The title of this chapter points to the frequent use of the word ‘we’ in Brexit discourse before and after the referendum. The pronoun ‘we’ in Brexitspeak almost always serves the exclusion of other nations or those in the domestic arena perceived as enemies of ‘the people’. Three different cases of the uses of ‘we’ are examined, each of which in their different ways shows how ‘we’ expressed an exclusionary notion of national identity. One of these cases shows how Brexitspeak persisted in the years after the referendum, and included the long-standing idea, at all levels of society, that ‘we’ speak only English. The second case is the 2013 speech by the then prime minister David Cameron, who favoured remaining in the EU. That speech, which announced the referendum, was apparently intended to placate the Eurosceptics and neutralise UKIP’s attractiveness. The speech repeatedly used ‘we’, embedded in an exceptionalist narrative of British greatness. Cameron’s speech failed in its aims and in fact boosted national-populist discourse. It was in tune with Farage’s own speeches of the same year, which is the third case of Brexiter ‘we’ examined in this chapter.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.

As represented by the title, this chapter unpacks how the British colonial administration left indelible legacies on the Nigerian state and how those legacies killed the sociopolitical fabric of the region before the institution of colonial rule. Through the concept of regionalism, which the chapter understands as “the systemic division of governmental control where a central or federal government holds clearly defined authority and power,” the colonial administration hamstrung Nigeria’s political and economic growth by creating ethnic mistrust and conflict, the marginalization of minorities and agitation among ethnicities after the development of ethnic nationalism. Self-serving interests of colonialists aimed to partition the country along arbitrary lines, disregarding the complex web of pre-existing linguistic and ethnic communities for ease of administration. The effects of these colonialist policies fueled the ethnopolitical and social conflict (and other marginalization of minority groups only possible after the creation of a state) within Nigeria, thus stymieing the development of Nigeria’s internal and independent sociopolitical structures.

This chapter follows the creation, adoption, and impact of the numerous constitutions implemented in colonial Nigeria, ultimately pushing the region toward adopting a more federal system of government. This chapter will contain overviews of the five important constitutions created in the colonial period, while also exploring the factors which drove the colonial government to push the region toward federalism and the greater inclusion of native Nigerians. It will identify two primary periods of constitution-making, one before World War II and one after, pushed more vigorously by nationalist groups. Federalism, codified by Nigeria’s consecutive implementation of different constitutions, promoted regionalism, causing the growth of ethnic nationalism. Consequently, ruling groups benefiting from previous, more unitary systems, like Northern Nigeria’s emirs, and small minority ethnic groups fearing the influence of larger groups, opposed the growth of federalism. As Nigeria transitioned into an independent nation, it walked a fine line between an oppressive unitary system and a chaotic federal one. This balancing act defined its constitutions and political landscapes during Nigeria’s colonial period, and continues to do so today.

This chapter focuses on Haiti’s twentieth-century periodicals, and more specifically on the literary magazine. By bringing to light the complex stories of literary revue culture during key historical moments I show how these specific forms of publications, which played a major role in Caribbean countries, have influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. At its core, this chapter addresses the tension between the aesthetics and politics of several literary revues by highlighting, first, literary and/or socially engaged magazines predominantly concerned with the development of Haiti’s literature and culture, and, second, those with a clear political agenda, some of which were infused with an explicit objective: the forging of a Haitian national voice.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

The first chapter introduces and outlines the project of the book. As a point of departure, it discusses the logic of the nation-state and explains why this ideal is fundamentally unrealistic and, therefore, inadequate as a principle for political organization. Contra liberal nationalists, it argues that even where the “standard liberal package” is granted to all citizens, the nation-state remains intrinsically exclusionary and unjust. Moreover, the chapter discusses the limitations of existing approaches to national pluralism, including liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism before laying out the ensuing research agenda. In order to recover an alternative to the nation-state, the book proposes to examine the theoretical relationship between nations and political organization prior to the rise of the nation-state in the early modern period. The chapter addresses both methodology and source selection.

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s language regime has evolved in a context of intense cultural heterogeneity. The most crucial element of the language situation in Ukraine concerns cohabitation and intermingling between Ukrainian and Russian language-oriented populations. Ukraine’s competitive state tradition produced a contested language regime. Formed at the crossroads of civilizations, it has been influenced by both East and West. The critical juncture of Ukraine’s independence marked a rupture with its past and generated a new language regime that actively embraced priority for the Ukrainian language. But because of its competitive state tradition, this language regime remained unsettled, solidifying only gradually and non-linearly. Inherited institutions that were both executive dominant and fragmented produced radical shifts when new elites took power. Through these shifts, Ukraine’s language regime has gradually coalesced around a dominant conception, though the tradition of competitiveness remains. Ukraine’s language regime reveals the embedded normative and institutional legacies of its experience under Russian and Soviet rule, as well as the reactive nationalism this imposition provoked. It continues to occupy a crossroads, pulled at once by East and West, paradoxically asserting the very monolingual nationalism perfected in Europe but now cautioned by appeals to minority language rights.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

Over c. 50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England’s position in the world, and the last two decades have seen intensification in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our analysis of this history starts with the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities, educational philosophies valuing the ‘whole child’, educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures, and a legislative strategy that promotied good community relations. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of LEAs initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments are analysed in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. Finally, we consider the role of universities in these processes.