time.

Ece Temelkuran, author of How to Lose a Country

This is a book about Brexit which will not make you yawn. Different, imaginative, thought-provoking.

J. H. H. Weiler, author of The Constitution of Europe

I have known Kalypso Nicolaidis over the last three decades not only as one of the greatest experts on the EU, but one capable of engaging with it through countless angles, from policy wonk to storyteller. This book is the ultimate expression of her passionate, life-long commitment and a beacon on the road of our never-ending Brexit.

Shirley Williams, author of God and Caesar:
Personal Reflections on Politics and Religion

To Simon, Ari and Daphne

Brexit Means Brexit

Myth-mania

Brexit Mythology

Brexit Means the UK Will Leave

But Exodus-lite?

He Did Not Listen

How Many Tribes?

Of Bond, the Modern Kind

Resist, Regret, Respect, Relent, Repent

Eve, or the Lure of Banishment

Escape from Rome?

Clash of Messianisms

Exceptionally Exceptional?

Liminal Fates

Bargaining Pedagogy

Lost in Transition

Wilderness, Tamed

Promised Land, Promise?

Suburban Life

The Sea, the Sea

Brexit Means Everyone Should Leave

ButWhose Judgement?

What Truths?

Endisms Galore!

Popular Wraths, Plural

Sovereignty Angst

Naming the Beast

Blame Games

The Price of Hubris

Youth as Redeemer

The Myth of Er, Enlightened Scepticism

Reckoning as Re-knowing

Authors of Our Destiny

Brexit Means a New Beginning

ButHeroic or Ironic Sacrifice?

Things Are Not Always What They Seem

The Great Experiment

Sacrifice for Control

On the Altar of Principles

Pity the Little Children

Cherry, My Precious

Filioque, Freemoque

Of Minotaurs and Scapegoats

Unity Amor, Unity Terror

Self-reflexive Sacrifice

Revolutionary Defeatists

Many Worlds

Sacrifice for Moral Influence

Exit Interruptus

On the Importance of Being Former

Precedent, Unprecedented

The Ultimate Proof

Words, Worlds and Myths

Brexit Means Brexits

Leave to Remain

Do you remember how Ulysses, the cleverest of them all, was defined by his ambivalence even more than by his cunning? We meet him on his island of Ithaca at the beginning of Homers Iliad as old Palamedes begs him to join the Greek expedition against Troy. We are told how Ulysses, determined to stay put with his young wife Penelope and three-month-old son Telemachus, colludes with his people and pretends to have gone mad by ploughing his field backwards and sowing it with salt while singing to the winds, and how Palamedes unveils the stratagem by laying Ulysses newborn son in the way of the plough. The rest is history. If Ulysses ploy had succeeded, there would be no heros Odyssey for sure. But wouldnt Penelope have been better off?

To each epoch its ambivalent Odyssey. Brexit is only beginning and yet this political odyssey of ours is already replete with flawed heroes and monsters, acts of courage and trickery, misjudgements and delusions, terrible tempests and dead calm. Albeit torn apart, the British ship of state has managed to stay afloat as continental horizons recede into the distance, and Europes early we already miss you recedes into the past. From wherever you are watching, you may have called this political drama a bewildering mess. But admit it: what an extraordinary democratic mess this has been.

What have we learned? At the very least that our democracies need tender loving care. If so, we must find shared languages in which to conduct our democratic conversation across the many divides that both infuriate and enrich us.