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Exploiting Britain’s Imperial History: The Polarising Effects of the Culture-War Discourse and the Master Narrative of Nostalgia in Contemporary British Political Rhetoric

Matthias Göhrmann et Dennis Henneböhl

Résumés

Depuis le vote du Brexit en 2016, l’expression « guerre culturelle » est de plus en plus utilisée pour décrire un changement fondamental de la politique britannique vers un style politique plus américanisé et très clivant. Cet article reconceptualise le terme – popularisé à l'origine au début des années 1990 par le sociologue américain James Davison Hunter – du point de vue des études culturelles britanniques afin qu'il puisse être appliqué de manière productive au contexte culturel britannique. Ici, le choc entre les notions « traditionalistes » d'identité nationale et celles dites « progressistes » constitue un facteur de polarisation majeur. L'article proposé se concentre en particulier sur les débats polarisants de l'histoire britannique qui ont refait surface après le renversement de la statue du marchand d'esclaves Edward Colston par les manifestants de Black Lives Matter en 2020. Ici, le discours de la guerre culturelle est en corrélation avec ce que nous appelerons le « grand récit de la nostalgie ». Ce récit culturel dominant, qui a été (et est) par exemple largement instrumentalisé dans le contexte du Brexit, offre une perception principalement positive du passé, marginalisant les points de vue contradictoires ou même les omettant entièrement. Nous illustrerons ce processus en examinant des exemples sélectionnés de produits rhétoriques récents du bloc traditionaliste, tels que des discours ou des déclarations prononcés dans les médias traditionnels et sociaux.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York, Basic Books, 1991.
  • 2 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Benni (...)

1When on 23 June 2016 a slight majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union, they revealed deep cultural and ideological fault lines within British society. Much of the domestic turmoil the country finds itself in today, seven years after this fateful decision, arguably is the result of a shift in political conduct which has first featured in the extremely divisive Brexit campaigns, and which became discernible in the political rhetoric which emanated from them. Ever since the Brexit vote of 2016, the term « culture war » has been employed to describe a British political style which heavily relies on the exaltation of one’s own political camp and the demonisation of the opposition. What is more, within this divisive mode there has been an observable tendency towards the use of nostalgic tropes, images, and narratives. Our article therefore investigates the interplay between these two prominent strategies, i.e. the use of polarising rhetoric and nostalgia, which are instrumentalised for various purposes and have surfaced in numerous British rhetorical products such as speeches or statements made in both conventional and social media. In order to do so, we will combine our retheorisations of two concepts, culture war and nostalgia, which enable us to investigate the ideological sources of Britain’s seemingly polarised party politics. This will be done in two steps: firstly, we reconceptualise the term culture war as originally popularised in the early 1990s by US sociologist James Davison Hunter1. Here, British cultural studies of the Birmingham tradition as well as rhetorical studies provide us with the necessary critical concepts and theories. The culture war is redefined as a divisive national discourse which is sustained by rhetorical strategies that structure the perception of the Self and Other in reductive and binary oppositional fashion, discursively eclipsing the moderate middle ground. More precisely, this means that we will focus on the ways in which the ideological workings of culture-war discourse constructs positive in- and negatively-evaluated out-groups. To this end, « progressivist » but especially « traditionalist » cultural forces employ what we term « the rhetoric of polarisation », triggering major polarising effects which they seek to exploit. Secondly, we argue that the predominance of nostalgic tropes in contemporary British politics, media, and culture constitutes a « master narrative » in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense2. Therefore, we posit the existence of what we call the « master narrative of nostalgia » which permeates the current culture-war discourse. This dominant cultural narrative, which was, for instance, prominently instrumentalised in the context of Brexit by traditionalist cultural forces, provides a mainly positive perception of the past, marginalising conflicting views or even omitting them entirely. Our paper focuses especially on the divisive debates about British history which resurfaced after the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. In this context, the culture-war discourse and the master narrative of nostalgia strongly interrelate with one another. As our analysis of selected sources will show, traditionalist cultural forces sought to frame this debate as an attack on British identity by employing culture-war rhetoric, demonising their opposition and exalting their own nostalgic position on Britain’s imperial past.

2. The British Culture War Revisited: Brexit Britain and Social Polarisation

  • 3 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars, op. cit., p. 34.
  • 4 For an attempt to amend this methodological ineffectiveness, see Göhrmann, Matthias, « Brexit and t (...)

