Description
This paper explores Vote Leave’s use of one strand of Britain’s persistent Eurosceptic traditions – the discourse we now know as ‘Global Britain’. Now associated with an increasingly neoliberal escape from the EU, the discourse’s core themes of expansive free trade, foreign policy, and scientific innovation supported by institutional similarity stretch from the Victorian era, through the history of UK-EU relations to the present day. Implicitly entwined with the loss of British empire, the discourse is a prime candidate for the investigation of nostalgia, which has been overlooked in extant scholarship on the Eurosceptic Anglosphere. However, despite evidence to the contrary, senior Vote Leave interviewees rejected association with the imperial connotations of ‘Global Britain’ or nostalgic communication in general, insisting instead that the campaign was ‘forward-looking’. This paper investigates this puzzle as an opening for discussing the affective politics of continuity and ‘crisis’ in British Eurosceptic discourse.
The paper begins by historicising ‘Global Britain’ before discussing Vote Leave’s adaptation of the discourse and its relationship with nostalgia. Providing evidence that counters campaigners’ claims of distance from these themes, the paper illuminates Vote Leave’s use of a ‘mode’ of imperial and colonial nostalgia mobilised to preserve the campaign’s futuristic vision of post-Brexit Britain. This approach enabled the campaign to claim temporal superiority against a ‘crisis’-riven EU, and promote a distinctive version of British political economy. Yet though this post-Brexit vision rested on Vote Leave’s ostensibly avant-garde treatment of science and technology, additional empirical evidence suggests a further role for a ‘mood’ of nostalgia in underwriting these claims. The paper therefore concludes by highlighting the nostalgic underpinnings of the ‘scientific’ outlook of Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, and extrapolating to broader questions of ‘crisis’ and affect in the Brexit debate.
