Imperial Gothic 2.0: Brexit, Brex-Lit, and everyday Euroscepticism in British popular culture

ABSTRACT

In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and ‘Europeanness’ urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of ‘Imperial Gothic 2.0’. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century ‘Imperial Gothic’ saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This ‘Imperial Gothic 2.0’ reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanisation
• narrative politics
• emotion
• brexit
• European union
• dystopia
• discourse

Introduction

The past decade has seen the emergence of new avenues in European Studies. The effects of the EU’s ‘polycrisis’ (Zeitlin, Nicoli, and Laffan 2019) have seen the rise of various Eurosceptic movements and social forces, which in the UK mixed with domestic issues to culminate in Brexit. However, these underlying problems have not disappeared in the aftermath of the UK’s exit; indeed they may be increasing. The consequences of rising Euroscepticism and a ‘new narrative project’ (Bouza Garcia 2017) in European Studies has been most significant in three aspects.

First, European Studies has developed into a truly interdisciplinary field (Warleigh-Lack 2008; Cini 2006; Wodak 2005), building upon traditional approaches focusing on institutions and integration, towards a more diverse field which reflects the changing nature of the EU from a distant technocracy into a major actor in everyday life. Second, European Studies has witnessed not only new theories of integration such as postfunctionalism, but new theories of differentiated integration and disintegration (Af Malmborg et al. 2022). Third and arguably most significantly, a plethora of research has emerged which challenges the concept of a single Euroscepticism and amorphous concept of ‘populism’, instead investigating significant national and demographic variations in sentiments towards the European project. This is particularly significant for the British.

This paper examines one aspect of British culture to examine the extent of everyday Europeanisation, Euroscepticism, and de-Europeanisation, in the UK. By examining portrayals of the EEC/EU/Brexit in English-language fiction, this paper tests a popular hypothesis (see, inter alia: George 1998; Carl, Dennison and Evans 2019) that the UK has always been an ‘awkward partner’ (George 1998) and a long-term Eurosceptic society. First, the paper establishes Brexit not simply as an elite-centred and institutional policymaking process, but as a deeply affective phenomenon which has colonised the quotidian – the everyday life of Britain. Second, it tests the aforementioned hypothesis (Carl, Dennison and Evans 2019) which claims that the British have long been, perhaps always been, Eurosceptic (barring a functionalist and perhaps opportunistic Europhilia in the UK’s applications to join the EEC and the 1975 referendum). Third, the paper establishes the significance of fiction as a realm in which political emotions are formed. A theoretical framework of ‘Imperial Gothic 2.0’ is then established before an analysis of British fictional representations of the EEC/EU.

While an exhaustive account of all English-language fiction pertaining to the EEC, EU, and Brexit is not possible within a single research paper, key themes are identified. Significant in this is a curious volte-face from narrating the EU as dystopia to the EU as utopia; and the continuation, from pre-Brexit fiction into post-Brexit, of a theme in which Europe is always the ‘Other’ to the British, and never the ‘Self’.

The paper concludes that by reading fictional portrayals of the European project before 2016, we can identify strong indications that the British (at least in the minds of authors) were indeed Eurosceptic, portraying the European project as antithetical to the ‘good old days’ before membership in 1973. However, after 2016, in the curious phenomenon of ‘Brex-Lit’, or Brexit-themed literature, these negative narratives of Europe are reversed as fictional portrayals represent the EU as a utopia, and the era of the UK’s membership is portrayed nostalgically as the ‘good old days’ before Brexit divided the nation. From being Eurosceptic, post-2016 fiction suggests that Britons may now be among the most Europhilic people in Europe. Finally, this paper ends with a call for research into the fictions and popular cultures of other EU member-states to advance the study of Euroscepticism in the quotidian.

Brexit and the quotidian

From 2016 to 2021, the process of Brexit revealed and exacerbated deep social divisions and ideational gulfs within British society. The root causes of Brexit remain fiercely contested and it is likely that for the foreseeable future, debates will continue on the extent to which Brexit was the result of long- and short-term factors: Britons’ emotional and institutional detachment from the EU (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016); general lack of knowledge about the EU’s mechanisms; immigration; economic and cultural anxieties of the ‘Left Behinds’ and ‘Let Downs’ (Goodwin and Heath 2016; Antonucci et al. 2017); sovereignty; dissatisfaction with Westminster; and a general dissatisfaction with the status quo (Lynskey 2017). The answer is likely to be a combination of some or all of these, and that there was no single root cause of Brexit any more than there is a single root cause of differing varieties of Euroscepticism in once country (Leruth, Startin, and Usherwood 2018), let alone wider Europe (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008). However, in spite of these debates, it is unarguable that the Brexit process elevated the EU in everyday British discourse.

Prior to 2016 the iconography and symbolism of the EU were almost invisible in the UK (Foster 2022), the Euro was not used or discussed, and – while difficult to prove beyond anecdotal evidence – the EU itself rarely featured in everyday British discussions beyond tabloid headlines. While ‘Europe’ had been widely supported by British politicians and media from the 1950s (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016) and enjoyed popular discussion from 1973 to 1975 (Saunders 2018), from the 1990s the EEC/EU, in public discussions, became entagled in an atmosphere of growing Euroscepticism (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016, 461–470). While the EU of course entered public discourse during major activities, such as debates over joining the Euro currency or ratifying treaties (Koller, Kopf, and Miglbauer 2019), the EU did not enter as much into the British quotidian, the realm of everyday life (McNamara 2017), in a positive manner. The 2016 referendum campaign (and the result itself) changed this, with the EU looming large in elite and everyday discussions in the United Kingdom from February 2016, until the onset of the 2020 Global Coronavirus Pandemic changed the focus. Brexit has had a profound impact on the quotidian and effectively colonised British consciousness. Within a few weeks in 2016 and continuing beyond, the EU transformed from a distant and barely-considered entity into the subject of extreme emotions, formal and informal political debates, and became a (perhaps ‘the’) focus of literary, material, and popular culture.