2To investigate the saliency of Conservative polarising rhetoric in British politics since the 2016 Brexit referendum and fathom the strategic attempts by traditionalist cultural forces to frame contemporary controversies as divisive issues, one needs to properly define, refine, and perhaps adapt a concept which has been used rather superficially in British media and academic research: the culture war. In its modern use, the term originated in America in the 1990s where it was promoted as a serious analytical concept by US sociologist James Davison Hunter. In his Culture Wars (1991) he set out to amend « an absence of categories »3 when it comes to theorising ideological struggles for the interpretative hegemony over national identity. Breaking with the survey-driven approaches which had dominated US sociology, Hunter turned to Continental and British social theory to explain the disparate clashes over those aspects to national life which had traditionally favoured the (re)production of a rather sanitised version of American national history and identity. Even though Hunter has clarified the theoretical foundations of his culture-war hypothesis in subsequent publications, the concept remains difficult to apply productively in the investigation of the polarising effects of, for instance, political rhetoric4. It is here that a heightened focus on theories and concepts provided by British cultural studies and rhetorical studies provides important methodological insights into the polarising power of language and its broader discursive impact on national culture. Indeed, there are some conceptual overlaps between Hunter’s elaborations and the premises of these fields of studies which may be employed to specify the concept of culture war as well as elucidate the kind of polarisation promoted by the Conservative Party in specific and traditionalist cultural forces in Britain in general.

  • 5 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and A (...)
  • 6 Hall, Stuart, « Questions of Cultural Identity », Modernity. An Introduction to Modern Societies, e (...)
  • 7 Hall, Stuart, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2 (...)
  • 8 Göhrmann, Matthias, « Brexit and the Struggle to Define Great Britain », Mentalities and Materialit (...)

3Several of the key premises of Hunter’s culture-war hypothesis seem to echo assertions of British cultural studies – most notably those put forward by their most prominent theorist, Stuart Hall, and his work on cultural representation and the formation of national identity. Breaking with traditional American sociology, Hunter considers culture not to be the sum of values, beliefs, and attitudes, which may be explored more or less reliably through polls. Instead, the US sociologist understands culture to be inherently conflictual and mediated through systems of representations such as language5. This mirrors Hall’s elaborations on national culture which he considers a discourse that provides its subjects with cultural representations, allowing them to make sense of themselves and the world around them. It is through and within discourse, contends Hall, that (national) identity is continually (re)produced and (re)negotiated6. Since this process of identification with the nation – that is, the attaching of meaning to oneself and others by acts of representation – rests on the interplay between (often racialised) sameness and difference, it inevitably boils down to a question of who is included in and excluded from the national community7. In Hunter’s culture war, these discursive processes are also present and function in an especially polarising manner. Culture war therefore is reconceptualised here as a divisive national discourse which sustains itself through an overreliance on classificatory systems of difference. The culture-war discourse structures any debate that is linked to national identity, infusing it with a bellicose us vs them mentality. This polarising discourse simplifies topics, leaving only two sides to consider and thus eclipses the middle ground; it structures the perception of the Self and the Other in dogmatic, moralistic, and essentialised terms; and it expresses as well as sustains itself through a brutalised rhetorical mode8.

  • 9 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.
  • 10 Parekh, Bhikhu, « Defining British National Identity », The Political Quarterly, 71, 1, 2000, p. 9.
  • 11 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.
  • 12 Ibid.
  • 13 Hall, Stuart, « Questions of Cultural Identity », op. cit., p. 597.
  • 14 Ibid., p. 598.
  • 15 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.

4The binary constitution of the British culture war, among other things, results from the development of two dominant positions on British national identity. Similar to the situation in the USA during the late 1980s, where Hunter originally observed the emergence of traditionalist and progressivist blocs9, these two identity positions have now also visibly emerged in Britain during and in the wake of the Brexit referendum. However, even before 2016, there existed what Bhikhu Parekh termed « the new right view and the New Labour view of British national identity »10 which by and large correspond to Hunter’s classification. Both these traditionalist and progressivist blocs are the product of distinct political traditions and rest on differing, at times even mutually exclusive presumptions about moral and absolute Truth. According to Hunter, for traditionalist individuals, « a sense of ultimate reality […] is rooted in transcendent authority » which is itself deduced from, for instance, nature, religion, or tradition11. What follows are supposedly fixed standards which traditionalists use to organise their actions as well as to conceptualise their individual and collective identities12. In British cultural studies terms, the traditional moral vision is thus essentialist in character, propagating the existence of rather unalterable (group) identities, social roles, and power positions13. On the other side of the divide, progressivists adhere to something similar to what British cultural studies refers to as a constructivist notion of identity, which contends that subjects are historically defined14. Progressivists therefore have « a sense of ultimate reality that rejects the possibility of fixed standards outside of human experience »15.

  • 16 Ibid., p. 14.
  • 17 The crucial role which nostalgia played in the conduct of the traditionalist bloc during the Brexit (...)
  • 18 Note that traditionalists and progressivists are not to be (mis)understood as two monolithic blocs (...)

