EU Citizenship, Free Movement and Emancipation: A Rejoinder 173 The other way of explaining the cleavage between pro-mobile and anti-­ mobile citizens is not to focus on the economics, but on identity politics. Rainer Bauböck, for example, refers to Theresa Kuhn’s book in highlighting that individual experiences of transnationalism (‘lived experience’) makes them more pro-European and pro-free movement. On this view, it is to be expected that, say, Gibraltar, would vote in favour of staying in the EU with 96 per cent, while, say, Stoke-on-Trent would vote with 69.4 per cent against it. But that argument understands the idea of ‘transnational experiences’ much too narrowly. The ‘Leave’ voters in Stoke eat pizza and drink Stella Artois. The local pride – Stoke City football club – combines English players with Dutch, Austrian, Spanish, Italian and Irish stars. These kind of less obvious transnational experiences matter as they locate elements of ‘the other’ in something we consider our ‘own’. The social capital built up through free movement extends much beyond instances of Erasmus or holidays abroad. It pervades our world. But if both the economic and the sociological argument explaining the cleavage between pro-mobile and anti-mobile are at best oversold, how can we explain its indisputable emergence? The starting point in this analysis was intimated above – and that is that many of the citizens that have rejected the EU have indeed been ‘left behind’. But the main culprit is their own government, not the EU. This is different, of course, in instances where the EU mandates welfare reform through its austerity drive. But blaming welfare scarcity in the UK on the EU seems a bit rich. Yet why do voters blame the EU and not the UK? This is where Brexit reveals a more structural problem for the EU, as I have discussed elsewhere1. It is because the EU cannot institutionalize contestation appropriately. In a well-functioning democracy, discontent that is so widely spread as the Brexit-cleavage is internalized in the system, and mediated through the politics of contestation. In such a system, political conflict feeds into the process of decision-making and stabilizes the overall project. Democracy, on this view, is a safety valve for emergent discontent. In the EU, on the other hand, the nature, conditions, and consequences of free movement cannot be contested. The only possible way to contest the normative orientation of the European market is to leave the EU. And so we see ‘hard left’ parties claiming that if we want to resist the neo-liberal nature of the EU, the only thing we can do is leave it. And so we have parties on the extreme right claiming that if we want to resist 1 Dawson, M and F. de Witte (2016), ‘The Future of the EU between Independence and Interdependence’, Verfassungsblog On Matters Constitutional, available at http://verfassungsblog.de/ the-future-of-the-eu-between-independence-and-interdependence/.