"There is no status quo": 'Crisis' and Nostalgia in the Vote Leave Campaign

Melhuish, Francesca (2021) "There is no status quo": 'Crisis' and Nostalgia in the Vote Leave Campaign. University of Warwick, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of nostalgia in the 2016 Brexit referendum Vote Leave campaign. Extant literature on elite British Euroscepticism has highlighted the persistence of imaginaries of national history in discourses of EU opposition but neglected to explore the emotive dynamics of historical framing. Without reference to emotion, such discussions of Euroscepticism appear rather anodyne. The thesis contributes to addressing that paucity by arguing that one emotion in particular – nostalgia – accounts for the persistence and resonance of dominant ideas about the national past within Britain’s Eurosceptic elite. Focusing on the 2016 referendum, it therefore asks how nostalgia was invoked by the Vote Leave campaign and how this relates to the evolution of Britain’s elite Eurosceptic traditions over time. By employing an historically and culturally situated Discursive Institutionalist analytical framework, the thesis explores how background nostalgic structures of feeling have worked with foreground discursive representations of nostalgia to constitute distinctive emotional communities of elite British Eurosceptics. Drawing on archival documents, visual material and interviews, the thesis charts how interlocking banal, empire, and Powellite varieties of nostalgia have been expressed through time in divergent discursive representations or nostalgia modes. It argues that two distinctive nostalgia modes have fractured the Eurosceptic movement into two sets of emotional communities, with one faction favouring explicit forms of nostalgic display and the other preferring tempered representations of nostalgia. Showing how Vote Leave emerged from a tempered nostalgia mode prevalent within the contemporary Conservative Eurosceptic movement, the thesis then provides a fine-grained analysis of how each of the three varieties of nostalgia was invoked by the campaign during the 2016 referendum. In doing so, the thesis explores how nostalgia traverses conventional binaries of reason and emotion, memory and amnesia, past and future, stability and revolution, and illuminates the emotive politics of Eurosceptic appeals to history.

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Contributors

Author: Francesca Melhuish

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