5In this context, we would like to briefly emphasise the crucial role of history and nostalgia in the formation of these blocs and their respective political thrust. As the term suggests, traditionalists regard traditions rather uncritically as unquestionable sources of moral authority. They predominantly adhere to, reproduce, and defend those representations of national history which tend to be sanitised and « often tinged with nostalgia »16. Based on this biased reconstruction of a nation’s past, traditionalists promote a rather exclusive national identity which legitimises their power positions within a patriarchal, white-dominated, heteronormative capitalist society. Eventually, traditionalists’ veneration of a romanticised version of the past is highly problematic as it potentially hinders them from addressing cultural change cooperatively. In fact, this results in a rather hostile attitude towards change and everyone who stands for it – not least due to the perceived danger that, in case of just social change, one might be losing time-honoured yet unjustifiable power positions17. Progressivists here once again position themselves in opposition to traditionalists: they critically question and partially reject the authoritative quality of traditions which they regard as arbitrarily dictating social roles and restricting the interactions between individuals18. They also consider history to be a construct open to revision and new perspectives to make the self-understanding of a nation more inclusive. Eventually, the mere existence of these differing perspectives on identity as well as their political implications constitutes a polarising impulse in itself. However, the divide between traditionalist and progressivist positions is exacerbated further by a brutalised language which is characteristic of culture wars.

  • 19 Göhrmann, Matthias, op. cit., pp. 116-117.
  • 20 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars, op. cit., p. 143.
  • 21 As mentioned above, in the context of British politics this is nothing new. Margaret Thatcher made (...)

6More precisely, Hunter describes a specific language use which we term « rhetoric of polarisation »19. This rhetorical mode is characterised by a « definable pattern […] of image-building and accusation »20. Both sides of the divide make use of this emotionalising language in attempts to delegitimise their opponent’s normative definition of national identity while legitimising their own. In Britain, Conservative politicians have not only borrowed these divisive rhetorical strategies from the American playbook but have also revived and refined the rhetoric typical of the Thatcher years. In rhetorical studies terms, the rhetoric of polarisation is an epideictic and rather populist mode riddled with hyperboles and relying heavily on ethos, pathos, and ad hominem attacks. Through this rhetoric political actors of either side seek to stage themselves as supporters of some marginalised group whose inclusion in the national community is framed to be essential for the moral integrity of the nation. In this way, they present themselves as trustworthy and authentic representatives of an idealised nation, that is, Britain as it ought to be. Additionally, they attempt to delegitimise their opposition by framing them as « the enemy » who schemes to maintain or install an unjust regime and implement an « un-British » way of life. Consequently, what follows are calls to block these elements from political power and expel them from the national community. By and large, the culture-war discourse invites its subjects to reduce not only the respective opposition to stereotypes but also to consider the Self in equally rigid, reductive, and moralistic terms. This results in fixed, even essentialised morally « good » and « bad » identity positions – be they self-chosen or externally assigned21. Even though, in the British political context, traditionalists, including an increasing number of Conservative politicians, make use of such a rhetoric of polarisation much more comfortably, it is important to note that progressivists, mostly outside of the party-political system, do also employ it. The result of such a brutalisation of language is devastating for democratic debates: since one is less inclined to reach compromises with a demonised Other who is perceived as threatening the (continued) existence of oneself and one’s national community, cultural warfare renders the struggle over the meaning of a nation a seemingly everlasting social conflict, thereby destabilising liberal democratic societies.

3. Nostalgia and Dominant National Narratives in Brexit Britain

  • 22 Müller, Michael et Grimm, Petra, Narrative Medienforschung: Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung, K (...)

7In the following, we will focus especially on the traditionalist bloc and its instrumentalisation of nostalgia within the British culture war. As pointed out earlier, notions of history and national identity are discursively constructed. According to Michael Müller and Petra Grimm, people and societies make use of narrative-based mental models to structure systems of representations22 such as the culture-war discourse. In this regard, they refer to Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of master narratives. These can be defined as

  • 23 Strinati, Dominic, An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture, London – New York, Routledge, 2000, (...)

[t]he big stories, or over-arching belief systems, which allow people to organise and interpret their lives and which provide a universal and integrated frame of reference for society. […] They make absolute, universal and all-embracing claims to knowledge and truth.23

8Moreover, one can argue for the existence of a specific master narrative connected to nostalgia in Brexit Britain. Since nostalgia plays a crucial legitimising role for the traditionalist side of the culture war, the connection between nostalgia and national narratives will now be discussed in more detail. Here, the concept of narrative is of central importance and will thus serve as the starting point. Following Marie-Laure Ryan’s broader definition of narratives which forms the basis for her development of a transmedial narratology, the term can be defined as follows:

  • 24 Ryan, Marie-Laure, « On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology », Narratology beyon (...)

On one hand, narrative is a textual act of representation (or presentation) – a text that encodes a particular type of meaning. The definition remains unspecific as to what type of signifier is used to encode this meaning. On the other hand, narrative is a mental image built by the interpreter as a response to the text. But it does not take a representation proposed as narrative to trigger the cognitive template constitutive of narrativity.24

  • 25 Müller, Michael et Grimm, Petra, op. cit., p. 59, p. 98.
  • 26 Tannock, Stuart, « Nostalgia Critique », Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no 3, 1995, pp. 456-457.

