Emmanuelle Avril is professor of contemporary British civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. She is a specialist in British political life, and is the author of several books on the subject.
Pauline Schnapper is professor of contemporary British civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. A specialist in the foreign and European policies of the United Kingdom, she is notably the author of Le Royaume-Uni doit-il quitter l’Union européenne? (La Documentation Française, 2014), and, co-authored with David Baker, Britain and the Crisis in the European Union (Palgrave, 2015).
The vote for Brexit caused unprecedented upheaval in the United Kingdom and in Europe, and its shockwaves are still being felt. It plunged the place of London, the advanced leader of liberalism, into a whirlwind of instability which the chaos surrounding the negotiations around the modalities for exiting the European Union has only reinforced. It has called into question the notion of the United Kingdom as a guarantor of democracy. Beyond that, Brexit has also revealed a lasting crisis between the political system and the citizens that is true for all of Europe. The fog that surrounds the on-going negotiations prevents any serious attempt to develop plans, and oracles claiming to be able to anticipate the outcome of the negotiations and the impact Brexit will have on the United Kingdom in the short and middle term are wrong.

This work attempts to bring us out of the state of shock and questioning in which we are existing today. How could the United Kingdom have fallen into such an enormous political crisis? Is this disintegration of society and the political and media systems temporary, or does it indeed constitute a point of no-return? What is the future of the English, and beyond, of all of Europe? These are the questions that the authors attempt to answer here.