Vortrag: The Fifth Nation - London and Brexit
Am Dienstag, den 16.01.2018, findet von 11:15 Uhr bis 12:45 Uhr ein öffentlicher Vortrag zum Thema "The Fifth Nation: London and Brexit" statt. Gehalten wird der Vortrag von Frau Dr. Pleßke im Gebäude 40, Raum 231. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich eingeladen.
Greater London was the only region in England to back British membership of the EU – a fact that resulted in the notion that the country was made up by a fifth nation: its very own capital city. Indeed, Londoners started signing a petition calling for the metropolis to become an independent city state. Whereas the former conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, was a leading spokesman for the Brexit, the newly-elected Sadiq Khan, was the Labour party's most prominent Remain campaigner, who after the referendum vouched to "take back control" for an "Open London". This was not only meant as gesture of welcome to the 1 million Europeans resident in London. In line with the economically-driven "OpenBritain Campaign", he urged business executives, entrepreneurs, and investors not to panic, promising London would remain an open gateway to Europe and the world.
This lecture will take an urbanistic as well as an economic approach to the Brexit and analyse three rationales of the remain-minded capital city. In a first part, I will concentrate on the City of London as a hub of free trade, whose businesses and banks had backed the Remain campaign by economic discourses. Secondly, I will assess the relation between the capital city and the nation to underline London's historically evolved idiosyncratic character which is neither typically British, nor English. This leads to the third aspect under scrutiny, namely London as a multicultural, cosmopolitan, and international city. Khan's new slogan of "Open London", after branding the metropolis "sexy", "new", and "more", emphasises the importance of the city's winning key-potential within a worldwide urban competition in both economic and cultural terms.