There are Brexit-themed plays (Eastham 2018) and Brexit-themed television specials (Channel 4 2019); Brexit appears in video games such as the pandemic management mobile game Plague, Inc (Ndemic 2022), the PC game Football Manager (BBC 2016), and the open-world MMPORG Watchdogs: Legion (Wired 2020). It appears in material culture in the form of Brexit-themed biscuits (The Week 2020) and a proliferation of EU and UK flag-themed clothing and soft furnishings (Foster 2022). It exists performatively in a Museum of Brexit (Museum of Brexit 2022) and planned festivals (Guardian 2021). Brexit has so permeated the British consciousness it even spawned the Brexit-themed pornographic film Hard BreXXXit (Vice 2017). The EU was not the only intergovernmental organisation in which the UK was a member, yet there is no comparative appearance of other organisations in the culture of everyday life. There are no United Nations-themed biscuits, no NATO flag facemasks, and (to the author’s knowledge) no World Trade Organisation-themed pornography. The EU and Brexit appear unique in British culture, yet research into the quotidian and everyday aspects of Brexit remain understudied. This is significant for understanding processes of Europeanisation.

Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation occur not just in the formal, rational realm of treaties, legislation, and interactions between policymakers and industrialists; clearly the processes of binding people together as Europeans (and pulling them apart) occur in the quotidian realm of everyday life (Storey 2014). Furthermore, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of (de-)Europeanisation are highly affective, with powerful emotional discourses permeating everyday life. The increasing study of everyday life, particularly relating to the EU (McNamara 2017), is highly significant as the EU itself has radically changed since the Maastricht Treaty. Europeanisation pre-dated the EU and was visible in the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), with clear evidence of Europeanisation long before the Treaty of Rome (Drace-Francis 2013). However, it is arguable that these earlier Europeanising forces existed at an elite level, with limited citizen identification and emotional attachment among the British public (and perhaps others) to what was, under the ECSC and EEC, a distant and rarely encountered technocracy. Consider, as analogues, the lack of popular identification with the UN or (until February 2022), NATO. Yet this emotional distance arguably changed as the EU gained far greater visibility in everyday life from the late 1990s, in the realms of symbols and vexillology, and particularly with the introduction of the Euro currency as a physical cash system in 2002 (Foster 2015). The role of EU symbols such as flags, iconography, the anthem, and events such as Europe Day in identity formation has been well documented, alongside the phenomenon of ‘Banal Europeanism’ (Cram 2001). Building upon Michael Billig’s study of nationalism, this approach argues that the gradual proliferation of EU symbols into everyday life embedded the EU into peoples’ affective consciousness and certainly made the EU a far more visible presence in everyday life. However, the British have been an exception to this.

Because the EU defies easy categorisation (Habermas 2016) and combines the characteristics of ostensibly mutually exclusive political forms, it is an amorphous entity which acts as a convenient platform for projecting fears, insecurities, and anxieties. The EU can easily fill the role of a distant, faceless, uncaring bureaucracy which can either be manipulated by malevolent agents or reduced to irrelevance. Related to this is the EU’s lack of an emotional dimension. It is arguable that the EU suffers, to a degree, from what Samuel Pufendorf (1667, in Foster 2022) had described as the terminal sickness of the Holy Roman Empire; an ungleichzeitigheit des gleichzeitigen, or ‘deficit of simultaneity’. In this model, EU has the powers of a sovereign but not the legitimacy of a sovereign (at least pre-2016), with the result that a lack of identity and identification with the EU results in the EU being perceived as illegitimate.

While the UK was not the only EU member with opt-outs, a broad consensus argues that despite affective displays of pro-European sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016; Saunders 2018, Acqui 2020), the British have never felt as ‘European’ as their mainland neighbours. Explanations for this are broad, ranging from later membership of the EEC for economic rather than symbolic reasons, to historicist studies (see, for example, Tombs 2021, Nicolaidis 2019) which see Brexit as simply one part of a long myth of British exceptionalism traceable since the Second World War, the nineteenth century, or even earlier (Heuser 2019). While it is impossible to trace ‘British’ attitudes to ‘Europe’ over such a time period, a consensus nevertheless remains that the British, at least in the aftermath of the Second World War and since, have been at best lukewarm, at worst outright hostile, to European integration and the UK’s involvement. To what extent is this true?

Popular culture can provide insights. Fiction can provide a repository of attitudes; fiction ‘might have some kind of social function – might help us to “communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other”’. (Boxall 2015, 10–11). Novels in particular ‘allow us to narrate to ourselves the passage of modern democracy … given us that closest and most intimate access to the minds of others’ (ibid.), hence this paper examines fictional British portrayals of the European project pre- and post-Brexit.

The significance of fiction

Fiction is inherent to politics. Not only in its portrayal of the political, but in fiction’s ability to generate calls for actual political and social change (Williams 1977). For Ali Smith (in Schofield 2019: 18) ‘fiction is political. Fiction can’t not be’, with literary fictions and political fictions forcing us to ‘read’ reality as fiction, and fiction as reality (Smith 2017). Similarly for Maurice Edelman (1995 in Fielding 2014, 8):

People perceive and conceive in light of narratives, pictures, and images. That is why art is central to politics … there cannot be any representation that reproduces another entity, scene, or conception, but only constructions that may purport to reproduce reality while simplifying, elaborating, accenting, or otherwise constructing actualities and fantasies’.

Reading fiction has three significant political roles. First, by presenting an audience with a counterfactual world, fiction ‘can inform how people think about themselves politically and influences how they understand real politics’ (Fielding 2014). For Maja Dijikic (2012), ‘when we read fiction, we are asked to temporarily exit our identities and mentally step into different ones … by exploring other minds, we are given the opportunity to practice experiencing different emotions, thoughts and behaviors than what we otherwise live’. In this regard, reading fiction is similar to historians’ and IR scholars’ experiments in counterfactualism (‘what if?’ histories); by placing the reader in an alternate world, the reader must challenge their own assumptions and narratives about how the ‘real’ world works (Lebow 2010; Ferguson 2011).

