The Battle for Britain has taken place on the political-cultural terrain of the nation as contending narratives about its past, present and future have tried to claim the nation for themselves. These contentions crystallised around Brexit, a moment which exemplified one dramatic trend – the revival of nationalism – and posed one profound analytical problem: how do we locate this nationalist revival in spatial terms? Do we attend to the varieties of nationalism in play, looking at their distinctive formations and trajectories? Or do we look beyond the national examples to a more global account of this phenomenon: is this an era of nationalism structured by international or global realignments? Although most academic – and media – attention has been focused on populism, I share Valluvan's view of this as a period of ‘nationalist populism’ (2019: 11; emphasis in original). Such nationalist populisms have proliferated, connecting the British experience to many elsewheres: Trump's desire to make America Great again, Bolsanaro's rise to power in Brazil, Modi's Hindu nationalism in India, Orban's Fidesz governments in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, not to mention the rise of nationalist-populist movements, if not governments, across Europe, from the AfD in Germany to the Rassemblement National in France. Across these many settings, nationalism, populism, racism, authoritarianism and more have been bundled together – or, more accurately, articulated – in specific national forms. It remains important that Trumpism is not Orbanism which is not Brexit, even though they (and other instances) are connected in multiple material and symbolic ways. The chapter will argue that the challenge is to think about nations and nationalisms transnationally and conjuncturally. This forms the focus of the first section of the chapter.

This approach makes it possible to situate Brexit – and the wider Battle for Britain – within these larger transnational conjunctural dynamics of the national question rather than solely in terms of the UK's relationship to the EU (or some abstract ‘global capitalism’). How the UK as nation and nation-state came to occupy this place is the focus of the second section.