Global Britain: Imaginaries, identities, and ontological security

This article analyses the imaginaries and identities that comprised the idea of Global Britain in the post-Brexit period. Global Britain emerged as a re-articulation of the United Kingdom’s place in the world following the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Drawing on six discrete but related articles, this Special Issue on Global Britain shows what drove this idea and how audiences, domestic and international, responded to its narrative with a mixture of enthusiasm, mockery, disdain, and even anger for this renewed vision of Britain and its place in the world. From internal disputes within the Conservative Party to attitudes towards the Monarchy, via foreign policy formation, technological innovation, and message reception among foreign media, Global Britain was articulated in order to mitigate the sense of ontological insecurity generated by the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union and the new geopolitical environment of the 2020s. Part foreign policy, part national narrative, it was not the first such re-articulation of England, Britain, and the United Kingdom, nor will it be the last. This is because such narratives are not only broad foreign policy frameworks but are national narratives that seek to provide a sense of ontological security at a moment of geopolitical change.