At around four-thirty on the morning of 24 June 2016, the media began to announce that the British people had voted to leave the European Union. As the final results came in, it emerged that the pro-Brexit campaign had garnered 51.9 per cent of the votes cast and prevailed by a margin of 1,269,501 votes. For the first time in its history, a member state had voted to quit the EU.The outcome of the referendum reflected the confluence of several longterm and more contingent factors. In part, it represented the culmination of a longstanding tension in British politics between, on the one hand, London's relative effectiveness in shaping European integration to match its own preferences and, on the other, political diffidence when it came to trumpeting such success. This paradox, in turn, resulted from longstanding intraparty divisions over Britain's relationship with the EU, which have hamstrung such attempts as there have been to make a positive case for British EU membership. The media found it more worthwhile to pour a stream of anti-EU invective into the resulting vacuum rather than critically engage with the issue, let alone highlight the benefits of membership. Consequently, public opinion remained lukewarm at best, treated to a diet of more or less combative and Eurosceptic political rhetoric, much of which disguised a far different reality.The result was also a consequence of the referendum campaign itself. The strategy pursued by Prime Minister David Cameron-of adopting a critical stance towards the EU, promising a referendum, and ultimately campaigning for continued membership-failed. In particular, his gamble on the outcome of his much-vaunted renegotiation proved reckless. In contrast, the Leave camp ran an effective campaign, highlighting key themes that resonated with a public increasingly disinclined to trust their leading politicians.The referendum represented a turning-point in British politics. Debates about it polarized the country in the weeks before 23 June, and on the day itself, a high turnout testified to the mobilization that had been achieved.

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The field known as Europeanization explains the domestic impact of the European Union (EU) by focusing on the origin of the EU impulse, the process through which the impulse is filtered, interpreted and used by constellations of domestic actors and institutions, and the outcomes in terms of convergence or differential Europe. This literature has, for good reason, tended to examine such processes in 'forward gear'; that is, studying the efforts to increase the domestic impact of the EU. In recent years, however, there have been several manifestations of strategies to reduce this impact and operate in 'reverse gear', thus seeking de-Europeanization effects. In this chapter, we draw on the established 'forward gear' conceptual and empirical tools to establish the broad outlines of a framework to account for de-Europeanization ('reverse gear'). We locate the origins of the impulse to de-Europeanize in both the EU's institutions themselves, and in the member states, and we examine the actors and processes which explain the extent to which this has ultimately taken place.

How much influence does the UK have in Europe? How has this changed? We argue that the UK has tended to view its relationship with the EU in transactional terms, and that this has led to a dominant understanding framed in terms of 'costs' and 'benefits.' However, thinking more broadly gives a more nuanced picture of British influence. Thus, we approach this question from two directions: examining the historical record of the UK's role in the development of the EU and the single market; and looking at the ways in which British politicians and officials exert influence in the current political structure. We argue that although the UK has generally had a good track record of success, this has often been threatened by domestic political difficulties -as the current referendum debate shows.

Following the 2007–9 financial crisis, the EU strengthened its institutional apparatus for bank regulation, creating a trio of sectoral bodies, including the European Banking Authority (EBA). Various aspects of this new system have been studied, but to date, little is known about how banks engage with their new supranational regulator. We argue that such engagement fosters an interdependence between banks and regulators, thus contributing to the efficiency and robustness of the overall regulatory regime; but also that it is contingent on the regulator exhibiting the qualities of credibility, legitimacy, and transparency. These qualities are grounded in the domestic regulatory governance literature, but we suggest that they are rendered problematic by the complexities of the EU's multilevel system and, in particular, the overlap in competences between the EBA and the European Central Bank. We examine the EBA in the light of these criteria and find that banks’ engagement remains pitched towards established national regulators and the EU's legislative arena. This poses concerns for the efficacy of agency governance in the EU's regulatory regime for banking.