A/Prof. Ben Wellings1, Prof Karine Tournier-Sol1
1Monash University, Australia
Biography:
Ben Wellings is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. His research focuses on the importance of ideas and ideology as a crucial element of foreign policy formation in liberal democracies. He is the author of English Nationalism, Brexit and the Anglopshere: wider still and wider (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), co-author with Helen Baxendale of ‘Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere: traditions and dilemmas in contemporary English nationalism’ in the Journal of Common Market Studies, 53 (1), January 2015 and is currently completing a monograph for OUP on English nationalism and British disintegration
Abstract:
As right-wing politics undergoes a radical transformation in the context of intensified geopolitical competition, this article illustrates and analyses right-wing opinion-formers’ threat perceptions of external and internal enemies. It focuses on the perceptions of the shared strategic challenges of Europe and the Anglosphere countries from 2020-24 in what Tim Bale calls the ‘party in the media’. This influential part of the right-wing milieu in Britain is an integral and organic part of the Conservative party, playing an active part in promoting right-wing ideas. This was driven by the right of the Conservative party and, increasingly, the insurgent radical-right (UKIP, Brexit Party, Reform UK) whose influence in the party in the media grew. By the start of the 2020s, the challenge from Russia along with Chinese re-assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, pushed the EU, especially France, and the so-called ‘Anglosphere’ into strategic alignment, although tensions over AUKUS expressed an Anglosphere-France cleavage. Yet for the party in the media, France was an undependable ally. But at the same time, French republican nationhood offered a counterpoint to an undermining “woke” auto-critique of the Anglosphere that weakened those countries' resolve at a moment of impending conflict.