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Abstract

In 2017, the UK Government revealed its vision for a ‘global’ post-Brexit Britain. Despite emerging interest in Global Britain discourses, there has been no diachronic discursive analysis of how the Global Britain vision shifts in relation to the changing socio-political context of Brexit. This article takes a diachronic, corpus-assisted critical discourse approach to UK Government documents published between 2016 and 2019. It reveals changing representations of Anglo-European relations prompted by rising political tensions over Brexit. Focussing on the key semantic domain of Personal Relationships, the paper reveals a move from positive portrayals of a transactional UK-EU relationship towards antagonism and uncertainty. The article illustrates that the increasing improbability of a stronger UK-EU partnership undermines the Global Britain narrative, threatening to position Britain as an international ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’.

Keywords

Brexit critical discourse analysis national identity political discourse

Introduction

On 24 June 2016, the British public awoke to the news that by a slight margin, the United Kingdom (UK) had voted to leave the European Union (EU). Although the referendum on the UK’s EU membership was not legally binding, the Government promised it would honour the democratic mandate and ‘get Brexit done’ (Johnson, 2019). As an EU member state had never voted to leave the bloc before, the withdrawal process proved lengthy, complex and turbulent. The original withdrawal date of 30 March 2019 was extended first to 12 April, then to 30 October, and finally to 31 January 2020 (Walker, 2021). UK and EU negotiators disagreed over the terms of the UK’s departure, and then British MPs refused to pass their original Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament (Walker, 2021). Even after Britain formally left the EU in January 2020, there were stumbling blocks in negotiating a trade deal (BBC News, 2020) and in relation to Coronavirus vaccines (BBC News, 2021). The effects of Brexit rage on and will continue for years to come.

From the first, political discussions about Brexit were closely tied to questions of British identity (Wenzl, 2019, 2020). When David Cameron introduced the idea of a referendum, he proudly asserted that Britain had the ‘character of an island nation’, which rendered it culturally and geographically distinct from Europe (Cameron, 2013; Wodak, 2018). Thereafter, the Brexit debate became a discursive and ideological contestation of the meanings of Britain, often expressed in relation to meanings of Europe. To be sure, Leave and Remain campaigners employed some of ‘the same cultural narratives of Britishness’, drawing on Britain’s colonial past to project a successful internationalist future (Wenzl, 2020: 72). However, for politicians on the Vote Leave side, Britain’s international success could only be achieved by rescinding its EU membership. Prominent Leave activist Boris Johnson argued, for example, that the day Britain left the EU would be its Independence Day, drawing on colonial discourses to position Britain as a victim of EU tyranny while ignoring the nation’s history of perpetuating colonial violence (Charteris-Black, 2019).

The discursive debate about Britishness and how it related to Europe did not stop when the referendum results were announced. On the contrary, British politicians now faced the task of delineating a national identity narrative for post-Brexit Britain that drew on the successful Leave branding of the nation while downplaying the more antagonistic representations of Europe. After all, as the EU Single Market contained 450 million consumers, Britain’s post-Brexit economy would rely on trade with the EU (Bogdanor, 2020). On 17 January 2017, then prime minister Theresa May introduced what would become the dominant post-Brexit identity narrative of ‘Global Britain’. A ‘truly Global Britain’, she explained, would continue to collaborate with the European Union but also pursue bilateral relationships with ‘old friends and new allies alike’ (May, 2017a, 2017b : n.p.).

It is the trajectory of Global Britain discourses that this paper examines, specifically in relation to the UK Government’s discursive construction of the UK-EU relationship. In a corpus of UK Government documents published online between February 2016 and December 2019, the study uncovers a diachronic shift from optimistic unity to uncertainty about the UK’s international relationships. This discursive transition relates to the everchanging socio-political context of Brexit negotiations, and intranational political disagreements about the future of the UK-EU relationship. The increasing improbability of negotiating a stronger UK-EU partnership triggers an unravelling of the Global Britain narrative; international and intranational tensions render Britain a less attractive ally, forcing it to discursively produce an ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’ role (Daddow, 2015: 75). Despite the dwindling argumentative value of Global Britain, the Government remains faithful to its narrative, producing a vision that is often contradictory. The inconsistency between text and context renders the Global Britain vision increasingly untenable and compromises the Government’s promised reinvigoration of Britain’s historical reputation as a global trading nation.

In taking up Zappettini and Krzyżanowski’s (2019) call for critical discourse analysts to follow the course of discourses about the UK-EU relationship during the Brexit process, this paper drives forward existing linguistic and political research on Global Britain discourses. The corpus-assisted critical discursive approach allows for coverage of a wider range of government-produced texts than previous studies of Global Britain have addressed.

