History Education and National Identity Eleni Karayianni and Stuart Foster 11 History Education, National Identity, and the Road to Brexit Eleni Karayianni and Stuart Foster On June 23, 2016, citizens of the United Kingdom voted to exit from the European Union, a move commonly referred to as “Brexit.” The result of the referendum sent shock waves through the nation and had an immediate impact on the international economic and political landscape. Various analysts have suggested a host of reasons for the British public’s decision to leave the European Union, such as general dissatisfaction with falling wages and a declining standard of living, increased political mistrust, widespread concerns over rising levels of immigration, and growing anxiety over a perceived loss of national sovereignty. Notwithstanding these important factors, during the extensive, passionate, and fiercely contested debates that preceded and followed the referendum, it was strikingly evident that issues of national identity were of critical importance. Of significance, during the days leading up to the vote, two of Britain’s most widely read newspapers typically splashed their entire front covers with the British flag and unapologetically used emotive headlines to appeal to nationalist and patriotic sentiment. For example, one urged its readers to “BeLEAVE in Britain” (“We urge our readers,” 2016, June 14) and the other exclaimed on the day of voting: “Your Country Needs You: Vote Leave Today” (2016, June 23). Perhaps not surprisingly, the day after the referendum, one BBC reporter remarked, “What appears clear from the campaign is that the vote to leave was as much a statement about the country’s nat ional identity, and all that involves, as it was about its economic and political future” ( Eight reasons Leave won, 2016, June 24). Other analysts and psephologists have pointed to the influence of particular perceptions of national identity in the referendum decision. For example, a NatCen report on the Brexit vote concluded that “matters of identity were equally, if not more strongly, associated with the vote to Leave—particularly feelings of national identity” (Swales, 2016, p. 2). Relatedly, it is notable that a persistent feature of British public opinion, identified by the 2015 British Social Attitudes survey, was that relatively few people held a strong sense of European identity. Invited to choose as many of the identities associated with Britain and Ireland as they wished, only 16% chose European, a figure that has varied little during the course of this century (Curtice, 2016). Equally, when people were invited to place themselves on a 7-point scale in which 1 means not at all European and 7 means that they feel very strongly European, as many as 27% of respondents put themselves at 1, while just 6% declared themselves 7. On average, people were positioned at 3.2 on this scale, noticeably below the