Second is the power of fiction to record the anxieties of writer and reader. Novelist Ali Smith (2017) argues that fiction acts as a reflection of contemporary social assumptions and fears. As Lahtinen (2017: 215) argues, ‘cultural and literary analysis can also make a significant contribution to risk theory by foregrounding how new risk perceptions are shaped by contemporary tropes and narrative templates’. Political fictions express ambitions and hopes within broader society alongside fears of collapse, class war, social decay, and what Kucich (2003) terms ‘imperial masochism’; a morbid obsession with collective suffering and national decline. Just as the original Imperial Gothic (see below) was framed around anxieties of the British Empire’s ascent, eclipse, and decline (Brantlinger 1988), Imperial Gothic 2.0 follows the same pattern.

In the emotionally turbulent context of the UK’s Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation, fiction has a third (negative) consequence – the ability to scapegoat an Other while exonerating the Self. Brexit (and the EU) act as an empty signifier, with citizens able to project their negative and positive emotions onto an amorphous phenomenon (Manners 2019) with which the British had a perhaps-uniquely distant and uncaring relationship before Brexit (Hix 2015). As is explored below, pre-Brexit, this demonised Other was the EU and for post-Brexit fiction the ‘Other’ is the UK/Leavers. Yet regardless of this swap the underlying mechanism remains the same – claiming innocence for the Self while demonising a convenient Other, endlessly reproducing a cycle of what Edward Said (1988) termed ‘the rhetoric of blame’. Fiction thus has a crucial role in understanding everyday Europeanisation.

Consequently, this paper adopts discourse analysis to assess portrayals and representations in British fiction. Representative samples were identified through close reading of literary reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Economist, and the Spectator from June 2016, and from Boolean web searches via keyword, through Google Advanced Search. The texts were read through discourse analysis; a method increasingly visible in European Studies (see, inter alia, Wodak, KhosraviNik, and Mral 2013; Niţoiu and Tomić 2015; Koller, Kopf, and Miglbauer 2019). Since the Brexit vote in 2016 and the subsequent surges in leftist and rightist Euroscepticism across the EU, constitutional, legal, and economic analyses have been increasingly supplemented by discourse analysis of Brexit in elite rhetoric and popular discourses (Brusenbauch Meislová 2021; Adler-Nissen, Galpin, and Rosamond 2017c). Yet surprisingly little research has been conducted on the relationship between Brexit and popular culture (see Habermann 2020; Eaglestone 2018), and very little research on British fiction and cultural imaginations of the European project. Despite this relative absence, literary studies offers a pathway into understanding British fiction – Imperial Gothic.

Imperial gothic and imperial Gothic 2.0

‘Our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was – that it all rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade once turned away from us, even for a time, might never return; and that our credit once shaken might never be restored … They could not be got to see that the wealth heaped up on every side was not created in the country, but in India and China, and other parts of the world; and that it would be quite possible for the people who made money by buying and selling the natural treasures of the Earth, to go and live in other places, and take their profits with them’.

The Battle of Dorking (1871; in Chesney and Saki 1997, 46)

In George Chesney’s story ‘The Battle of Dorking’, serialised in 1871 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the United Kingdom is conquered in a lightning invasion by the forces of the new German Empire. Appealing to widespread public anxiety following Prussia’s victory over France that year (Chesney and Saki 1997: ix–xvi), the story’s popularity was instrumental in the emergence of a new literary genre which Patrick Brantlinger (1990) terms ‘Imperial Gothic’.

The British Empire and its legacy have had a long relationship with popular culture (MacKenzie 1986), and narrations of the end of empire are perhaps more illuminating than fictions of the height of empire (Ward 2001). With graphic portrayals of Britain invaded, occupied, and brutally plundered by foreign enemies from Prussians to Martians, Imperial Gothic literature enjoyed a following among Britons fearful that even at the zenith of imperial power, the British Empire was dangerously vulnerable to conquest from beyond and sedition from fifth columnists within (Brantlinger 1990). It is arguable that the genre’s popularity reflected, and shaped, eschatological fears of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, of a society rapidly changing on an everyday level and in which Britain was no longer a unipolar hegemon. It is equally arguable that Brex-Lit’s popularity reflect, and shap, eschatological fears of the Third Industrial Revolution – an ‘apocalyptic sensibility’ (Mousoutzanis 2014, 7) characterised by fears of automation and alienating technology, anxieties and unease over globalisation (Boxall 2013: 212–213), and what Jean Baudrillard (1984: 191) termed ‘a whole range of nihilisms associated with “modernity”’. Nihilism certainly characterised the Brexit campaign, with Leavers before 23 June 2016 warning of Britain’s political, economic, and demographic collapse under continued EU membership, and Remainers warning that precisely the same would happen outside of the EU’s orbit. This nihilism was a direct continuity of the fin-de-siècle fears that birthed the original Imperial Gothic. Thus, before examining the themes of Brex-Lit, Imperial Gothic as a genre must be established.

Studies of fiction, in relation to European identity, are very few. During the Brexit process itself an anthology appeared (Eaglestone 2018); while recently two works have been published on Brex-Lit (Shaw 2021; Everitt 2022), focusing overwhelmingly on Englishness and British culture’s memorialisation of the Second World War and the legacies of the Empire. These are groundbreaking, but frame Brex-Lit purely within the context of the 2016 referendum rather than a broader theme of ‘crisis literature’. Furthermore, it is questionable as to what extent the Second World War and the British Empire framed Brexit up until 23 June 2016 (they certainly became much more significant after Brexit, but arguably, not before). While war sentimentality certainly exists as a peculiar feature of British popular culture, the significance (and even the existence) of imperial nostalgia pre-2016 is strongly contested between those who argue that a yearning for Empire was a primary driver of Brexit (Mitchell 2021; O’Toole 2018b) versus those who argue that the Empire did not appear at all in Brexit discourses until after the vote, and that Britain’s foundational myth is based in the memories and myths of the Second World War (Guerra 2019), not a long-defunct Empire which few cared about (Ward 2001; Saunders 2020). It is arguably a stretch to claim that Brex-Lit is symptomatic of the British public yearning for an Empire which had ceased to matter, in British consciousness, decades before the UK even joined the EEC (Ward 2001). Instead of interpreting Brex-Lit as driven by Empire, a more fruitful approach is to examine Brex-Lit as displaying similar themes to the Imperial Gothic genre little over a century ago.

