Imperial Nostalgia? The Presence of Imperial Past in the Conservatives' Discourse on Global Britain

This master's thesis deals with the British political Conservative discourse on Global Britain in the years 2016-2020 and the United Kingdom's place in the post-Brexit world. After the unexpected results of the EU referendum, the British government introduced the concept of Global Britain as their new foreign policy orientation. This paper assumes that the idea of the UK opened to the whole world and embracing old friends and new allies alike is built upon the imperial nostalgia and the idealisation of their past. It focuses on the various ways in which nostalgia manifests itself in the Conservative discourse of 2016-2020, specifically in the public speeches of its key representatives and election programs. In the theoretical part, this paper explores the academic debate on Global Britain and the role of history in the post-Brexit world. It uses the memory studies and operationalisation of the concept of nostalgia as a framework for the source analysis. The empirical chapter presents the research results in two ways - based on the thematic categories and individual speakers. The former follows the various ways in which the nostalgic manifestations are used to create a vision of a post-Brexit global Britain, while the latter focuses on the individual approaches in the efforts to communicate that image