9This definition understands the term in a wider sense that goes beyond literary texts and also encompasses narratives in films, TV series, or even contexts regarded as non-fictional like for instance history and political rhetoric. Something that all narratives have in common, though, is a specific narrative structure that consists of at least three parts: first, they describe the initial state of a story world, second, a transformational event occurs which causes that world to change, and which then leads to, third, an end state in which the same world has been transformed25. This is highly reminiscent of the structure of nostalgic rhetoric identified by Stuart Tannock, who describes nostalgia as « a periodising emotion » based on three key elements26: first, the notion of the « prelapsarian world » or the glorious past that is regarded positively or even romanticised by the nostalgic subject. Second, the « lapse » or cut, which refers to a catastrophe or any other negatively perceived change. This then leads to third, the « postlapsarian world », that is, the present that is felt to be lacking or deficient in comparison to the positively evaluated past. As becomes apparent, both nostalgia and narratives are based on a similar three-part structure. It can therefore be said that nostalgia constructs a narrative and here especially a narrative about decline.

  • 27 While this narrative follows the complete structure outlined by Tannock, for reasons of time, the f (...)
  • 28 As the cost of living crisis hit Britain in late 2021, the efficacy and dominance of the master nar (...)
  • 29 Assmann, Aleida, Die Wiedererfindung der Nation: Warum wir sie fürchten und warum wir sie brauchen, (...)
  • 30 Clarke, John, and Janet Newman, « What’s the Subject? Brexit and Politics as Articulation », Commun (...)
  • 31 Ibid., 67-77.
  • 32 For a more detailed outline of this argument about the consolidation of the master narrative of nos (...)

10Even more so, nostalgia can also function as a master narrative in Lyotard’s sense. More specifically, we posit the existence of what we call the master narrative of nostalgia in contemporary Britain27. This term refers to the national narrative used for the dominant constructions of Britishness as well as the nation’s history as it was perpetuated by Tory politicians as well as conservative national newspapers with a wide readership from the time of the Brexit referendum until roughly the end of Johnson’s premiership28. Of course, other national narratives – nostalgic as well as non-nostalgic ones – currently also exist in Britain but the master narrative of nostalgia differs from them in what Aleida Assmann would call the distinctive « grammar » of a national narrative29. The dominant master narrative draws on familiar (nostalgic) tropes from traditional national narratives as well as myths, for instance about the Second World War or the British Empire, and then explicitly connects them to Brexit. There are of course many different reasons why people voted for Brexit – e.g. anti-immigration attitudes, a perceived lack of sovereignty and decline in living-standards or economic hardships – and one should not assume a uniform category of Leavers30. Instead, in line with John Clarke’s and Janet Newman’s work on the formation of political subjects during the 2016 referendum31, we argue that the master narrative of nostalgia addressed a variety of discontents with the present state of the nation and consolidated them into a coherent nostalgic narrative about Britain’s decline that a large but heterogeneous group of people could identify with. While individual voters might not have agreed with all of these discontents and found some of them more appealing than others, they nevertheless shared the overall feeling that life in Britain was generally better in the past32. In addition to that, the master narrative of nostalgia was also instrumentalised for various other purposes such as during the COVID-19 pandemic or within the British culture war, especially with regard to the polarising debates about the memorialisations and interpretations of British history which resurfaced after the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. In the following, we will look especially at this later context and use examples from Conservative and traditionalist rhetorical products to outline the specific grammar of the master narrative of nostalgia as well as to highlight its interrelation with the polarising rhetoric inspired by the culture-war discourse.

4. The Master Narrative of Nostalgia and Contemporary British Culture-War Rhetoric

  • 33 See for instance Thatcher, Margaret, « The Renewal of Britain », Margaret Thatcher Foundation. http (...)

11In the British cultural context, there is a congruency between traditionalist views of national identity and the Conservative Party. While there is a long-standing rhetorical tradition of nostalgically evoking British history and national identity by the Conservative Party33, such instances have become more frequent and prominent in recent years. In fact, since its successful use by the Leave campaign during the EU referendum, this rhetorical strategy is part of the standard repertoire of Tory politicians, who also employ it in other contexts and for various purposes, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic or the recent debates about the memorialisation of Britain’s imperial and slave-trading past. In the following, we will highlight the ubiquity of the master narrative of nostalgia in contemporary political rhetoric and demonstrate how this is connected to the polarising effects of the British culture war.

  • 34 Fox, Liam, « The United Kingdom, Is One of the Few Countries in the European Union that Does not Ne (...)