Identity and the nation

Through its discourses on Global Britain, the UK Government writes into being a particular version of British national identity rooted in international relationships. As ‘writes into being’ indicates, I interpret identities through the lens of social constructionism, as ‘fragmentary’, context-dependent, and ‘constituted in discourse’ (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006: 17). As Hall (1996: 4) puts it, ‘identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being’. Identities emerge out of a discursive process of negotiation between a sense of self and other. They are multiple and multifaceted, and different aspects become significant in different contexts (Smith, 1991). Identities are produced within specific ‘historical and institutional sites’ (Hall, 1996: 4).

The concept of national identity is rooted in the normalisation of the nation. The nation is an imagined political community (Anderson, 2006), ‘that is real only insofar as individuals believe in and identify with it’ (Wenzl, 2020: 73). Like identities, the imagined national community is constructed, negotiated and renegotiated through discourse; language reifies an otherwise abstract idea (Billig, 1995). Discourse, in this context, refers to ‘linguistic and non-linguistic social practices and ideological assumptions’ (Flowerdew, 2011: 178). There is no single, undisputed national frame but multiple, sometimes competing, constructions of the nation that differ depending on the discourse producer and the production context (Billig, 1995). Some constructions of the nation have more cultural reach and weight than others; representations produced by governments, for example, are more likely to be accepted as common sense than individual conceptualisations because of the institutions’ socio-political power and access to mass communication.

For a nation to be successful, it must inculcate in its citizens a collective sense of national identity (Schlesinger, 1991) – a complex pattern of meanings and values related to a group whose borders are defined by the state (Duchesne and Frognier, 2008). A belief in united ideals, values and goals which differentiate one nation from all others strengthens a collective national identity (Henderson and McEwen, 2005). In other words, building a collective sense of belonging involves delineating what a nation is not as well as what it is (Benhabib, 1996). This process involves demarcating a national other based on the political concept of borders (Wodak et al., 2009). As collective national identities are fluid and context-dependent, others are never fixed identities; the construction of a particular nation as a type of other depends on socio-political context.

In the context of Britain, Colley (1992) argues that a collective sense of national identity emerged out of a series of wars with France between the Act of Union in 1707 and the beginning of the Victorian age in 1837. As this assertion indicates, Britain has long been discursively constructed as detached from the European continent, even when it was a member of the EU (Maccaferri, 2019). This discourse of difference is especially prevalent in British political discourse, the text and talk of political actors or institutions when they are fulfilling political actions, such as legislating, protesting, or voting (van Dijk, 1997). British politicians typically locate Europe at a distance from the UK and only discuss shared values in the context of the EU’s present political and economic arrangements (Good, 2001). Often, they draw on themes of history and geography to personify Britain and imbue it with moral and democratic ideals, constructing a homogenous, stable Britishness that has endured for centuries (Wenzl, 2019). Following Cameron in 2013, politicians in parliamentary debates make intertextual links to the Churchillian discourse of ‘Britain-as-an-island-nation’ to distinguish the UK spatially, temporally and ethically from the EU and its constituent countries (Cap, 2019: 72).

Although British politicians typically foreground distance and difference when talking about Europe, representations of UK-EU relationships differ according to context. The need for a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU, for example, led to a tension between discourses of British exceptionalism and European collaboration in UK policy documents (Zappettini, 2019). Outlining the government’s future partnership with the EU in policy and defence, policymakers depicted Britain as continuing a European tradition of democracy and wanting to maintain a special relationship with the continent (Zappettini, 2019).

Global Britain and the UK-EU relationship

An internationalist identity narrative for the United Kingdom is neither novel nor tied exclusively to Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Some 20 years ago, Teubert (2001: 74) identified the discursive construction of Britain as a ‘truly global nation’ with ‘huge trading links’ in Eurosceptic discourses. Of course, these discursive representations of the nation intertextually relate to (sanitised) historical understandings of Britain’s place in the world, as the Department for International Trade (2017: 5) notes when stating that Britain ‘has a long and proud history as a great trading nation’. In short, then, the post-Brexit Global Britain vision draws on historical discourses of Britishness to project an influential future identity for the nation (Eaton and Smith, 2020; Zappettini, 2019). In relating past to present and future, the UK Government taps into the desires of some Leave voters to return to a British golden age of influence and power (Calhoun, 2017).

Early government documents about post-Brexit Global Britain tend to be shaped around a pursuit of economic and security interests through hard and soft power (Daddow, 2019: 15). Representations of the UK-EU relationship are rooted in a ‘pragmatic tradition’ of British foreign policy that focuses on promoting prosperity and bilateral diplomacy, and guaranteeing national security (Daddow, 2019: 6). Given that these interests are transactional, Siles-Brügge (2019) claims that governmental representations of the UK-EU relationship lack underpinning emotive content. In other words, he argues that the UK Government largely constructs a strategic international friendship between the UK and the EU – ‘an entirely instrumental, functional, and oftentimes asymmetrical form of friendship’ (Oelsner and Koschut, 2014: 14). Strategic friendships are based on mutual interests rather than genuine trust and so are often ‘relatively unstable’ and subject to disintegration once conflicts of interest surface (Oelsner and Koschut, 2014: 14).

