British Euroscepticism and the Geopolitics of a Post-Imperial Britain

Abstract

The cucumber is by now a standard item in the rhetoric of Euroscepticism. When we read that ‘the cucumber regulation (1677–1688) … rules that “Extra” grade of this vegetable may only be offered for sale if the curve does not exceed 10 millimetres for every 10 centimetres’ (Enzensberger 2011, p. 16), we are in the familiar and comforting territory that is mapped out through metonymic reduction. In an unsublime variation on King Lear’s questioning of the essence of man, we conclude that the EU is indeed no more than this. The cucumber is thus as predictable and as useful in its connotations as those other longer-established instances — frogs, rosbifs, krauts — through which the demarcations between the familiar and the foreign are inscribed in subjectivities, collective consciousness, ideologies, discursive formations, their survival impermeable to the methodological sophistication which the recent history of the social sciences has attested. Frogs and rosbifs can be curated in museum exhibitions, assuming palatable distinction as a cultural commodity for the discerning post-national subject, like the brand of heritage sausages on sale in airport duty-free. The P.I.G.S. acronym is evidence of a persistently binary and feral mode of ethno-stereotyping, still operative in a supposedly cosmopolitan mediasphere. There is, however, one notable difference between these instances of metonymic reduction.