12Coinciding with the beginning of the referendum campaign, one can indeed identify a significant number of nostalgic statements such as a tweet by Conservative MP Liam Fox claiming that « [t]he United Kingdom, is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history »34. Using pathos, Fox proudly and nostalgically evokes Britain’s victory in the Second World War, which in the master narrative of nostalgia is often positively represented as a time when Britain stood alone and succeeded in winning against all odds in one joint effort of national resilience and unity. The Conservative politician also alludes to Britain’s supposedly unblemished imperial past. Ironically, this tweet omits any events that would paint a more muted and yet perhaps a more realistic picture of Britain’s history: seemingly forgotten are its dependency on the USA which enabled Britain to emerge victorious in the Second World War as well as any references to atrocities committed by representatives of the British Empire such as Churchill’s actions during the Bengal Famine of 1943 or the violent acts committed by the colonial authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Such a sanitised portrayal of the imperial past can also be observed in one of Theresa May’s key speeches as Prime Minister, in which she outlines her vision for the country’s international role after Brexit:

  • 35 May, Theresa, « Lancaster House Speech 2017 », Time, 17 January 2017. https://time.com/4636141/ the (...)

We are a European country – and proud of our shared European heritage – but we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union, and why – whether we are talking about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, countries in Africa or those that are closer to home in Europe – so many of us have close friends and relatives from across the world. Instinctively, we want to travel to, study in, trade with countries not just in Europe but beyond the borders of our continent.35

  • 36 Woods, Hannah Rose, Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain, London, WH Allen, 2022, p. 37.

13Like in the previous example, any negative aspects such as Britain’s exploitation of the colonies for its own gains or the brutal subjugation of other cultures and peoples are not mentioned at all. Commenting on the overall nostalgic narrative about the past perpetuated by leading Brexit supporters from the Conservative Party, Hannah Rose Woods remarks that « [t]he gunboats of nineteenth-century imperialism, which established free trade to Britain’s advantage by threat of force, are imaginatively folded into a tale of Elizabethan romance, plucky privateers and heroic explorers »36. In the broader context of the British culture war, the presentation of and advocacy for a euphemised version of Britain’s imperial history and its global consequences are obvious attempts at reproducing a British national identity which legitimises established power positions, that is, the upper-class, white, patriarchal hegemonic social dominant order.

  • 37 « MP Calls for Lincolnshire Slavery Report to Be ‘Shredded’« , BBC, 18 March 2021. https://www.bbc. (...)
  • 38 Heffer, Simon, « Our Statues Must Not Fall – They’re at the Heart of Our Cultural Heritage », Teleg (...)
  • 39 Abulafia, David, « DAVID ABULAFIA: We Can Never Surrender to the Woke Witch Hunt Against Our Island (...)

14Moreover, the construction of a national identity which rests on the uncritical glorification of Britain’s history as well as the twisted attempt to repackage white supremacy as multicultural coexistence is part of concerted traditionalist efforts of image-building and accusation. In these expressions of the rhetoric of polarisation, traditionalist cultural forces employ ethos by seeking to depict themselves positively as champions of a national identity they themselves have constructed and propagated as « true ». This becomes apparent when looking at Conservative MP John Hayes’ reaction to a report commissioned by Historical England – a government sponsored public body responsible for the listing and preservation of historic buildings – which investigates the links between its property and the slave trade: « I first thought it should be shelved, I now think it should be shredded »37. Ironically, representatives of the traditionalist bloc – not only politicians, but also the media and reactionary academics – frequently accuse progressivists of promoting « a deeply unhistorical view of history, devoid of context, and seek[ing] to teach predominantly white students to feel ashamed of their country and its past »38. Their orthodox understanding of historiography as reflected in their use of the rhetoric of polarisation shares striking similarities with the grammar of a master narrative as it is based on the notion of a « real history » that needs to be protected from « distortions », « manipulat[ion] » or even « wilful falsification »39. As has become apparent, in contemporary British political rhetoric of the traditionalist bloc one can observe a tendency to depict British imperial history in a highly idealised and one-dimensional fashion as well as to reject more nuanced and critical views on British history. This is especially the case with regard to the British Empire and its role in furthering racism as an instrument of power as well as its involvement in the international slave trade.

15The aforementioned characteristics constitute a point of contact between the polarising culture-war discourse and the master narrative of nostalgia as the rejection of alternative viewpoints questioning or contradicting positive positions on the British Empire is another key element of the master narrative’s distinctive grammar. This can best be observed in Boris Johnson’s 2020 Party Conference speech in which he contributes to the divisive debates about the removal of statues commemorating individuals connected to the slave trade or the British Empire:

  • 40 Johnson, Boris, « 2020 Conservative Party Conference Speech », Conservatives, 06 October 2020. http (...)

