English Nationalism and British Disintegration

This original book analyses the relationship between English nationalism and the disintegrative dynamics affecting British politics from 2016-24. By situating English nationalism in historical and comparative contexts and arguing that the form and content of English nationalism is generated by a defence of British sovereignty, it shows how English nationalism has been an integrative force in England's plurinational polities for most of its history. This changed notably during Brexit when English nationalism was mobilised by Brexiteers, leading to the disintegration of the European Union. But this same force also heightened disintegrative tendencies within the United Kingdom itself. Wellings charts the post-Brexit attempts to return a now politically salient Englishness to an integrative British mode, invoking its habitual British register. These historic shifts occurred during a particularly turbulent period of British politics as the UK withdrew from the EU, steered a path through the Covid-19 pandemic, shaped a new foreign policy with Anglosphere allies, transitioned from the reign of Elizabeth II to that of Charles III, and negotiated the cultural-political divides that Brexit starkly illuminated. By defining nationalism as the discursive legitimisation of sovereignty that can have integrative or disintegrative goals, this volume concludes that English nationalism shifted to an unusual disintegrative mode in the middle of the 2010s but returned uneasily to its more usual integrative mode by the 2020s. However, this was no simple return to the status quo ante: England's ambivalent hegemony within the United Kingdom meant that the future of the plurinational union-state remained in a state of uncertainty as ostensibly British parties sought to mobilise or contain England's discontent.