Euroscepticism or nationalism — which better explains the decision of the British to leave the European Union?

The article is dedicated to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union Referendum (known as the Brexit Referendum) that took place on 23 June 2016 and resulted in the majority of the votes cast being in favor of leaving the EU. As a consequence, on 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland officially withdrew from the European Union. The purpose of this article is to try to make an interpretation of Brexit by attempting to answer a question of which of these two factors — Euroscepticism or nationalism — more heavily determined the will of the people and influenced the result of the referendum. Euroscepticism has accompanied the British from the very moment their country became part of the united Europe. The importance of nationalism in turn, analyzed as both English nationalism and British nationalism, has increased significantly in recent years. Using the collected research material, the author will try to prove the thesis that, in fact, these two factors are inextricably linked and it is very difficult to examine them separately. Euroscepticism, so deeply rooted in the British society, seems to have been — especially in recent years — the driving force of English and British nationalism.

Dreaming of Colonialism: Imagining “Place” in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes

This article explores the colonial mindset behind the depiction of space and travel in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes. Using Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Robert T. Tally Jr.’s “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a Spatially Symbolic Act” as frames for reading travel and travel literature in the text offers new insight into reading Antipodes’ underlying colonial mindset that is intertwined with the complex metatheatrical elements of the play. I read Peregrine as a British explorer going into the exotic to reform and impose his own ways of knowing on the people of the Antipodes. However, the complex metatheatrical elements further complicate this colonial reading of the text. The text uses metatheatrical elements that ultimately makes the audience aware of their own role in the space of the play—invoking a sense of self reflection. By focusing on the ways in which the exotic world is constructed and imagined, the nation as a performance, and the colonial discourse and power dynamics underlying the text I argue that The Antipodes can be read through modern literary theory to better understand and display the emerging difficulties and problems that accompany the developing sense of English nationalism and proto-colonialism. In doing so, the text displays the inherent colonial structures that inform and limit the role of both travel literature and the romance genre in “imaging” nations—something that is pivotal to both questioning and understanding the role of the nation in an increasingly global context.

Dis-comforting Urban Myths: Challenging Brexit Nostalgia in Recent Edinburgh Fiction

This article analyses two contemporary novels, Mary Paulson-Ellis’ The Other Mrs Walker (2016) and Ever Dundas’ Goblin (2017), comparing their depictions of Edinburgh in their strikingly similar parallel narratives, in which a contemporary Edinburgh setting intertwines with that of London in the Second World War. In the context of the Brexit vote of 2016, in which arguments for British autonomy and border closure won the day, the article argues that these texts challenge the pro-Brexit discourse which employed the mythology of the Blitz spirit to undermine the backward-looking nostalgia of a specifically English nationalism. In contrast, the Scottish setting of Edinburgh is presented here as facilitating a turn to a future of more mobile narratives of interrelation and connectedness rather than the fixed dimensions of myth

Rewriting Universes: Post-Brexit Futures in Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Quartet

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new strand of British fiction that grapples with the causes and consequences of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union. Building on Kristian Shaw’s pioneering work in this new literary field, this article shifts the focus from literary fiction to science fiction. It analyzes Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe quartet—comprised of Europe in Autumn (pub. 2014), Europe at Midnight (pub. 2015), Europe in Winter (pub. 2016) and Europe at Dawn (pub. 2018)—as a case study in British science fiction’s response to the recent nationalistic turn in the UK. This article draws on a bespoke interview with Hutchinson and frames its discussion within a range of theories and studies, especially the European hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It argues that the Fractured Europe quartet deploys science fiction topoi to interrogate and criticize the recent rise of English nationalism. It further contends that the Fractured Europe books respond to this nationalistic turn by setting forth an estranged vision of Europe and offering alternative modalities of European identity through the mediation of photography and the redemptive possibilities of cooking.

The possibility of a creolised planet

In this interview Paul Gilroy talks to Femi Oriogun-Williams about his love of folk music of all kinds. He discusses its songs of expropriation, suffering, soldiering, impressment and migration; its relationship to the countryside - often a dangerous and menacing place - and to Englishness, including English nationalism; and the role of Black performers inside the world of folk, including Nadia Cattouse, Dorris Henderson, and Dav(e)y Graham. He also discusses the cosmopolitan of musicians, and their appetite for music that operates across cultural and national boundaries; the plasticity, pliability and nomadic aspects of musical forms mean that Nina Simone can make a song by Sandy Denny her own, and Kathryn Tickell can experiment with South Asian sources; it allows songs to appear in many different versions, as with 'The Lakes of Pontchartrain'. The folk traditions of the Atlantic world exhibit all of the recombinant cultural DNA that went into them. This creates the possibility of reading the culture of the Atlantic world, North and South, with the idea of a Creole culture - and the possibility of thinking with a creolised planet in mind.

“Good Savage” vs. “Bad Savage”. Discourse and Counter-Discourse on Primitive Language as a Reflex of English Colonialism

In the ideological construction of colonialism and, more widely, of any hierarchy of human communities, a crucial role is played by discourse on language. English nationalism and imperialism, in particular, developed extensive argumentations on language as an interpretation of the encounter with the other, on the basis of internal cultural developments that assigned to language the role of social discriminator. The paper investigates a strand of such argumentations during the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the concept of “primitive” languages, described in a positive or, more often, in a negative light. The former arguments employ tones related to the idea of the “good savage” and stand in connection with narratives on the “language of Adam” and of the “Welsh Indians”, the latter uses a rhetoric extolling “progress” and “civilization” against the “immaturity” and “backwardness” of primitive languages, a perspective that was later to influence Darwinism.

Englishness

For a topic that until recently was presumed not to exist, English nationalism has transformed into an apparently obvious explanation for the Brexit result in England. Subsequent opinion polls have also raised doubts about the extent of continuing English commitment to the union of the United Kingdom itself. Yet, even as Englishness is apparently reshaping Britain’s place in the world and—perhaps—the state itself, it remains poorly understood, in part because of its unfamiliarity. It has long been assumed that nationalism is a feature of political life in the state’s periphery—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—but not its English core. Another barrier to understanding bas been the relative lack of public attitudes data with which to explore the nature of English nationalist sentiment.This book draws on data from a survey vehicle—the Future of England Survey—specially established in 2011 to facilitate the exploration of patterns of national identity in England and their political implications. On the basis of these data, Englishness offers new arguments about the nature and effect of English nationalism on British politics, as well as how Britishness operates in different parts of Britain. Crucially, it demonstrates that English nationalism is emphatically not a rejection of Britain and Britishness. Rather, English nationalism combines a sense of grievance about England’s place within the UK with a fierce commitment to a particular vision of Britain’s past, present, and future. Understanding its Janus-faced nature—both England and Britain, as it were—is key not only to understanding English nationalism, but also to understanding the ways in which it is transforming British politics.

Accommodating England

Following from these primarily data-driven chapters, Chapter 7 assesses the political challenges that arise in the context of the rise of English nationalism. In particular, we discuss the ways in which three constraints—the pattern of public attitudes in England, the institutional fusion of English and all-UK institutions, as well as the overwhelming size of England relative to the other constituent territories of the union—all serve to shape, limit, or undermine attempts to accommodate England within the post-devolution UK. The chapter then examines in detail the various efforts of political parties to answer ‘the English question’.