We are proud of this country’s culture and history and traditions; they literally want to pull statues down, to re-write the history of our country, to edit our national CV to make it look more politically correct.40

16In line with the grammar of the master narrative of nostalgia, history is here understood by traditionalists to be something that is naturally given and fixed rather than constructed through narratives and therefore open to revision. As this example shows, the master narrative’s singular perspective and its claims of absolute Truth closely interrelate with the culture war’s rhetoric of polarisation based on clear-cut binary oppositions. Here, the polarising impulse is due to the interplay between ethos and pathos which aims at inducing trust in the Conservative Party and fear of an ominous Left: whereas the Tories are made out to be the representatives of Britain, the opposition is stereotyped as extremist. Another prominent example where this becomes even more apparent is the speech Oliver Dowden, then Chairman of the Conservative Party, gave in 2022 at a conference of the ultraconservative think-tank Heritage Foundation, which has been one of the key players in the US culture war since the 1980s. In the speech, Dowden exploits the romanticised and one-dimensional view on Britain’s imperial history currently perpetuated by the master narrative of nostalgia and instrumentalises it to position himself on the side of the traditionalist bloc in the British culture war:

  • 41 Dowden, Oliver, « Standing Up for Our Values », Conservatives, 15 February 2022. https://www.conser (...)

Clearly history is a living subject, one that will inevitably be revised. But these activists are not interested in real scholarship or nuance … or in explaining the context of the bad things that our ancestors did alongside the good. They are engaged in a form of Maoism … determined to expunge large parts of our past in its entirety. For them, nothing is sacred.41

17Such characterisations of the opposition as Loony Left and left-wing radicals are ad hominem attacks, aiming at delegitimising the cultural opposition which can be found inside and outside the party system. In these ways, traditionalist rhetoric relies heavily on ethos and pathos to construct the Conservative Party as « good » or « true » Britons who embody the national character whereas the Other is to be feared and framed in a hyperbolic fashion as downright un-British because « they » scheme to eradicate the foundations for (the traditionalist version of) British national identity and way of life. By and large, these rhetorical products constitute strong polarising impulses, that is, they provoke strong emotional reactions, be they affirmative or hostile, in everyone who hears them.

5. Concluding Remarks

  • 42 Even though Labour’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy promises that « the era of culture wars is over » (...)

18As our analysis of selected rhetorical products taken from members of the traditionalist bloc has shown, one can indeed observe a close interrelation between two of the most prominent phenomena in contemporary British political rhetoric, namely the polarising effects of the culture-war discourse as well as dominant nostalgic narratives about British history and national identity. More specifically, there are strong similarities and points of contact between the divisive rhetoric of polarisation characteristic of culture wars and the distinctive « grammar » of the master narrative of nostalgia. First of all, both are based on a binary structure leading to the construction of polar opposites such as « us » versus « them », « true » versus « false » national history and identity, or « true champions of the nation » versus « conspirators against Britain ». Secondly, the culture-war discourse and the master narrative share a similar degree of authoritativeness and orthodoxy as well as a general dogmatic style: they both make claims of absolute Truth, provide a singular perspective on British national identity past and present, reject alternative views, and brand dissidents as un-British. As a result of these close interrelations in terms of a similar rhetorical structure, the master narrative of nostalgia with its largely positive view of British history and national identity functions as the structuring element of traditionalist image-building within the polarising culture war that to this day shapes Brexit Britain. In the British context, the traditionalist side can rely on an established national discourse which has continually been saturated by cultural representations of the nation’s alleged glorious past and which has been backed by a sort of historiography whose prime function is the praising of the nation rather than its critical investigation. Conservatives thus have a head-start as they can fall back on discursive representations which are already in place, and which have been normalised by large segments of the British public. As a result of this as well as the fact that the Conservative Party was in government for more than a decade, the traditionalist side in the British culture war occupies an advantageous position in the struggle for the interpretative hegemony over British history and national identity. Arguably, this head start remains despite Labour’s success in evading the Tories’ culture-war rhetoric during the 2024 General Election by channelling the people’s discontent with the current economic state of the country. Whether this really marks an end to the British culture war or merely a pause, remains to be seen.42

  • 43 Duffy, Bobby, et al., « “Culture Wars” in the UK », King’s College London, 18 June 2021, p. 149. ht (...)
  • 44 For his culture-war hypothesis, Hunter received harsh criticism from the field of traditional US so (...)
  • 45 Hunter, James Davison, « “Culture Wars” in the UK », op. cit.
  • 46 The majority of candidates in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election determining Sunak’s s (...)

19In this context, it is important to point to the results of survey-based research. The recently published King’s College study on the existence of a British culture war suggests that a majority of Britons would still consider their country not to be a polarised nation and themselves rather moderate than either fully traditionalist or fully progressivist43. Even though the effectiveness of empirical research in the detection of social polarisation in its early stages might be questionable, echoing Hunter’s experiences in the American context44, Bobby Duffy et al. rightly point to the possibility that Britain could be in the early stages of a culture war similar to the situation of the USA in the 1980s and 1990s45. Indeed, our cultural studies-based analysis of recent political rhetoric clearly shows the existence of a culture-war discourse in Britain and that its rhetoric of polarisation is well in use, especially by British cultural warriors from the traditionalist bloc. As long as Conservatives and traditionalist cultural forces continue to frame certain issues in such a divisive fashion that seeks to evoke strong emotional reactions46, the question is not if but rather when such discursive representations will eventually materialise in a conscious culture-war mentality in the British populace which can then be polled.