As a subset of crisis literature, Imperial Gothic refers to literatures of the very late Victorian/early Edwardian era, from the final years of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War (Brantlinger 1990). Its defining features are anxieties about the burdens of empire, and the imminent collapse of empire not necessarily due to something specific and manageable such as invasion (although this is a common theme), but due to broader social, demographic, intellectual, or cultural changes (Mousoutzanis 2014). As Edward Said (1993) observed, ‘literary shifts parallel broad social and political changes in British attitudes towards empire’, which are intimately interwoven with British and imperial narratives of the Empire and of Europe (Drace-Francis 2017). Imperial Gothic can thereby be conceived as one aspect of a broader ‘literature of crisis’, which occasionally appears in British (and other nations’) fiction during or in the aftermath of traumatic events for broader society.

Taking ‘crisis’ as ‘the distant or imminent threat of cataclysmic disruption’ in which ‘madness, heartbreak and violence are endemic’ (Wright 1984, 3), such ‘literatures of crisis’ become ‘Condition of England’ narratives (Wright 1984, 200–203) which anxiously express ‘the fracturing or dismantling of personal relations, of social institutions, of civilisation … the scope of the breakdown may be individual, national cultural, or cosmic’ (Wright 1984, 3). These themes define the original Imperial Gothic evident in the literature of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, but do not exist solely in this time and place. Modern literatures of crisis are most evident in the aftermath of major wars or as reflections of widely held social anxieties about civilizational collapse wrought by human hubris, accident, or forces beyond our control.

Dystopian and eschatological fiction – stories concerning the apocalypse or end of the world – have long been part of human culture and reflect popular concerns and anxieties prevalent in the society which produced said fiction (Heise 2008). Thus, Imperial Gothic is only one aspect of a broader fiction of dystopia v. utopia, and catastrophism. This is evident over the past century. British literature of the Edwardian period, such as When William Came (Chesney and Saki 1997 [orig. 1871, 1913]) or The Riddle of the Sands (Childers 2011 [orig. 1903]) reflected contemporary fears of Imperial Germany and nationalist rivalry. English-language fictions of the Cold War such as Red Alert (George 1958), A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller 1959), On the Beach (Shute 1957), or Down to a Sunless Sea (Graham 1979), are framed by contemporary fears of global thermonuclear war. The turn of the millennium saw fictions anxious of the rapidly-emerging fields of artificial intelligence and cyber (Mousoutzanis 2014, 19–46), while contemporary ‘Cli-Fi’ (Mehnert 2016) reflects and shapes fears of environmental catastrophe and ecological dystopia (Bradford in Lahtinen 2017, 214–216). These can be general fears of threats facing humanity more broadly, or nation-specific in declining (or imagined to be declining) societies. Johan Höglund (2014) demonstrates how contemporary United States fiction and popular culture has shifted from the triumphalism of 20th-century Hollywood and 1990s optimism, towards a pop culture overwhelmed by narratives of decline, catastrophism, and post-apocalyptic horror, reflecting and shaping contemporary American anxieties of racial conflict, social degeneration, and the end of their unipolar hegemony – not unlike the fears of the British before the First World War (Höglund 2014: 21–36). This is significant because as Lahtinen (2017: 215) argues, ‘cultural and literary analysis can also make a significant contribution to risk theory by foregrounding how new risk perceptions are shaped by contemporary tropes and narrative templates’. Brex-Lit demonstrates that the themes of crisis literature can extend beyond invasion literature, creating plots that are driven by, or framed within, non-military social trauma and catastrophism. Consequently, Brex-Lit is best considered not as an isolated Brexit phenomenon, nor as simply one of many general elements of crisis literature, but specifically as Imperial Gothic 2.0.

Recent scholarly focus on a narrative turn (Bouza Garcia 2017) in European Studies has emphasised the importance of storytelling and fiction in framing imaginations of the political, both descriptive and normative. Themes of economic collapse, relegation to global irrelevance, social chaos, and the consequences of a vote made by apparently ‘uneducated masses’ are present not only in Remainer accounts of the Brexit referendum but also in their fictional portrayals of Brexit and post-Brexit Britain. This is directly connected to the sacralisation of British politics (UK in a Changing Europe 2019) and the status of the EU in particular, as British politics have shifted from relatively calm, even boring, constitutional, and economic debates to emotionally charged accusations of treason or racism, with the division between Leavers and Remainers narrated as a divide between good and evil. This intersects with wider (and fierce) post-Brexit debates on the moral legacies of the British Empire (Mitchell 2021) and with narratives of the EU as empire (see, inter alia, Pänke 2019).

Chesney’s 1871 The Battle of Dorking, set in a future Britain devastated by decades of Prussian plundering, ends in despair. On the final page, the narrator bids farewell to his grandchildren, who are leaving a desolated Britain to seek better lives elsewhere. As they leave, he offers them a warning which encapsulates the anxieties and prejudices of Leavers and Remainers, Imperial Gothic and Imperial Gothic 2.0 (Chesney and Saki 1997):

‘The warnings of the few were drowned in the voice of the multitude. Power was then passing away from the class of people which had been used to rule, and to face political dangers … into the hands of the lower classes, uneducated, untrained to the use of political rights, and swayed by demagogues’.

Three parallels between Edwardian and Brexit crisis literature are visible. First is that Brex-Lit, like crisis literature, shows visible Imperial Gothic anxieties of society dividing into mutually hostile factions which neither understand, nor try to understand, each other (Wright 1984, 5–6). Second, Brex-Lit shows crisis literature’s ‘temporal dualism, past and present. If the present is in flux and decline, the past is framed and perfected. There is an element of nostalgia … these are elegies, recording with regret the passing of an era, as the sun sets on the perfected past’. (Wright 1984, 6). Third, Brex-Lit is characterised by endless narratives that reflect the endlessness of the Brexit process (politically and socially); the ‘permanent feature of a permanent literature of crisis’ (Kermode 1967, 104). British fiction’s portrayals of the EU and Brexit are undeniably gothic.

