Description
A growing number of sovereigntist governments, on both the right and the left, are challenging the liberal international order and its institutions. Many of them aspire to preserve deep international cooperation while taking back control from supranational authorities. In doing so, they encounter a trust paradox since their ideological commitments push them towards promoting trust-based institutions while at the same time rendering them less trusting and trustworthy. We illustrate our argument through a case study of the May government’s conduct of the Brexit negotiations from 2016-2019. Drawing on elite interviews, we show how the UK government sought to transpose existing forms of economic cooperation into looser institutional arrangements to ‘take back control’, but failed to generate sufficient trust to convince the European Commission to continue deep cooperation while relaxing existing control mechanisms. Our argument contributes to literature on trust in international cooperation by highlighting the ‘demand-side’ of trust and the variance in how much trust different types of actors need to achieve similar levels of cooperation. It also helps us to understand the dilemmas faced by contemporary populist governments when attempting to return control to the nation state without sacrificing the benefits of deep international cooperation.
