Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book analyses the relationship between English nationalism and the disintegrative dynamics affecting British politics from 2016 to 2024. By situating English nationalism in historical and comparative contexts and defining nationalism as the discursive legitimization of sovereignty that can have integrative or disintegrative goals, it shows how English nationalism has been an integrative force in England’s plurinational polities for most of its history. This changed notably when English nationalism was mobilized by Brexiteers, leading to the disintegration of the EU. But this same force also heightened disintegrative tendencies within the UK itself. The book also charts the post-Brexit attempts to return a now politically salient Englishness to an integrative mode. These historic shifts occurred during a particularly turbulent period of British politics and public life, as politicians negotiated the UK’s withdrawal 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 exploited the cultural–political divides that Brexit had starkly illuminated. By arguing that the form and content of English nationalism is generated by a defence of British sovereignty, this book concludes that English nationalism shifted to an unusual disintegrative mode in the middle of the 2010s but returned to its more usual integrative mode by the 2020s. However, this was no return to the status quo ante: England’s unusual and ambivalent hegemony within the UK means that the future of the plurinational union-state remains in a state of ongoing uncertainty.</jats:p>