What are the features, then, of Imperial Gothic 2.0? There are four answers. First is that Imperial Gothic 2.0 – fiction which uses Brexit as a plot device and/or background narrative – is not unique but instead is part of a much older crisis literature. Second is that this genre, as is demonstrated below, replicates the same themes of the original Imperial Gothic: foreign invasion and occupation, fears of fifth columnists, anxieties surrounding decline and foreign powers, and a refusal or inability to cope with a world no longer dominated by the British. Finally – and perhaps uniquely to Imperial Gothic 2.0 – is that post-Brexit, these themes and their associations have reversed, from an EEC/EU portrayed as malevolent to an EU portrayed nostalgically as a benevolent and protective entity. The EU is neither dystopia nor utopia, but the shift in its portrayal and imagination in British fiction demonstrates an understudied realm of (de-)Europeanisation in which, post-2016, (some of) the British have become the most Europhilic nation in Europe.

While some of the novels examined here are by American authors, they have been included as English-language fictional depictions of the EEC/EU as the UK has, since the era of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, straddled two worlds between Europe and America. These portrayals of the European project exist in two eras. In the first, before 2016, Europe was portrayed (by what would become Leavers) as a dystopia and a realm of de- Europeanisation. In the second, after Brexit, the EU was portrayed (by Remainers) as a utopia and a realm of potential re-Europeanisation for the British. This is a peculiar paradox which can only be understood by beginning with fiction before Brexit.

British fiction before 2016

Before 2016, the EEC/EU appeared in British fiction very rarely (Fielding 2013). This is not particularly unusual, as international institutions in fiction generally appear infrequently outside of military or espionage fiction (Fielding 2014, 243). The EEC/EU’s appearance in pre-2016 British fiction is therefore unremarkable in its infrequency. What is remarkable, is that when the European project does appear it is inevitably negative and dystopian.

For this paper, pre-2016 British novels and popular culture were interrogated for depictions of the European project. Through this critical reading I have divided pre-2016 British fiction of the EEC/EU into three genres. While there is a degree of fluidity and overlap between the categories, which are overlapping rather than separable taxonomies, these are:

1. Europe as farce

2. Europe as direct malevolence

3. Europe as indirect malevolence

In the first category, the EEC/EU appears for the purposes of comedy. Depicted as bumbling and/or incompetent for the purposes of humour, Europe appears as an avatar of the peculiarly British phenomenon of Euromyths (Usherwood 2013); the popular misconception that the EU was responsible for ridiculously specific, counter-intuitive, and unnecessary/unenforceable laws.¹ The second category is far more sinister; to this genre belong pre-2016 works of fiction which depict the EU as a front for a Nazi remnant of the 1940s, neo-Nazism, and/or a ‘Fourth Reich’, using the EU as a fig-leaf for the resurrection of the New Order. This may be a peculiarly British phenomenon tied to the apparently uniquely British manifestation of war sentimentality and a national obsession with the imagined (sole) British victory over/liberation of, an imagined evil Europe (Elledge 2017).

The third category is more subtle, in which the EEC/EU is depicted as well meaning and with good intentions, but excessively weak and/or naïve, and which inadvertently causes disaster through its byzantine bureaucracy, administrative inflexibility, or promotion of ideals over reality. While these three categories are different and perhaps even mutually exclusive (the EU cannot be narrated as a serious Nazi threat if it is also shown as comically incompetent), all of these depictions show Europe as a dystopia and a threat to the United Kingdom. Examples of each genre are outlined below.

Europe as farce

In the first category of British fiction, the EU appears as a comic device. This category is perhaps best exemplified by two unflattering analyses of Europe from popular British television comedies. In two episodes of Yes, Minister (BBC1), the sardonic civil servant Sir Humphrey offers Minister Hacker his insights into the EEC:

”Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now; when it’s worked so well?”

Yes, Minister (Season 1, Episode 5) BBC1, 20 March 1980

Hacker: Europe is a community of nations, dedicated towards one goal!

Sir Humphrey: [laughs].

Hacker: May we share the joke, Humphrey?

Sir Humphrey: Minister, let’s look at this objectively. It is a game played for national interests, and always was. Why do you suppose we went into it?

Hacker: To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations!

Sir Humphrey: Oh, really. We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.

Hacker: So why did the French go into it, then?

Sir Humphrey: Well, to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition.

Hacker: That certainly doesn’t apply to the Germans.

Sir Humphrey: No, no. They went in to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race

Yes, Minister (Season 1, Episode 5), BBC1, 20 March 1980

These scathing views are replicated elsewhere. In ITV’s comedy The New Statesman (1987–1992), the amoral and swindling protagonist Alan B’stard secures a position for himself in the European Parliament, exploiting a hidebound bureaucracy to re-enter British politics. In the BBC comedy, The Brittas Empire (1991–1997), following a well-meaning but irritating manager preoccupied with petty bureaucracy, a story arc follows the titular character’s application to the (fictional) position of European Commissioner for Sport. The series’ villain offers an assessment of the EU not dissimilar to Sir Humphrey’s:

‘Brussels, Laura. A vast bureaucracy, wasting everybody’s time. It’s all the things he’s good at.”

The Brittas Empire (Season 5, Episode 3) BBC1, 14 November 1994

These are not isolated portrayals and are matched in literary fiction, reflecting a general trend in portrayals of the EEC/EU in 1980s–2010s British fiction. In this tradition, the EU is neither malevolent nor benevolent, rather it is portrayed as pointless and preoccupied with enforcing trivial regulations. Examples from literary culture are varied but infrequent.

Stanley Johnson’s (1987) novel The Commissioner offers a surprisingly supportive critique of the stultifying bureaucracy of the EEC, framed within gallows humour. This is echoed by Red Dwarf writer Rob Grant’s (2002) novel Incompetence, set in a near-future Europe in which ridiculous EU regulations have created a comically dystopian society. Andrew Marr’s (2014) novel Head of State follows farcical negotiations after a 2017 referendum on whether to stay in the EU. In this genre, the EEC/EU rarely appear, but when they do they are ridiculous or pointless; even if their leaders have noble intentions their actions are rarely anything more than useless (when positive) or a nuisance (when negative).

