Theresa May, the Brexit negotiations and the two-level game, 2017-2019

For the two years between the activation of article 50 of the Lisbon treaty and the expected withdrawal on 29 March 2019, Theresa May was confronted with an apparently classical two-level game, where she needed to find a compromise between what Brussels could find acceptable, especially as far as trade relations were concerned, and what her domestic constituency demanded. This was made more complex by the fact that the latter was itself divided between Remainers, Soft and Hard Brexiters and multiple other sub-groups. Based on a discursive institutionalist approach, this article suggests that the Prime Minister was caught in a contradiction between her 'hard' rhetoric at home and the reality of her bargaining position in Brussels. Tsebelis' nested games theory explains why her communicative discourse was politically rational but ultimately incompatible with the reality of the European power game.