The clamour of nationalism (Race and nation in twenty-first-century Britain) - 9781526126122

Nationalism has reasserted itself as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism’s confident return to the mainstream. Intellectual attempts to account for nationalism’s resurgence have however floundered. Desperately trying to read nationalism through one overarching cause – as capitalist crisis, as cultural backlash, or as social-media-led anti-establishment politics – these accounts have proven woefully inadequate. This book argues that the only way to understand nationalism is through nationalism itself: the key force of modernity that calls upon all existing ideological traditions in asserting its appeal, whether liberal, conservative, neoliberal or left-wing. The ideological clamour that characterises today’s British nationalism requires both recognition and theorisation. A meaningful understanding of new nationalism must reckon with the ideological range animating it and the deeply hostile aversion to different racial minorities that pervades its respective ideologies.