A final addition to this category includes Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992). Set in an alternate 1964 where Nazi Germany has won the Second World War but is losing the peace, Western and Southern Europe have been corralled into a European Economic Community. In this universe, the EC has the same symbols: ‘a European flag – the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations, on a dark blue background’ (Harris 1992: 46), and ‘Herbert von Karajan [conducting] a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – the European anthem – at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the Führer’s birthday’ (Harris 1992: 40). But this fictional EEC is a pointless entity which exists purely to ensure that ‘“the British, French and Italians will do what we tell them”’ (Harris 1992: 185). This is a visible theme throughout British fiction’s portrayals of the EEC/EU, and is arguably a much deeper psychological phenomenon in post-war British culture: that despite victory in the war the British have exhibited nervous triumphalism, retaining ‘a lingering fear’ of Germany which forms ‘the paranoid fantasy behind Brexit’ (O’Toole 2018a). This phenomenon, which is equally visible in and perhaps a direct continuity from the original Imperial Gothic, illuminates the second category of pre-Brexit fiction.

Europe as direct malevolence

In this second category, the EU is knowingly wrong. This takes multiple forms but a common thread of wilful deceit and conspiracism connects them. Portrayals in this category vary.

Peter Hamilton’s Misspent Youth (2002) narrates an EU whose leaders continually lie about deeply unethical scientific experiments. Martin Coles’ Millennium Blitzkrieg (2000) follows an Old Etonian Prime Minister intent on ‘taking back control’ from an EU in which elites are conspiring to place political power in the hands of unelected financial interests. In Brian Aldiss’ Superstate (2002), a decadent and technocentric EU is pursuing and promoting automation, artificial intelligence, and symbolically driven space exploration (to the Jovian moon Europa) without any care for the impact on the climate or the EU’s ordinary citizens. Andrew Roberts’ The Aachen Memorandum (1995) takes place in a Britain which, in 2015, narrowly voted (52% to 48%) in a referendum to join the fictional United States of Europe, with the book’s protagonist discovering decades later that the referendum was illegally rigged. Andrew Dodge’s And Glory (2010) takes place in a not-too-distant future in which a collapsing EU is maintained only through corruption and repressive violence against protestors by the office of ‘Supreme Manipulator’. These offer isolated but intriguing condemnations of more recent Eurosceptic complaints, but a more sinister theme in this category is perhaps uniquely British – the imagination of the EU as a Fourth Reich. In Adam Lebor’s Budapest Protocol (2009), the EU is a covert front for the re-emergence of the Third Reich, following a spillover-type integration process drawn up in 1944. These are not entirely without real-world precedents for a Nazi Europe (De Bruin 2022; Herzstein 1982) and illustrate a constant theme in Britain’s relationship with the post-war European project, and a theme connecting Imperial Gothic and Imperial Gothic 2.0 – fear of Germany.

Fears that the EU is a front for German domination are not entirely unique to the British; as demonstrated in the Czech President’s spokesman publicly comparing the EU to the Third Reich (Reuters 2017a) or Yannis Varoufakis’ claim that the EU wished to conquer Greece ‘with banks, not tanks’ (Öncü 2015). Yet British Euroscepticism, far more than its counterparts in other European states, shows a consistent trope of the Second World War and Teutophobia. This is prominent in pre-Brexit fiction and a theme of conspiracism, incompetence, and manifest violence connects to the third category of pre-Brexit fiction.

Europe as Indirect Malevolence

In this final and least populated category, the EEC/EU are portrayed by authors as well meaning, but whose naïve policies inadvertently cause catastrophe. The American writer Tom Kratman’s Caliphate (2008) reflects contemporary discourses of ‘Eurabia’ and the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory (Davey and Ebner 2019) – not dissimilar to themes in a possible French Imperial Gothic such as Michel Houellebecq’s (2016) Soumission or Jean Raspail’s (2011 [orig. 1973]) Le Camp des Saintes – novels set in a future, highly oppressive Islamic Europe which is (partially) the result of the EU’s migration policies. The same theme defines DC Alden’s Invasion (2013, 2020, 2021a, 2021b) series of military fiction between the EU and an aggressive Caliphate. Immigration plays a similar theme in Larry Bond’s Cauldron (1993), in which mass migration compels an undemocratic ‘European Confederation’ to pursue reallocation policies which trigger unrest and international war. Throughout these fictions, themes of Imperial Gothic – Othering, racial conflict, Fifth Columnists, conspiracism – are prevalent.

It is clear that pre-Brexit, fictional portrayals of the European project fall into different categories but all reproduced the themes of Imperial Gothic. Decay, threatening foreign powers (in Europe, and largely German), anxiety about British decline and apparent humiliation at the hands of interlopers and fifth columnists, with the EU portrayed as a dystopian villain threatening to subjugate a once-utopian United Kingdom. Europeanisation is not visible in these themes, rather a belittling of Europe as a threat, and a tacit or overt advocation of de-Europeanisation. These themes, while reversed, continue into post-Brexit ‘Brex-Lit’.

Brex-Lit

Post-2016, a proliferation of Brexit-themed fiction has appeared. Curiously, similar themes from Imperial Gothic and pre-Brexit literature continue. While these are not mutually exclusive and overlap much more than pre-Brexit fiction, similar categories can be identified according to dominant themes:

1. Britain as farce (comedy)

2. British apocalypse (catastrophism)

3. Disunited Kingdom (survival but intense tension)

An atavistic gallows humour pervades most of Brex-Lit, as the EU and UK morph in fiction; respectively changing from villain to tragic hero, and from repressed underdog to eschatological victim of its own neurotic nostalgia. This is arguably understandable as Brexit encapsulates a process of collective trauma for the British nation; the end of the status quo, uncertainty, profound anxieties on both sides, and a reawakening of national and identities (UK in a Changing Europe 2019). From a European dystopia threatening a British utopia, fiction from 2016 depicts the UK as a declining dystopia whose inhabitants mourn Paradise Lost in the form of an Arcadian and faultless EU. Again, it is not possible to perform an exhaustive analysis in one paper due to the quantity of post-2016 Brex-Lit. But a thematic analysis reveals the continuation of Imperial Gothic themes of societal collapse, disorder, mistrust and suspicion, and eschatological fears in post-Brexit Britain.

