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English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere is the first sustained research that examines the inter-relationships between English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere. Much initial analysis of Brexit concentrated on the revolt of those ‘left behind’ by globalisation. English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere analyses the elite project behind Brexit. This project was framed within the political traditions of an expansive English nationalism. Far from being parochial ‘Little Englanders’, elite Brexiteers sought to lessen the rupture of leaving the European Union by suggesting a return to trade and security alliances with ‘true friends’ and ‘traditional allies’ in the Anglosphere. Brexit was thus reassuringly presented as a giant leap into the known. Legitimising this far-reaching change in British and European politics required the re-articulation of a globally oriented Englishness. This politicised Englishness was underpinned by arguments about the United Kingdom’s imperial past and its global future advanced as a critique of its European present. When framing the UK’s EU membership as a European interregnum followed by a global restoration, Brexiteers both invoked and occluded England by asserting the wider categories of belonging that inform contemporary English nationalism.
., 2017 : 632) The authors concluded that the result of this was a ‘triple effacement’ that marginalised Northern Ireland, pushed Scotland and Wales to the edges of research and occluded England, meaning that ‘we end up analysing the United Kingdom as a fictive country: Anglo-Britain’ (Henderson et al., 2017 : 632). This chapter (and this book) seeks to eschew any such misplaced analyses by making English nationalism the independent variable and focus of enquiry. There is, however, no avoiding the continuing elision between England, Britain and the
subcontinent in 1947, if not the Thirteen Colonies in 1783. But Suez left few traces on the electorate or domestic British politics and was conducted in the ‘black box’ of foreign relations. In contrast, the decision to leave the European Union was enacted by the electorate who, in so doing, challenged the sovereignty of Parliament that some Brexiteers claimed they were trying to save. Moreover, this was a campaign and outcome dominated by England. Examining this event as a ‘moment’ of English nationalism opens up fruitful ways of understanding both the vote to leave the
served as a vehicle for imparting an English worldview to the rest of the UK but at the same time had the continued effect of obscuring England as a political community within British structures. England may have been easy to discern by Scottish nationalists on the field of Bannockburn in 2014, but it was obscured by Britain in the Bastille Day parade and hidden in plain view by the attempt to create a ‘British’ day. The Englishness of the vote to leave the European Union in 2016 requires an examination of an elusive subject: English nationalism. There
Brexit was a significant moment of political Englishness, with consequences for the rest of the United Kingdom, the European Union and beyond. This book developed existing arguments about the links between English nationalism and Euroscepticism by showing how understandings of the ‘wider categories of belonging’ that inform political Englishness shaped responses to the dilemma posed by the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. When viewed in this light, with Brexit seen as a protracted event that pre- and post-dated the 2016 referendum, we
interpreted and enacted by executive government, raised the question of who was in charge after the Brexit vote. Magna Carta may have been England’s ‘gift to the world’, but as it turned 801 the Kingdom was once against discontented as the body politic searched for new rules of engaging with itself and the wider world. Chapter 4 develops the idea of the importance of English constitutional history as a link between English nationalism, Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere. It argues that England’s constitutional development of serves as a point of commonality
conditioned English nationalism at the outset of the twenty-first century. These reflexes were in turn conditioned by understandings of Britain’s past that limited what was or was not possible to commemorate in order to legitimise not just government policies but the British polity itself. That polity was entering a significant period of strain based on political de- and realignments amongst the nations of the United Kingdom. In 2007 the Scottish National Party formed a minority government in Holyrood. Having a secessionist party at official commemorations for the
evidence. The subject would not be so alive today if it were not for this kind of misreading since it helps to keep the conversation going (on this see Zˇizˇek 2000). Kumar introduces The Making of English National Identity with the statement that ‘there are virtually no expressions of English nationalism’ and ‘no native tradition of reflection on English national identity’ (despite the subsequent 273 pages which trace both the strengths and the limitations of that very tradition). However, the nationalism which finds virtually no expression and the identity upon which
). With Brexiteer free traders in the Conservative party and UKIP insisting that Britain’s EU past was merely an interregnum in its hitherto global story, allied with popular grievances over immigration that were strongest in the least ‘global’ parts of England, what can be identified as English nationalism played a major part in reshaping British, European and global politics. Yet if Brexit was a peculiarly English ‘moment’, then its aftermath was rhetorically ‘British’. It was characterised by efforts – unintended and deliberate – to contain the politicised
‘Ye English warriors’ 65 2 j ‘Ye English warriors’: radical nationalism and the true patriot Radicalism and nationalism would appear to be unlikely bedfellows, given that they tend to be placed on opposite ends of the political spectrum; yet this chapter demonstrates how many of the radical poems and songs written after Peterloo are underpinned by a radical English nationalism, with poets making a clear distinction between the un-English characteristics of a tyrannical state and monarchy and the true English patriot fighting for lost freedoms. Although the