Rule Britannia, Brexit and Cornish Identity by Ella Westland

“…This article returns Rule Britannia to its own political, geographical and biographical context at a time when Daphne Du Maurier’s last novel has achieved a kind of afterlife in post-2016 Brexit referendum discourse. Vanishing Cornwall (1967) and The House on the Strand (1969) drew on visions of the past in a decade when the growing tourist industry was exploiting historical representations of the peninsula, but Rule Britannia (1972) was a new departure, marking a reorientation of Du Maurier’s relationship to contemporary Cornwall. …”
Get full text

Mobilizing the Past: Germany and the Second World War in Debates on Brexit by Thomas Williams

“…In 2018 the outgoing German ambassador to the UK, Peter Ammon, suggested that a sense of national identity based on how Britain had “stood alone” during the Second World War, combined with a negative perception of Germany’s supposed domination of the EU, had fuelled Euroscepticism and contributed to the success of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum. While recognising that references to Britain’s wartime past and fears of German power in the present-day EU are by no means identical issues, this article traces the frequent convergence of these two themes in Eurosceptic rhetoric during the decade preceding Britain’s exit from the EU on 31 January 2020.It reveals that concerns about Germany’s “domination” of the European project, an important theme in British Euroscepticism since Thatcher, resurfaced in the early 2010s, particularly in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. …”
Get full text

The Question of the vis-à-vis: Scotland and Others by David McCRONE

“…Thus, the alignment of ‘England’ and voting Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum is a case in point. The strong Remain vote in Scotland was an assertion of institutional Scottishness even if highly personal. …”
Get full text