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Notes

1 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York, Basic Books, 1991.

2 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester, Manchester UP, 1984.

3 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars, op. cit., p. 34.

4 For an attempt to amend this methodological ineffectiveness, see Göhrmann, Matthias, « Brexit and the Struggle to Define Great Britain », Mentalities and Materialities, Philip Jacobi and Anette Pankratz (eds.), Würzburg, Könighausen & Neumann, 2021, pp. 111-128.

5 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, sous la direction de: Hunter, James Davison et Wolfe, Alan, Pew Research Center Brookings Institution Press, Washington D.C., 2006, pp. 27-28.

6 Hall, Stuart, « Questions of Cultural Identity », Modernity. An Introduction to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 613-634.

7 Hall, Stuart, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2021, pp. 13-31, 128.

8 Göhrmann, Matthias, « Brexit and the Struggle to Define Great Britain », Mentalities and Materialities, Philip Jacobi and Anette Pankratz (eds.), Würzburg, Könighausen & Neumann, 2021, pp. 121-122.

9 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.

10 Parekh, Bhikhu, « Defining British National Identity », The Political Quarterly, 71, 1, 2000, p. 9.

11 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.

12 Ibid.

13 Hall, Stuart, « Questions of Cultural Identity », op. cit., p. 597.

14 Ibid., p. 598.

15 Hunter, James Davison, « Enduring Culture War », op. cit., pp. 12, 14.

16 Ibid., p. 14.

17 The crucial role which nostalgia played in the conduct of the traditionalist bloc during the Brexit referendum and beyond will be discussed in more detail further down below.

18 Note that traditionalists and progressivists are not to be (mis)understood as two monolithic blocs which oppose one another. In fact, Hunter points out that there are only very few fully, and constant traditionalist and progressivist individuals. According to Hunter, the formation of these blocs takes place momentarily and is triggered by polarising impulses which are, e.g. belligerent rhetoric or the framing of an issue as a divisive culture-war topic, Culture Wars, op. cit., p. 42-46.

19 Göhrmann, Matthias, op. cit., pp. 116-117.

20 Hunter, James Davison, Culture Wars, op. cit., p. 143.

21 As mentioned above, in the context of British politics this is nothing new. Margaret Thatcher made use of a similar rhetoric, albeit one that was still contained in the disintegrating class antagonisms of the 1970s and 1980s. For a brief analysis of her proto-culture-war rhetoric, see Göhrmann, Matthias and Tönnies, Merle, « British Political Rhetoric from World War II to Brexit », How to Do Cultural Studies: Ideas, Approaches, Scenarios, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2020, pp. 313-321.

22 Müller, Michael et Grimm, Petra, Narrative Medienforschung: Einführung in Methodik und Anwendung, Konstanz, UVK, 2016, p. 115.

23 Strinati, Dominic, An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture, London – New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 239.

24 Ryan, Marie-Laure, « On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology », Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity,sous la direction de: Meister, Jan Christoph, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2005, p. 6.

25 Müller, Michael et Grimm, Petra, op. cit., p. 59, p. 98.

26 Tannock, Stuart, « Nostalgia Critique », Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no 3, 1995, pp. 456-457.

27 While this narrative follows the complete structure outlined by Tannock, for reasons of time, the following analysis will only focus on its portrayal of the prelapsarian world. For a more detailed discussion of the master narrative of nostalgia with regard to its construction of a contrast between past and present see Henneböhl, Dennis, « Utopian Past and Dystopian Present? Nostalgia in Brexit Britain », Twenty-First Century Anxieties: Dys/Utopian Spaces and Contexts in Contemporary British Theatre, sous la direction de: Tönnies, Merle et Voigts, Eckart, Berlin / Boston, de Gruyter, 2022, pp. 133-147.

28 As the cost of living crisis hit Britain in late 2021, the efficacy and dominance of the master narrative of nostalgia slowly began to wane so that Johnson’s successors Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak sought to adapt their rhetoric by euphemising the current situation and doubling down on culture-war rhetoric.

29 Assmann, Aleida, Die Wiedererfindung der Nation: Warum wir sie fürchten und warum wir sie brauchen, München, C.H.Beck, 2020, pp. 137-138.

30 Clarke, John, and Janet Newman, « What’s the Subject? Brexit and Politics as Articulation », Community & Applied Social Psychology, vol. 29, no 1, 2019, pp. 71-74.

31 Ibid., 67-77.

32 For a more detailed outline of this argument about the consolidation of the master narrative of nostalgia during the Brexit campaign and an in-depth analysis of its key tropes see Henneböhl, Dennis, ‘Taking Back Control’ of the Nation and Its History? Contemporary Fiction’s Engagement with Nostalgia in Brexit Britain, Brill Fink, 2023, pp. 55-70.

