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The European Union (EU) integration project is under attack from a reassertion of national sovereignty following Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis examines the impact that traditional forms of sovereignty and national interests will have on the conduct of EU foreign and security policy post-Brexit. We focus on the Brexit challenge to the EU mode of regulation and diplomacy in internal/external policies in Common Foreign and Security Policy, Common Security and Defence Policy, and Justice and Home Affairs. The article also considers key scenarios for future UK-EU security cooperation to inform analysis of likely policy outcomes for the UK and the EU. The article concludes that the EU will have a greater impact through its laws and regulations on the post-Brexit UK than vice versa and that Brexit is not an immediate threat to the EU's regulatory mode of security governance. The new realities of internal/external security governance in Europe post-Brexit will mean weakened EU–UK security arrangements, which will impact the scope and quality of European security cooperation beyond traditional defence. This is both undesirable and potentially dangerous for European security cooperation and for Europe's position in the wider world.

Globalization is a process with a long history, arguably as long as trade itself. In recent years however, it has been dominated not simply by technological change, but by consumerism where everything is a commodity and individuals are on ‘a treadmill of glut’ (Maley 2005). Contemporary globalization is marked by the neo-liberalism favoured by the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Gray (1998) describes neo-liberalism as a political project to construct a global economy based on free market capitalism and suited to the interests of corporate America. The dominant characteristics are the privatization of public assets, free movement of capital and the liberalization of key industries, notably telecommunications and finance, sectors where the United States (of America) already enjoyed competitive advantage. This cocktail brought major changes and social upheaval to industrialized and industrializing economies alike, and while many people enjoyed material advantages, others suffered marginalization. ‘Restructuring’, ‘outsourcing’, ‘downsizing’ and ‘flexible labour markets’ became watchwords of the management gurus, while critics such as Gray (1998) and Bauman (1998) argued that globalization was fuelling job insecurity, family breakdown, crime and the burgeoning prison population in many industrialized countries.