Existing studies of Global Britain discourses are illuminating but, as the above overview indicates, they are largely synchronic and focus on the first 2 years after the EU referendum vote. Currently, there are no diachronic studies of Global Britain discourses that consider how the internationalist national identity narrative shifts in response to periods of uncertainty about the future of the UK’s international relationships. This paper extends the analysis beyond 2018, to consider the state of Global Britain discourses as the nation’s membership of the EU draws to a close.

Texts and methodology

Analytical framework

In this paper I combine corpus linguistic methods with critical discourse analysis. Corpus linguistics refers to the study of naturally occurring language use; it involves analysing texts that are stored in a large, electronic database called a ‘corpus’ (Baker, 2006). As the texts in a corpus are electronically encoded, they can be subjected to complex calculations that reveal patterns in language within and across different documents (Baker, 2006). The corpus-assisted critical discourse studies position I adopt subscribes to the view of corpus linguistics as a methodology; corpus techniques are used as a way into the data that extends the scope of discourse analysis beyond a small group of texts (Partington et al., 2013).

By critical discourse analysis (CDA), I refer to an analytical practice that investigates how social inequality is represented and legitimised in discourse (van Dijk, 2015; Wodak, 2001). CDA is concerned with the interplay between relationships of power, control, and discrimination as they are constructed in language and social practice (Wodak, 2001). Given that the UK Government has the institutional and ideological power to reify post-Brexit Britain discursively and legally, CDA is an appropriate approach to take to the data.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies was first examined by Hardt-Mautner (1995) and later defined as ‘that set of studies into the form and/or function of language as communicative discourse which incorporates the use of computerised corpora in their analyses’ (Partington et al., 2013: 10). The aim of the approach is ‘the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of what we might call non-obvious meaning’ (Partington et al., 2013: 11). One of the advantages of CADS is that it can reveal the ‘incremental effect’ of discourse (Baker, 2006). That is, it can highlight discursive patterns that recur across texts from a particular genre, but which are imperceptible in a manual analysis of only a small number of texts (Baker, 2006).

Within the corpus-assisted CDA approach, I use key semantic domain analysis (Rayson, 2008) as an initial way into the data. Key semantic domain analysis identifies statistically salient discursive and thematic patterns by establishing statistically significant, key semantic fields in a dataset. The method involves comparing the relative frequencies of words automatically tagged as belonging to a semantic domain in the target corpus with those in a reference corpus (Rayson, 2008). After establishing key semantic domains, I perform a micro-linguistic analysis of examples from the data. For my analysis of the socio-political implications of the language used, I draw on terminology from political scholars. I employ Daddow’s (2015) formulation of Britain’s pre-accession role as an outsider and supplicant to Europe to argue that Britain begrudgingly reverts to this role in later UK Government documents about Brexit. That is, the ideological project of Global Britain is to persuade countries to trade with the UK without compromising the intranational branding of the nation as an international leader. As a result, a discursive tension emerges between framing Britain as an attractive trade partner for Europe and implying that the UK does not need Europe to be a global trading nation.

To make my argument, I borrow from Holsti (1970: 239) the idea of the national role conception: a conceptualisation of the ‘position and functions’ of the nation and ‘the behaviour appropriate to them’. I also draw on Gaskarth’s (2014: 561) concept of role orientation, ‘the patterns of roles that any state adopts’. These terms foreground the importance of actor and action representations in discursive constructions of the nation and legitimise my decision to examine social actor and action representation through a micro-linguistic analysis of lexical and grammatical choices.

Data collection

The UK Government documents were collected from three ministerial departments involved in Britain’s withdrawal from the EU: The Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU). The Home Office was chosen because, as its name implies, it is responsible for delimiting a national homeland and outlining who belongs in it (Law, 2001). Similarly, the Foreign Office was selected as it legally and politically defines which nations and people are different from the national in-group. As both departments are responsible for representing Britain to national and international audiences, their documents frequently draw on discourses of nationhood and belonging to establish what Britain is. In other words, the documents represent the Government’s public-directed discourse about Britishness and foreignness. The Home Office and the Foreign Office were also involved, alongside the DExEU, in negotiating Brexit deal points and reporting these negotiation details back to the nation, so they were partly responsible for bringing into being post-Brexit Britain.

I collected documents that had been tagged as related to ‘Brexit’ on the Government website and published by one of the three ministerial departments in either their ‘News and communications’ or ‘Policy papers and consultations’ sections between 22 February 2016 and 12 December 2019. I selected February 2016 as the starting point for data collection because it coincides with the first time the EU referendum date was announced in Parliament. December 2019, as a collection end point, corresponds to the last UK General Election before Brexit. The two sections from which the data were collected contain a variety of text types. Table 1 above offers a breakdown of the different document types that contribute to the overall government corpus.

Table 1.

Breakdown of text types in the government corpus.

