Our language then does not so much reflect Britain as a reality, but signifies it, carves it into conceptual shape. A point banged out time and again. British reality itself, before we come to constitute it through our discourses, is just some inarticulate entity. Britain does not therefore sort itself into shape independently of our descriptions of it. This is a simple point, and is now standard fare in Cultural Studies textbooks.
British practices are to a significant degree a product, then, of our discursive constructions.
In this way, discourses internally constitute nations. Discourses constitute a particular British reality by explaining, rationalising, concealing, legitimacy and so on. Much scholarship within the field of Cultural Studies continues to explain such processes. Deconstructing ideology, moreover, is analysing the ways in which meaning serves to sustain the life of a nation. Power, thus, and as Foucault has endlessly informed us, is complexly diffused.