This chapter charts antecedents for Brexit in British history. Key to the discussion is a recurring nativist reaction to European engagements. A strategic bias towards the periphery resulted. In contrast, the United Kingdom’s occasional attempts to be a core continental power often foundered. Purist notions of insular sovereignty and ‘victory’ in two world wars hampered a precise appreciation of Britain’s independent leverage. These dilemmas intensified amidst integrationist currents in Europe after circa 1950, making previous approaches obsolete. Although a workable balance was constructed after the UK’s adhesion to the European Community in 1973, from the mid-1990s, an intra-Tory civil war tipped antithetical visions of British interests against each other, culminating in the 2016 referendum. The struggle over Brexit is profoundly cultural, raising issues beyond definitive resolution.

The work of Dounia Bouzar and her engagement in the political debates about Muslims in France raises significant questions about the relationship between Islam, secularism and feminism. Bouzar could be described as a Muslim feminist, in that her work has consistently been concerned with what she calls ‘la condition féminine’, including questions such as the headscarf, women’s equality in the private and public spheres and, more recently, the indoctrination of young Muslim women by Islamist groups. This chapter will focus on Bouzar’s recent writings from a feminist perspective, taking into account the following themes in particular: disruptive discourses in the public arena, the notion of la femme-alibi (token woman), the experiences of women who intervene in the public arena and, finally, the relationship between feminism and anti-racism.

This chapter delineates major historical changes in the role that Europe has played in domestic discourse on the territorial order of the United Kingdom. It is argued that Europe has a uniform effect neither on this discourse nor on the territorial order itself. Instead, the impact of references to Europe is contingent upon both the state of the European project and the historical domestic context at a particular time. The EU and the European integration project have opened windows of opportunity for political actors in Britain to introduce and advocate particular constitutional notions and models. The Brexit process, as the most recent such window, may very well provide an unmissable opportunity for those who want to break up an already highly fragile United Kingdom.

This chapter brings together all five thinkers discussed in this book and critically evaluates the public reception of their work. It asks to what extent the five intellectuals are able to articulate a fully counter-hegemonic approach in relation to the ambient discourses about Muslims and Islam in contemporary France. It also briefly discusses their work in relation to the next generation of emergent Muslim voices in France’s public sphere.

The chapter will critically assess Chebel’s thought via an engagement with a variety of his monographs, essays and articles published in France between 2002 and 2016. Despite the wide range of topics under discussion in Chebel’s work, it is possible to nevertheless identify a number of recurring themes such as reason, subjectivity, secularism, the body, love and sexuality in Islam. His approach could be described as a project of cultural translation, in which Chebel can be regarded as a cultural mediator who seeks to productively confront non-Western and Western concepts of religion, spirituality, modernity and humanism. Of specific significance is Chebel’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene in the symbolic relationship between the Republican ideology of laïcité and France’s Muslim citizens.

This chapter considers how British writers and politicians articulated the concept of European unity throughout the twentieth century. It traces the development of a political rhetoric that presented British and continental cultures as separate entities. It also explores how influential writers pushed back against this idea, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The chapter draws parallels between these historical discussions and the current Brexit crisis, finally speaking to how the pro-integration writing of the post-war period might inform attempts to maintain and expand cultural – if not political – connections between Britain and Europe.

In the build-up to the EU referendum in 2016, the white cliffs of Dover loomed large over a debate crucially driven by concerns over immigration. This chapter discusses the problematic legacy of the cliffs as a key symbol of British insular exceptionalism and (racially) exclusive identities, with a focus on how travel accounts have both constructed and challenged the powerful symbolism of the white cliffs of the mind. The chapter discusses travel accounts by H.V. Morton, Christopher Isherwood, Jonathan Raban, Caryl Phillips and Jamaica Kincaid. Looking beyond the cliffs towards the English Channel as a space of cultural contact and exchange, this chapter argues for a broader and more inclusive perception of Britain’s national border.

The British vote to leave the EU is frequently explained with reference to the effects of immigration, the rise of populism, the country’s imperial past, memories of the Second World War, its attachment to parliamentary democracy, and its special relationship with the United States. Relevant as all these issues are, to fully understand Brexit it is also necessary to pay attention to the strong cultural forces that have driven the vote to leave. To put it simply, many people in Britain are literally Eurosceptic in the sense that they do not feel European, but instead see Europe and ‘the Europeans’ as the Other. Chiefly drawing on literature, and connecting the discourse of traditional anti-Catholicism with contemporary anti-Europeanism, this chapter explores the origins, nature and consequences of British cultural exceptionalism.

In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth published The Wake, a post-apocalyptic historical novel set in the years after the Norman invasion that tells the story of a group of native guerilla fighters who resist the ‘Norman yoke’. Read in our historical moment and against the backdrop of some of Kingsnorth’s political essays and articles, The Wake appears as a Brexit novel avant la lettre that constructs an authentic Anglo-Saxon Englishness, obliterated through invasion by the Continental Other. The threat that the foreigners pose to English identity serves as a template to the threat that globalisation and the ‘myth of progress’ pose to contemporary English identity. A comparison of Kingsnorth’s positions with those of John Berger throws the contingency of the traditional political categories of left and right into stark relief. Berger is equally straightforward in emphasising the importance of a sense of place, belonging and local identity in the face of globalised capitalism, but while Kingsnorth draws on a new right rhetoric of authentic place-based national identity, Berger’s Marxist humanism allows for a thinking of the nexus between place and identity not infatuated with narrow-minded particularism and exclusionary discourses of nationhood.

In her closing essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar begins by briefly restating her concept of the “shifting border.” She then moves on to address the three core issues raised by her interlocutors, which she labels as follows: 1) shapeshifting migration control and illiberal leeway; 2) legal institutions, social change, and constraints on governmental power; 3) the emancipatory power of ideas and political agency. Shachar concludes by observing that we cannot wait for perfection before we turn to counter preventable harm, death, and injustice. At the same time, we should not be afraid to contemplate robust, long-term solutions to the vexing problems of unfettered power, systemic exclusion, and official indifference to migrants’ rights, safety, and dignity.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, Noora Lori commends Shachar for providing the conceptual language to critique the contemporary migration-enforcement practices of liberal states while developing a framework for countering the illiberal effects of these policies. Lori notes, however, that while Shachar explains that the shifting border contracts and expands into time as well as space, most of her empirical examples focus on spatial mobility. Dividing her response into two parts, Lori begins by elaborating on the temporal aspects of Shachar’s argument, notably legal maneuvers that deploy time to police the boundaries of the national body politic. These separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law: what matters is not how much time a person has resided in a territory but rather how that time is counted by the state. By pegging rights to a specific legal status, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizens. The second part of Lori's response takes a step back to assess the larger implications of Shachar’s findings for our understanding of the political continuum between liberal democracies and authoritarian or autocratic states. Lori observes that, like the enterprises of colonialism and imperialism during previous periods, the practices associated with contemporary migration enforcement highlight the contradictions between democratic ideals and the actual practices of liberal states.