Document type	Frequency	Document type	Frequency
News and communications (NC): Press release	140	Policy papers and Consultations: White Papers, Position Papers and ‘future framework’ presentations	38
NC: Statement	56	PC: Legal texts and impact assessments	33
NC: Speech/editorial	55	PC: Draft agreements and Bill overviews	30
NC: News story	31	PC: Communiques and memoranda	27
NC: Letter	30	PC: Technical information	26
NC: Explainer/factsheet	5	PC: Explainer/factsheet	21
		PC: Report on negotiations and committees	7
		Policy papers and consultations (PC): Skeleton argument	1
		PC: Government response to White Paper	1
	Total: 317		Total: 185

All documents except for those which consisted solely of tables were copied from the Government website and pasted into plain text format. Tables were excluded from the corpus on the grounds that they do not constitute uninterrupted prose and so were unlikely to be processed accurately by the concordancing software. As all available government data were collected aside from the tables, the government corpus is representative of government-produced discourses about Brexit and national identity during the data collection period. In total, 501 UK Government documents were collected and analysed, amounting to 1,481,439 tokens.

To allow for the diachronic focus of the study, I segmented the data according to the year that each document was published. This top-down segmentation (Marchi, 2018) allowed me to situate the documents within their broader socio-political and historical contexts. Table 2 above outlines the number of documents and tokens in each of the annual subcorpora. The much smaller number of tokens in 2016 reflects the fact that government planning for post-Brexit Britain did not begin until after June 2016, when the UK voting public opted to leave the EU.

Table 2.

Breakdown of annual government subcorpora.

Annual subcorpora	Number of documents	Number of words (tokens)
2016	30	71,169
2017	178	308,262
2018	194	699,569
2019	99	402,439

Data analysis

To begin my study, I uploaded the four subcorpora to Wmatrix4 (Rayson, 2008). I chose this web-based programme suite primarily for its key semantic domain analysis tool, which, as described above, compares the relative frequencies of words automatically tagged as belonging to a semantic domain in the target corpus with those in a reference corpus (Rayson, 2008). Wmatrix4 first tags all the words in a dataset according to their part of speech using the CLAWS tagger developed at Lancaster University (Garside and Smith, 1997). It then uses the UCREL semantic analysis system (USAS) to assign every word or multiword expression to a semantic field (Rayson et al., 2004). There are 21 categories of semantic domains and 232 subcategories, all of which are used by Wmatrix4 to classify words into different semantic fields (Rayson et al., 2004). Although USAS has an accuracy rate of 91% according to its developers (Rayson et al., 2004), its semantic tagger does not accurately, automatically match Brexit-related neologisms to semantic fields. While this does not have negative implications for the present project, which focuses on a single semantic field related to relationships, it does potentially limit the kinds of Brexit-related research questions that can be addressed using this software.

I compared the UK Government documents to the British National Corpus (BNC) Written Informative Sampler because it is the only pre-loaded corpus on Wmatrix4 that is similar to the target corpora in terms of genre and purpose (to inform). The Sampler consists of 779,027 words, just over a third of which is about public affairs (Ucrel, 1998). When I compared each Government subcorpus to the Sampler, I sorted the results according to the effect size of log ratio. I also imposed a log-likelihood cut-off of 6.63 and a frequency cut-off of five. I used both log-likelihood and log-ratio measures as they are complementary, offering different perspectives on the data (Pojanapunya and Watson Todd, 2016). That is, the effect size measure (log ratio) examines the size of the relative frequency difference between the target and reference corpora, while the statistical significance measure (log-likelihood) indicates the confidence with which I can say a difference in relative frequencies is not due to error or chance (Gabrielatos, 2018).

Four key semantic domains related to national identity had a log-ratio value above 1.0 and a log-likelihood value above 6.63 across three of the four annual subcorpora. These domains were ‘Alive’, ‘Personal Relationship: General’, ‘Power and Organising’ and ‘No Obligation or Necessity’. Due to space restrictions and relevance to the Global Britain narrative, I will focus on the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ domain in this paper. Following the extraction of key semantic domains, I grouped concordance lines thematically and according to social actor and action representation (KhosraviNik, 2010; van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008). For the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ semantic domain, I considered with whom the UK was said to have a relationship (social actors) and which kind of relationships were depicted (e.g., security or trade) (social action). After establishing the most quantitatively salient social actors and relationships, I performed a micro-linguistic analysis of representative examples, focussing on lexical and grammatical choices. To analyse lexis and grammar, I draw on Halliday’s (1985) functional grammar, particularly the concept of mental desiderative processes, which are expressions of want or desire.

Results and discussion

The ‘Personal Relationship: General’ key semantic domain

As Table 3 above indicates, the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ semantic domain becomes less statistically salient in UK Government documents between 2016 and 2019. Whereas there are over twice as many instances of the domain in the government data in comparison to the BNC Written Informative Sampler between 2016 and 2018, the difference between the observed frequencies in 2019 is much smaller. What the 0.87 log-ratio value indicates is that, in 2019, international relationships are much less salient in the UK Government documents than in texts published in earlier years. In other words, despite promoting a Global Britain narrative for post-Brexit Britain throughout negotiations, the UK Government emphasises personal relationships less as it approaches its withdrawal from the EU.

