Book contents
- Europe in British Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- Europe in British Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Zones of Influence
- Part II Pan-European Moods and Movements
- Part III Cultural Transfers
- Part IV Anxious Neighbourhoods, Uncertain Futures
- Chapter 21 Blockade Communications
- Chapter 22 Britain as the ‘Asylum of Nations’
- Chapter 23 Great Games
- Chapter 24 Border Crises
- Index
Chapter 24 - Border Crises
Brexit, Pandemic, War in Europe
from Part IV - Anxious Neighbourhoods, Uncertain Futures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2024
- Europe in British Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- Europe in British Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- General Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Zones of Influence
- Part II Pan-European Moods and Movements
- Part III Cultural Transfers
- Part IV Anxious Neighbourhoods, Uncertain Futures
- Chapter 21 Blockade Communications
- Chapter 22 Britain as the ‘Asylum of Nations’
- Chapter 23 Great Games
- Chapter 24 Border Crises
- Index
Summary
This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.
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- Europe in British Literature and Culture , pp. 385 - 419Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024