33 See for instance Thatcher, Margaret, « The Renewal of Britain », Margaret Thatcher Foundation. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104107 or Major, John « Mr Major’s Speech to Conservative Group for Europe – 22 April 1993 », John Major Archive. https://johnmajorarchive.org.uk/ 1993/04/22/mr-majors-speech-to-conservative-group-for-europe-22-april-1993/.

34 Fox, Liam, « The United Kingdom, Is One of the Few Countries in the European Union that Does not Need to Bury its 20th Century History », Twitter, 04 March 2016, 9:39 a.m, https://twitter.com/liamfox/ status/705674061016387584.

35 May, Theresa, « Lancaster House Speech 2017 », Time, 17 January 2017. https://time.com/4636141/ theresa-may-brexit-speech-transcript/.

36 Woods, Hannah Rose, Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain, London, WH Allen, 2022, p. 37.

37 « MP Calls for Lincolnshire Slavery Report to Be ‘Shredded’« , BBC, 18 March 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-56447347.

38 Heffer, Simon, « Our Statues Must Not Fall – They’re at the Heart of Our Cultural Heritage », Telegraph, 10 June 2020. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/architecture/britains-statues-must-not-fall-heart-cultural-heritage/.

39 Abulafia, David, « DAVID ABULAFIA: We Can Never Surrender to the Woke Witch Hunt Against Our Island Story » Daily Mail, 09 September 2021. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9975729/ DAVID-ABULAFIA-never-surrender-woke-witch-hunt-against-island-story.html.

40 Johnson, Boris, « 2020 Conservative Party Conference Speech », Conservatives, 06 October 2020. https://www.conservatives.com/news/2020/boris-johnson--read-the-prime-minister-s-keynote-speech-in-full.

41 Dowden, Oliver, « Standing Up for Our Values », Conservatives, 15 February 2022. https://www.conservatives.com/news/2022/standing-up-for-our-values.

42 Even though Labour’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy promises that « the era of culture wars is over », Walker, Peter, « Era of Culture Wars Is Over, Pledges New Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy », The Guardian, 09.07.2024. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/09/era-of-culture-wars-is-over-pledges-new-culture-secretary-lisa-nandy Her remarks received significant backlash from the traditionalist side employing culture-war rhetoric against her. See for instance Smith, Joan, « Lisa Nandy: Minister for the Culture War », UnHerd, 10.07.2024. https://unherd.com/newsroom/lisa-nandy-minister-for-the-culture-wars/ or Wilde, Gabrielle, « ‘Lisa Nandy Is Very Lucky to Even to be in the Job!’ Furious Debate Breaks Out over Culture Secretary’s ‘Culture Wars’ Speech », GBNews, 11.07.2024. https://www.gbnews.com/politics/lisa-nandy-culture-wars-debate.

43 Duffy, Bobby, et al., « “Culture Wars” in the UK », King’s College London, 18 June 2021, p. 149. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk.pdf.

44 For his culture-war hypothesis, Hunter received harsh criticism from the field of traditional US sociology which relies heavily on empirical research. The fact that in the 1980s and 1990s Hunter was able to detect the emergence of the culture war in America while traditional sociology did not, reveals the pitfalls of quantitative empirical studies. Even though, a culture-war mentality could not be polled empirically back then, it has since undoubtedly solidified and is now picked up by empirical studies. Hunter’s experience is telling indeed, as a similar development could also be underway in Britain.

45 Hunter, James Davison, « “Culture Wars” in the UK », op. cit.

46 The majority of candidates in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election determining Sunak’s successor have prominently engaged in the culture wars, most notably the current frontrunners Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. Wheeler, Brian, « Conservative Leadership: Who are the Candidates? », BBC, 06.09.2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51y2lqzxl8o. Badenoch, who seems most likely to succeed Sunak, has already received prominent backing from traditionalist actors for her stance and willingness to engage in the British culture war. See for instance Biggar, Nigel « Conservatives Can’t Afford to Ignore the Culture War – Kemi Badenoch Gets This », The Telegraph, 30.07.2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/30/conservatives-cant-afford-to-ignore-the-culture-war/.

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Référence électronique

Matthias Göhrmann et Dennis Henneböhl, « Exploiting Britain’s Imperial History: The Polarising Effects of the Culture-War Discourse and the Master Narrative of Nostalgia in Contemporary British Political Rhetoric »Amnis [En ligne], 5 | 2024, mis en ligne le 25 décembre 2024, consulté le 14 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/amnis/10627 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130ir

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Auteurs

Matthias Göhrmann

University of Passau, Germany, matthias.goehrmann@uni-passau.de

Dennis Henneböhl

Friedrich Alexander, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, dennis.henneboehl@fau.de

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