Table 3.

Statistical information for the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ domain.

Year	Relative frequency in C1 per 100,000 words (gov)	% of C1 (gov)	Relative frequency in C2 per 100,000 words (ref)	% of C2 (ref)	Log-likelihood	Log ratio
2016	345.7	0.37	93.2	0.10	255.57	1.93
2017	324.7	0.42	93.2	0.10	891.79	2.11
2018	86.2	0.24	93.2	0.10	263.69	1.33
2019	164.0	0.18	93.2	0.10	123.73	0.87

As its name indicates, the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ semantic domain consists of lexical items used to describe international alliances. These lexical items are the abstract nouns ‘relationship’, ‘partner/partnership’, ‘friend/friendship’ and ‘ally’. UK-EU relations are represented most frequently in this domain, appearing in 1052 concordance lines. The UK’s partnerships with unspecified countries (e.g., ‘the rest of the world’), named countries from outside of the EU (such as Japan, the USA and Canada) and Northern Ireland and Ireland also appear relatively frequently – in 136, 93 and 88 instances respectively. A diachronic micro-linguistic analysis of examples from the ‘Personal Relationship: General’ semantic domain reveals that the discursive construction of the UK’s international relationships shifts after UK-EU negotiations begin, undermining the feasibility of the Global Britain vision.

2016-2017: Constructing optimism and unity

In 2016 and 2017, the Government proposes a pragmatic UK-EU relationship that will naturally produce affective and ideational bonds, allowing the UK and the EU to serve their mutual interests. Extracts (1) and (2) elucidate the marrying of practicality with emotionality in the documents:

(1) Once we have left the EU, we will continue to work with our partners across Europe, indeed Brexit is an opportunity to intensify those relations. And just as we want Britain to succeed outside the EU, we want the EU to be strong and successful after we depart (May, 2017b).

(2) Simply, we will do what independent, sovereign countries do. It will be a negotiation, and it will require some give and take, but we want a deal that reflects the kind of mature, cooperative relationship that close friends and allies enjoy. I have been clear to my European counterparts that we approach the negotiation in a spirit of goodwill and a desire to see the EU succeed politically and economically. In exit we are not seeking a bitter divorce, but a better relationship (Davis, 2016).

In Extract (1) above, the then prime minister Theresa May discursively constructs Britain’s withdrawal from the EU as both continuity and departure from the existing UK-EU relationship (Zappettini, 2019). The phrasal verb ‘continue to work’ frames Brexit in terms of ongoing cooperation and obscures logistical changes to shared operations between the two parties. After foregrounding stability, May recontextualises departure (‘once we have left’) as a realignment that allows for greater cooperation through the verb ‘intensify’. She legitimises her argument by personifying the nation in the plural first person pronoun ‘we’ and assigning it the capacity to express concern and consideration through the mental desiderative process ‘want’ (Halliday, 1985). The balance of the syntactic parallelism in ‘we want Britain to succeed [. . .], we want the EU to be strong’ positions the importance of national prosperity as equal to the desire for the EU to thrive. In expressing goodwill towards the EU, May discursively constructs a role conception for Britain as a cooperative and supportive international partner (Gaskarth, 2014; Holsti, 1970). Although her statement refers to the mutual benefits of practical collaboration (as expressed through the material process ‘work’), May’s use of mental processes and positive adjectives reformulates transaction as an emotional bond.

Excerpt (2) follows a similar duality, as Chief Negotiator for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, combines several kinship terms in a single sentence. Like May, Davis frames a strategic international friendship based on congruent interests as a normative international friendship rooted in ideational and emotional ties (Oelsner and Koschut, 2014: 13–15). The subtle reframing of a pragmatic future relationship as an affective attachment emerges out of the different connotations of the collectivised nouns (van Leeuwen, 1996) ‘relationship’, ‘friends’ and ‘allies’. ‘Relationship’ is the least specific kinship term; it acts as a hypernym for the two more nuanced nouns. Through its genericity, the abstract noun ‘relationship’ connotes a functional approach to interaction that serves the interests of both parties. The adjectives ‘mature’ and ‘cooperative’ foreground rationality and shared responsibility, framing the future ‘relationship’ as a logical means to an end – an obvious way to ‘succeed politically and economically’. The repetition of this noun indicates that pragmatism forms the core of the Government’s vision for future UK-EU interaction.

