A conceptual framework for capturing anti-EU nationalism in post-Brexit Britain

What the paper says

This conceptually focused article advances scholarship on hospitality by developing a novel framework for capturing nationalist inhospitality and growing exclusions that have been widely reported by EU citizens living in post-Brexit Britain. The discussion synthesizes two seminal social theoretical models (i.e. derived from Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of crises transforming doxa into discourse, respectively) to create an analytical grid consisting of four quadrants that correspond to different, internally nuanced nationalist constellations. Through a discussion of two discursive ‘snapshots’, of the European football championship in 2021 and of Boris Johnson’s last speech as departing prime minister in September 2022, the analytical focus then moves on to the workings of two hitherto under-researched forms of inhospitality: first, a lesser-known, though historically not new sub-type of reflexively hot nationalism; second, a novel configuration of non-reflexively hot nationalism. These ideological constellations add new nuance to our understanding of the different forms nationalist inhospitality can take.