Brex-Lit reproduces the themes of Imperial Gothic 2.0 by depicting Brexit Britain as bleak and desolate, analogous to the occupied, plundered United Kingdom of original Imperial Gothic literature. Fictional portrayals vary, reflecting deep eschatological fears visible throughout the Brexit process. The legitimacy of Brexit, a constant argument since 2016, is reflected in Stanley Johnson’s (2017) Kompromat, in which Brexit is found to have been the result of Kremlin meddling. In portrayals such as Ayesha Malik’s (2020) Green and Pleasant Land, Jonathan Coe’s (2019) Middle England, or Ali Smith’s (2016–2020) Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer quartet, Britain has become a harsher, more cruel society in which xenophobia and intolerance (of foreigners and Remainers/Leavers) are the fabric of everyday life. Adam Thorpe’s (2017) Missing Fay and Anthony Cartwright’s (2017) The Cut depict a post-Brexit Britain badly divided between Remainer cities and Leaver provinces, between abandoned working-class ‘Left Behinds’ (Goodwin and Heath 2016) and sneering Twitterati elites. Fears of globalisation, and of Brexit Britain becoming a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ tax haven for the super-rich (Rutter 2020), appear in Sam Byers’ (2019) Perfidious Albion, depicting a divided UK accelerating towards a level of laissez-faire profiteering that would make Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt (Butler 2018) or Bioshock’s Andrew Ryan (Irwin and Cuddy 2015) blanch. These themes are not restricted to literature. The videogame Watchdogs: Legion (Wired 2020) takes place in a near-future UK slipping not only into economic ruin but public xenophobia and privatised totalitarianism. In such thrawn depictions of Brexit Britain, the EU is mourned, narrated as a protective presence against the predations of unfeeling xenophobes and (curiously) uncaring globalisers.

Further themes are prevalent in Imperial Gothic 2.0. Englishness, whose relationship with Britishness has long been a difficult subject in British fiction (Spiering 1992), is a running theme in Brex-Lit (Everitt 2022) and coincides with reappearance of an Englishness which had been thought to be moribund or defunct (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021), but which has returned. While few Brex-Lit fictions reach apocalyptic levels, a cottage industry of independently published novellas portray scenarios which reflect real social anxieties. Bob Blighty’s (2018) Post Brexit: Brexit Wounds depicts a UK driven to total societal collapse; a not-uncommon prediction following 2016 and one which resulted in genuine survival guides such as AJ Rawson’s (2018) Preparing for Brexit: How to Survive the Food Shortages. Real-world anxieties around a second referendum, or suspicions of political scheming to stop or ‘betray’ Brexit, are reflected in Oliver Richbell’s (2018) Gloriana and Douglas Board’s (2017) Time of Lies, both depicting Remainer efforts to block Brexit through sabotage or a military coup. A lack of social trust, eschatological fear, and suspicion of conspiracies from within, clearly defined not only Imperial Gothic but also Imperial Gothic 2.0.

A final dominant theme in this literature is regret. Sometimes this is simply sad, encapsulated in John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017) following an elderly version of George Smiley, an iconic character of 20th-century British spy fiction ‘who has spent his life defending the flag in one way or another … [but now] … feels alienated from it, feels a stranger in his own country’ (Reuters 2017b, Le Carré 2017). Yet more often, regret is flavoured with vicious contempt for Leavers. A sinister undercurrent is visible in comic fiction such as the parody Enid Blyton-style books Five on Brexit Island (Vincent 2017a) and Five Escape Brexit Island (Vincent 2017b), and the parody 1970s Ladybird childrens’ book The Story of Brexit (Hazeley and Morris 2018). Such works depict Brexit not as a democratic process born of desperation at domestic conditions, but are toxically depicted as ignorant plebeians driven by hatred and stupidity, dragging out-of-touch and self-anointedly ‘superior’ Remainers out of the EU against their will. This dark theme of vilifying Leavers to the point of dehumanization is a sinister Imperial Gothic trope recognisable from a century ago, and one which tessellates with popular debates in Brexit Britain. This can manifest, in fiction as in reality, in xenocentric ‘Hard Remain’ narratives that are no less poisonous than ‘Hard Brexit’ xenophobic portrayals. This Gothic theme sometimes reaches ‘Toxic Remainer’ or ‘Radicalised Remainer’ (Lewis 2019) levels, with openly cruel and borderline hateful literature such as Becky Brice’s The Brexshit Book: A Remainer’s Self-Help Guide (2016); the pseudonymic Nigel Sewage’s The Brexit Cookbook (2017) or Keith McGivern’s (2019) unsettlingly dehumanising A Remainer’s Guide to Brexiteers, in which Leavers are depicted as sub-human. This disconcerting trope aligns with themes of social division and two groups not merely disagreeing with, but openly despising, one another, and has been a constant of British life since 2016. This Imperial Gothic 2.0 would be easily recognizable to an Edwardian elite terrified of the consequences of extending suffrage or a mixing of the classes, and suggests a continuation of the themes of a century ago.

Post-Brexit fiction shows a number of stark differences to pre-Brexit – the gender of authors, a Remainer perspective, a much greater frequency of Brexit as a framing device, and fictions in which it is the UK, not the EU, that is dystopia. But one prominent (and dominant) theme continues. This is a ‘gothic writing of Otherness’ (Kahir 2009), the use of fiction to distinguish Self from Other and the use of transgressive fiction allowing ‘concurrent, discordant, and nominally subaltern voices to surface’ (Höglund 2014). Just as with the reality of Brexit, some Brex-Lit novels are premised around wealthy metropolitans refusing to accept the complications of the Leave vote, with Remainer characters willingly ignoring tales of economic despair and feelings of abandonment by uncaring elites, instead just assuming that Leave was driven purely by racism and stupidity (Financial Times 2017). Through their portrayals of ‘the putative divide between metropolitan liberal elitism and economically deprived provincial despair’ (Financial Times 2017), Brex-Lit novels continue the gothic theme of Othering. Consequently, ‘tame and twee … BrexLit often reinforces the social divisions it should be the job of the writer to break down’ (Dix 2022 [emphasis added]).