The focus on transaction is offset by the noun ‘friends’, which combines interpersonal warmth with individuality (Roshchin, 2011). The noun ‘friendship’ has long appeared in international treaties as a boundary producing term that recognises the distinctiveness of the two parties (Roshchin, 2011). That is, it connotes collaboration between equal but different entities. The adjectives ‘independent’ and ‘sovereign’ tease out this sense of the noun, foregrounding a transformation in the UK’s position from part of the EU to partner to the EU. Although ‘friends’ implies a deeper emotional attachment between the UK and the EU than ‘relationship’, then, it also conceptualises Brexit as a process of political distancing. This duality allows the Government to balance the economic necessity of a deal with the EU with the narrative of Brexit as a means of regaining national independence. In other words, it placates national readers who viewed EU membership as a form of entrapment while reassuring EU leaders that the Leave vote symbolises a desire to redefine, not remove, ties to the Union.

The final collectivised noun (van Leeuwen, 1996), ‘allies’, is the most emotive and value-laden kinship term in the example. In a European context, it evokes memories of the Second World War and the bonds of duty and loyalty that united the UK and its mainland counterparts (Charteris-Black, 2019). The Second World War reminds European leaders of the moral responsibility to collaborate on European defence. Equally, it is a powerful example of affective ties emerging out of a practical need for collaboration – it reflects the government’s broader argument that a mutually beneficial transaction is more important than ideational alignment. Ultimately, then, the noun ‘allies’ provides an emotional rationale for redefining the UK-EU relationship in functional terms, contradicting the claim that there is no emotive dimension to the UK Government’s transactional approach to Europe (Siles-Brügge, 2019). Considering the three kinship terms together reveals that while the government desires a relationship that best serves its defence and economic interests, it recognises the rhetorical power of evoking affective attachments between European nations.

The Global Britain vision requires politicians not only to re-negotiate UK-EU ties, but also to situate the UK within an expansive network of international relationships. As outlined above, the Government achieves this by discursively constructing alliances between the UK and three extra-European groups: unspecified global actors, specific extra-EU countries and the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland nexus. In 2016 and 2017, discursive constructions of the UK’s extra-EU relationships exhibit the same degree of optimism and unity as underpins the representation of the UK-EU relationship. That there is consistency across the two types of alliances indicates that this discursive construction is not only about the practical economic need to trade widely but is also integral to producing a national identity narrative for Britain as a global trading nation. Indeed, in 14 examples, politicians draw on Britain’s historical political actions to envision the UK’s post-Brexit reputation as a return to a former legacy. Excerpt (3) below is an extended example of this discursive strategy:

(3) It is in the interests of global order that we are at the centre of a network of relationships and alliances that span the world. It is one of the great achievements of British diplomacy in the 20th century that – together with others – we effectively changed the basis and assumptions on which those relationships work. It was Britain in 1815 that helped to create the balance of power system of politics [sic] a system that was remarkably successful for about a century in keeping the peace, until it could not cope with the rise of new states in the European order (Johnson, 2016).

In this excerpt, then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson argues that ‘it is in the interests of global order’ that the UK sit ‘at the centre of a network of relationships’. The prepositional phrase ‘at the centre’ and the phrase ‘in the interests of global order’ posit that Britain has an ethical responsibility to be a world leader because it has unique, diplomatic capabilities that allow it to facilitate peace. In other words, Johnson frames Britain’s desire to become a linchpin for international politics as an honourable act of generosity, rather than a role that it requires to enhance its credibility and legitimise its decision to leave the EU.

To legitimise his role orientation for Britain as an influential, international actor (Gaskarth, 2014), Johnson retells a history of British diplomatic successes in the ‘20th century’ and ‘1815’. Alluding to the UK’s role in ‘creating the balance of power’ during the two World Wars and the Battle of Waterloo, Johnson reveals that the Global Britain vision is heavily rooted in the past (Eaton and Smith, 2020). He demonstrates that the government’s early plan for post-Brexit Britain is to create a future identity worthy of (its sanitised version of) the nation’s history – a vision which unites progress with a return to the past, appeasing the desire of some Leave voters to reignite Britain’s former power and influence (Calhoun, 2017). By foregrounding two historical junctures during which the UK was an independent nation, Johnson illustrates that Britain can act and strategise globally. Although the events occurred long enough ago to question whether Britain can still shape global politics, the fact that they precede Britain’s accession to the EU allows Johnson to subtly imply that EU membership constrained the nation’s actions. Underpinning Johnson’s narration of British history, then, is the conceptualisation of Brexit as the rebirth of a powerful, internationalist Britain (Zappettini, 2019).

As Examples (1)–(3) indicate, there is little suggestion in 2016 that fulfilling an international role will not be possible for Britain. On the contrary, politicians presuppose that the UK-EU relationship will sit at the core of a wider network of bilateral relationships between the UK and extra-EU countries. The UK’s place at the centre of this network, officials argue, is an ethical responsibility that it is generous enough to fulfil, rather than an economically advantageous position on which the UK depends for its internationalist identity.

