ABSTRACT
This chapter examines constitutions of Island Race identity from the Labour Party coming to office in 1997 to 2015. Taking a more general approach that focuses on wide-ranging foreign policy debates, this chapter places the parliamentary discourse from both the Labour governments of 1997–2010 and succeeding Conservative administrations side by side. This encompasses an overarching narration of the post-Cold War, geopolitical environment as one that co-constitutively reifies Island Race identity tropes through emphases on cultures of global threats and opportunities and mutable distances. Furthermore, as Britain’s membership of the EU began to be narrated as an ‘issue’ and then the subject of a promised referendum, questions of insularity and universalism came to the fore once more as the two main Westminster parties drew on these notions in articulating ontologically secure political positions. Taken in sum with what David Cameron called ‘our island story’ and his first Foreign Secretary William Hague’s policy of a reinvigorated global diplomatic network, these are the contours of an exemplary posture of parochialism and globalism in which the insular Britain island has forged unique values that are of relevance to a world badly in need of their superintendence.
