Description
Dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’, Global Britain outlines the Conservative Party’s post-Brexit foreign policy ambitions, framed as an internationalist venture. Nevertheless, the prevalence of colonial references and related promulgation of the CANZUK alliance is decidedly narrower in outlook, reflecting the imperial agenda and deeper racial prejudice against non-white Commonwealth countries associated with imperial nationalism. However, beyond a yearning to recapture the grandeur of the imperial ‘golden age’, there is a lack of conceptual clarity as to what imperial nationalism entails and its implications. I argue that to understand this, we must consider imperial nationalism during empire. In this paper, I therefore highlight the discursive parallels between Global Britain and the nineteenth century narrative of Greater Britain, where imperial nationalists attempted to incorporate the White Dominions into British nationhood. Although this differs greatly from the goals of its contemporary Global Britain counterpart, legacies of race and hierarchy have persisted, along with the theoretical incoherence of emphasising sovereignty while endorsing imperialism. Hence, Global Britain is not a new policy, but a reproduction of pre-existing power structures. This comparative analysis thus presents a unique opportunity to understand the nature of imperial nationalism, and importantly the ways in which it manifests in British foreign policy today.