In 2017, confidence that the UK and the EU will negotiate a better deal that will benefit countries outside of Europe continues to pervade Government documents. This year, the UK Government formally announces its vision for Global Britain, a plan to make the UK ‘a problem-solving and burden-sharing nation’ that remains ‘distinctively open and global’ (Cabinet Office, 2020). The Government explicitly acknowledges that to fulfil this role, it will rely on ‘strong bilateral relationships’ inside and outside of Europe, as Example (4) indicates:

(4) We aim to enhance our strong bilateral relationships with our European partners and beyond, projecting a truly global UK across the world (UK Government, 2017).

The extract above illustrates that international relationships are important for more than just Britain’s economic survival after Brexit. By arguing that ‘enhanc[ing] [. . .] bilateral relationships’ will ‘project a truly global UK across the world’, the Policy Paper recognises that new trade deals are paramount to the UK’s credibility as an independent and sovereign political actor – they legitimise the UK’s decision to leave the EU by demonstrating that the nation can stand alone. If the government fails to secure new trade agreements, its ability to ‘project a truly global’ image would be weakened, prompting an identity crisis that could undermine the UK’s international standing. Although this argument suggests that leaving the EU would make the UK an ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’ (Daddow, 2015: 75) to other countries, the policy document downplays the nation’s dependence on other states through the mental, desiderative processes (Halliday, 1985) ‘want’ and ‘aim’. These verbs depict new deals as a desire rather than a necessity, ignoring the practical constraints that an internationalist identity imposes on UK negotiators. In sum, there is an implicit but growing awareness of the UK’s dependence on other countries for its Global Britain identity narrative to be legitimate and successful, but this is repeatedly shrouded behind a construction of trade as an ‘aim’.

2018–2019: Towards disorder and disarray

By 2018, Brexit negotiations begin to show signs of tension: in March, the two parties reach an impasse in talks over the Irish border with Northern Ireland – a problem which recurs throughout negotiations that year (Walker, 2021). This stalemate has a pejorative effect on the construction of UK-EU ties. While the Government ostensibly positions the EU as a friend, politicians allude for the first time to the possibility that there will not be a trade deal before the transition period ends. The absence of a deal would undermine the Government’s internationalist identity narrative – to offset this threat to an emerging national identity, politicians place the responsibility for the relationship breakdown on the EU. There are 17 concordance lines in which politicians question the EU’s commitment to negotiations and discuss the possibility of the UK leaving the EU without a deal. They employ speech acts to construct Britain as a trusting and trustworthy partner, committed to achieving a deal; in doing so, they challenge EU negotiators to perform their trustworthiness by conceding and compromising. A plethora of kinship terms once again obscures this construction of dwindling trust. Examples (5) and (6) elucidate these argumentative developments:

(5) We approach these negotiations with a spirit of pragmatism, compromise and indeed friendship. I hope, I trust that the EU will engage with our proposals in the same spirit (Raab, 2018a).

(6) That way, as we prepare for our departure from the EU, and as we strain every sinew to deliver a new, deep and special, partnership with our European friends, we will be ready, in case those efforts are not matched (Raab, 2018b).

In Example (5), then Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union Dominic Raab’s description of Britain’s ‘spirit’ of ‘pragmatism’ and ‘compromise’ imbues the nation with a natural aptitude for diplomacy. Despite the claim to diplomatic expertise, the extract constitutes an attempt to coerce EU negotiators into conceding to British demands. Through the syntactic parallelism of the expressive and directive speech acts ‘I hope, I trust’ (Searle, 1985), Raab produces an emotive plea for the EU to approach the UK’s proposals with compromise. At the locutionary level, Raab performs the ‘friendship’ to which he alludes by expressing his belief in the trustworthiness and honesty of EU negotiators. Through this performance, he constructs the UK’s negotiatory stance as reasonable and friendly. At the illocutionary level, however, the speech act introduces doubt that the EU will approach negotiations fairly, a shift from the optimism found in the earlier documents. This rhetorical duality allows Raab to place the blame for inevitable tensions during negotiations on the EU – deciding not to compromise becomes a breach of Britain’s trust. In other words, it enables Raab to present the UK as an innocent victim of an antagonistic, uncompromising EU, even as he issues a veiled threat to the EU’s reputation. Blaming the EU for any impasses is, of course, ironic, given that Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement was voted down by British MPs months later.

Excerpt (6) exposes a further contradiction in the construction of the future UK-EU relationship. By asserting that the UK desires a ‘deep and special partnership’ with European countries, Raab indicates that he is pursuing a ‘thick, normative’ relationship (Oelsner and Koschut, 2014: 13) with the EU based on trust. Usually, however, countries with normative relationships do not demand reassurances that their counterparts will be honest because relations are rooted in mutual confidence (Oelsner and Koschut, 2014). In challenging the EU to match its efforts in ‘strain[ing] every sinew’ to reach an agreement (and requesting proof of the same ‘spirit’ of compromise (5)), Raab constructs a lack of trust between the two parties. Despite the rhetorical focus on achieving a ‘deep and special relationship’, then, Raab’s speeches and statements envision a severing of trust between the UK and the EU that could result in a more distant future relationship.

