The quest for a foreign policy ‘home turf’ after Brexit
On safer ground? The emergence and evolution of ‘Global Britain’
Why did Theresa May’s government introduce the narrative about ‘Global Britain’, and how did this narrative evolve and manifest itself in UK foreign policy discourse in the ensuing years? We make the case that Brexit distressed the United Kingdom’s foreign policy identity, and that the ‘Global Britain’ narrative emerged as a means to consolidate that identity—at a time marked by uncertainty and political turmoil. Scholarship on ontological security has theorized how states employ narratives to restore and stabilize their identities when they become ontologically insecure. It has not sufficiently addressed how these narratives evolve, and the conditions under which they come to resonate with key audiences. We suggest that identity consolidating narratives are more effective when they are anchored in familiar spaces and contexts—what we here call ‘home turfs’. We show how filling ‘Global Britain’ with content constituted a process of moving from existential anxiety about the country’s future role, to anchoring UK foreign policy in and around such ‘home turfs’. Tracing the emergence and evolution of the ‘Global Britain’ narrative in official UK discourse, we find that ‘Global Britain’ gradually homed in on two secure narrative bases: first, security and defence; and second, the Anglosphere and Euro-Atlantic.
Polish elections – what’s left of the liberal order?
Poles head for the ballot boxes, amidst concerns about the health of democracy.
Noen har hevdet at mitt moralske kompass er gått i stykker
Jeg forsøker å skjønne hvorfor Kreml handler som det gjør. Er det virkelig det samme som å støtte disse handlingene?
Tale ved utdeling av Fritt Ords Pris 2023
Torsdag 11. mai 2023 fikk NUPI-forsker Julie Wilhelmsen Fritt Ords Pris 2023 for å ha bidratt med nyanserende faglig kunnskap i et opphetet offentlig ordskifte, før og etter Russlands fullskala-invasjon av Ukraina. Hun har gjennom dette vist betydningen av ytringsmot og utøvd akademisk ytringsfrihet i praksis, sa styreleder Grete Brochmann.
The Persistence of the Civic-Ethnic binary: Competing Visions of the Nation and Civilisation in Western Central and Eastern Europe
The normative binary of ‘good-progressive’ and ‘bad-retrograde’ nationalism, traceable to the civic and ethnic dichotomy, is alive and well in studies of nationalism and populism today. This article underlines the insufficiency of this approach, firstly by examining three stances on the civic nation in the West, each of which rejects ethnic nationalism and reflect different fundamental concerns. Moving east, in Central Europe the binary is inverted and turned against ‘liberal cosmopolitans’; in Russia, the Kremlin’s ‘state-civilization’ project can be viewed as a distinct trend in nation-building for non-Western contemporary great powers.
Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology in the Department of Organization at the Copenhagen Busin...