Introduction

The meanings and practices of belonging to places have been affected by the era of globalisation. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are not the first events to have an impact on belonging in this era, but they represent significant jolts, and the specific programmes of Brexit and the Trump administration indicate intentional reconfigurations of existing arrangements. In some cases, these political upheavals have served to intensify existing tendencies, or make existing practices more visible. In other cases, there are new problems, new connections made and new severances of existing connections.

Brexit and Trump have produced so much uncertainty that they are their own crises. They, and similarly disruptive moves for independence in Scotland or Catalonia, remind us that despite performances of state security at borders, the geopolitical order is always vulnerable to destabilisation. If we survey the history of modern Europe, for example, we can see that its borders and identities have changed frequently, with emergence of new nation-states, the disappearance of others, and other partitions and unifications generating new allegiances, championed by an expanding state. Tensions over existing borders and identities clearly remain, sometimes fed by resistance to narratives of unity. Nationalism has served as both an emancipatory and an authoritarian force (Bianchini, 2017). When it comes to questions of citizenship and belonging, both governments and individuals strategically navigate disputed cartographies.

The UK government and the Trump administration have made strong and explicit statements about bringing about change that will alter definitions of who belongs. What are the lasting impacts of such statements and the policies that may follow? What insights can we draw from the sentiments and structures that have been revealed by these crises? Mary Layoun (2001) has argued that ideas about citizenship are never more electrified than in a crisis. In these moments, the state makes an extraordinary effort to set out clear (and usually exclusionary) definitions to establish order, to instil fear and to promote political unity through purified ideas of who belongs. However, in the ordinary lives of citizens on the ground, belongings and allegiances may be much more complex and ambiguous. It is not the goal of this chapter, nor of this book, to predict what will happen in five, 10 or 40 years from now because of Brexit and Trump.