Ultimately, the Imperial Gothic theme of writing unsettling fictional political worlds as a tool for trying to make sense of the present, reinforces (possibly consciously, possibly inadvertently) the macabre themes of division, despair, and decline which these fictions seek to rehabilitate. Imperial Gothic 2.0 does the same, with Brex-Lit that is based around social divides replicating and reproducing those forces which resulted in the 2016 vote, and which further drive a wedge between the mutually exclusive forces of Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation among Remainers and Leavers. This dark irony of reproducing and accelerating the fears and anxieties of society unites pre- and post-Brexit fiction, and results in Brex-Lit being indistinguishable from the suspicion and paranoia of steam-age Imperial Gothic.

Conclusions

Fictional portrayals of ‘Europe’ offer a unique insight into popular consciousness and the revival of a Victorian-Edwardian anxiety of the ‘European Other’. Unchanged from the original Imperial Gothic, Imperial Gothic 2.0 narrates the Other not merely as Europe, but frequently as Germany. By acting as a synecdoche for ‘Germany’, Imperial Gothic 2.0 continues British culture’s nervous pre-1914 and post-1945 perception of Germany and may translate into Euroscepticism (Williams 2021). New observations lead to new questions.

In Imperial Gothic 2.0, Europe acts as an empty signifier and site of projection, just as Europe did for the original Imperial Gothic. Pro-EU sentiments appear in British fiction only after Britain voted to leave, raising the question of whether the British now represent one of the most Europhilic demographics in Europe. Yet a curious pattern is visible. Before 2016 Europe was narrated as the undesirable Other, which the British Self did not wish to be in. After 2016 Europe is narrated as the desirable Other, which the British Self wants to be in. Again, while these appear mirror opposites, the difference is less significant than the continuation of a binary in which Britain and Europe are never coterminous but always narrated as separate. For Remainers and Leavers, pre- and post-2016, Europe is never the Self – it is always the Other.

Therefore – have the British always been Eurosceptic? On the surface, the answer appears to be yes. Every nation had its own reasons for joining the European project but it is arguable that only the British joined for purely practical economic reasons over symbolic, moral, pacific, defensive, or ideational reasons. This running theme is consistently visible through the UK’s reaction to Europe, from Clement Attlee’s and Winston Churchill’s invocations to be ‘semi-detached’ and ‘with Europe, but not of it’, to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges Speech, to Nigel Farage’s speech to the European Parliament on 28 June 2016 or Boris Johnson’s address on 24 December 2020. But British Euroscepticism, this paper argues, is far more significant in the quotidian realm of everyday life which continues beyond the UK having left the EU, and it is mediated and communicated through multiple realms including fiction.

Various peculiarities are visible in Imperial Gothic 2.0. From a Eurosceptic and apparently exclusively male authorship pre-2016, Brex-Lit appears to be exclusively Remainer fiction, with a predominantly female authorship. These are intriguing findings which align with ongoing research into Brexit and gender (Galpin 2022) and necessitate further research. One particular curiosity is that now that Brexit is concluded (at least at a formal level), severe social divisions remain but a strange unity has emerged. Brexit has dissatisfied everyone (Grey 2021), resulting in a curious atmosphere in which advocates of Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation are united not in diversity, but in disappointment. At the end of The Battle of Dorking (1871), the narrator offers his emigrating grandchildren an imperial gothic insight that could come from either Leavers or Remainers since 2016:

When I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!

What are the implications for researching everyday Europeanisation? First, fiction and popular culture need to be taken much more seriously than they are currently. Even if Europeanisation takes place more within the realm of formal policymaking (which is debatable), the popular realm cannot be ignored because it is ultimately in emotions and everyday experiences, not occasional laws, that ‘Europeanness’ is made, unmade, and remade (Bruter and Harrison 2020). Brex-Lit suggests that authors and artists might be more temperamentally inclined to support the EU, given its facilitation of cultural exchange and the decline of these opportunities for Britons post-Brexit (British Council 2017). Yet Brexit divided demographics in extraordinarily complex ways, and the dearth of pro-EU fiction before 2016 poses a serious challenge to this assumption. The further development of this phenomenon, and its equivalents in other EU members, requires further research.

Second, everyday processes of de-Europeanisation must be studied at national levels. The British are far from the only nation vulnerable to ‘toxic imperial nostalgia’ and its attendant politics (Shafak 2018), nor are the British the only country in Europe with significant Euroscepticism. The popular cultures of other members need to be examined much more seriously to seek popular imaginations and perceptions of Europe lurking at the peripheries of national consciousness. There are already initial forays into this phenomenon in other nations (Schofield 2019), and more needs to be done.

Third and perhaps more positively, Imperial Gothic 2.0 reveals de-Europeanisation but it also shows a new theme which is, again, perhaps uniquely British. This is re- Europeanisation. Pre-referendum, positive fictional portrayals of the EU were as rare as the sight of an EU flag flying in a British street. Post-referendum, positive fictional portrayals are prolific. Although post-Brexit fiction is overwhelmingly regretful and nostalgic, there remains a significant and perhaps growing potential that just as fiction encouraged negative sentiments towards the EEC/EU, fiction can encourage a more positive sentiment for both sides.

In Chris Beckett’s (2020) apocalyptic Two Tribes, a novel set in a 2216 Britain reeling from a long-ended civil war between the equally intolerant ‘Liberals’ and ‘Patriots’, labouring under a corrupt and brutal Chinese occupation and closed off from an ecologically devastated planet, a future historian pieces together the history of the Brexit referendum, the acrimony between Leavers and Remainers, and unfolds the consequences of mutual hostility and contempt, rediscovering the importance of opposing factions setting aside old rivalries to achieve a brighter future. In this regard, life should imitate art. The EU is neither heaven nor hell, nor is the UK, and nostalgically utopian imaginations are no less helpful than their cartoonishly dystopian counterparts. As the acrimony and toxic arguments of 2016–2020 (very) slowly fade from the present into the past, perhaps the future can be shaped by positive imaginations of everyday Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation – what it means to be ‘British’ and to be ‘European’, and what the UK and EU have the potential to be.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. During the UK’s membership of the EU, the European Commission’s UK Representation maintained an entire webpage debunking British tabloid Euromyths: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11,980/20,191,004,103,218/https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/