Extracts (5) and (6) are both directed towards a national audience – the former to Parliament, which contains Eurosceptic MPs advocating for a ‘hard Brexit’, and the latter to British citizens. In this context, Raab’s antagonistic approach to UK-EU negotiations reads as political posturing – an attempt to strengthen confidence in UK negotiators and their ability to guarantee British interests. In choosing to make those reassurances by provoking EU negotiators, however, Raab only increases the likelihood that the EU will adopt a more antagonistic stance in retaliation. In other words, Raab’s discursive strategy further undermines trust between the two parties and makes a deal more complicated to reach. Given that a lack of conflict is in the national interest (Hug, 2020), Raab’s language exposes a tension between meeting public expectations of Brexit and the constraints of foreign policymaking in a globalised world.

Perhaps inevitably, tensions continue to afflict the UK-EU relationship throughout most of 2019 – in part because British MPs repeatedly vote down Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. Responding to the greater possibility of the UK leaving the EU without a deal, UK politicians side-line the EU as a partner and direct their attention towards potential extra-European alliances (12 examples). Although officials still assert the importance of a trade deal with the EU, they argue that the UK does not require one to become a global trading nation. Example (7) illustrates this argument:

(7) Today, the UK wants a strong relationship with our European partners. But Brussels isn’t the only game in town. It’s time we broadened our horizons, and my first visits as Foreign Secretary – to the US, Canada, Thailand and Mexico – have shone a light on the opportunities for a truly global Britain (Raab, 2019).

Excerpt (7) reveals a shift from framing the UK-EU relationship as integral to projecting the Global Britain vision, to considering it expendable (‘isn’t the only game in town’). The mental desiderative process (Halliday, 1985) ‘wants’ once again frames the relationship with the EU as a desire, not a necessity. Together with the idiomatic metaphor ‘isn’t the only game in town’, these grammatical and lexical choices posit that extra-European bilateral relationships will act as substitutes for the loss of a ‘strong relationship’ with European countries. In other words, then Foreign Secretary Raab (like May before him) promises both stability and change – leaving the EU allows the UK to ‘broaden [its] horizons’ (change), offering other trade ‘opportunities’ to those presented by EU membership (economic stability). Paradoxically, however, documents published in the same year reveal a rising concern that failing to approve a trade deal with the EU will render the UK a less attractive ally to extra-EU countries. This argumentative contradiction indicates a reluctance to accept that the UK has reverted to its pre-accession role as an ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’ (Daddow, 2015: 75). Extract (8) illuminates this concern:

(8) When I picture how others see Britain right now, I suspect old friends are shaking puzzled heads. The clash and thunder over Brexit is not an appealing spectacle (Hunt, 2019).

In the example above, Conservative MP Jeremy Hunt presupposes that Americans view Britain’s decision to leave the EU critically. Although he does not specifically mention the USA, alluding only to a collectivised (van Leeuwen, 1996) group of ‘old allies’, Hunt’s decision to publish in the Washington Post indicates that he is referring to American perceptions of Brexit. Acknowledging that ‘Brexit is not an appealing spectacle’ for ‘old allies’ is a departure from the confidence exuded as late as 2018 that the UK would strengthen ties with extra-European countries even if UK-EU negotiations failed. Even more illuminating is the weather metaphor of ‘clash and thunder’ – a rare sensory reference to the (very public) intranational political divisions caused by Brexit. That the government acknowledges national political tensions in an international newspaper indicates that the UK’s inability to reach a consensus within its four nations forces it to display weakness in the international sphere. In other words, documents published in 2019 express greater awareness that Britain could become an ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’ (Daddow, 2015: 75) not just to Europe but to powerful countries across the globe. The optimism and unity that politicians voiced in the early post-referendum years, then, give way to a sense of political instability and uncertainty.

Despite an argumentative shift between 2016 and 2019, which reveals a rising self-consciousness that the ongoing trust breakdown in UK-EU negotiations and Parliamentary disagreements over Brexit are rendering the UK a less attractive trade partner, the Government remains committed to the Global Britain vision as it barrels closer to its withdrawal date of 31 January 2020. In 2019 documents, the ‘global’ modifier is used to evaluate Britain 49 times. Although contextually, the Global Britain identity narrative appears ever more precarious as the years progress, the UK Government remains committed to its internationalist discourse. While this might give the illusion of ideological consistency, British citizens appear to be cognisant of governmental contradictions: in 2019, some 28% of Britons surveyed by the British Foreign Policy Group said they did not understand what it means to be a global nation (Gaston, 2020). Those who said they did understand, did not agree on what the criteria are to be considered a global nation (Gaston, 2020).

Conclusion

This paper reveals a discursive shift in the UK Government’s Global Britain narrative, brought about by a stalemate in Brexit negotiations and discord in the UK Parliament over the Withdrawal Agreement. In the early years, the government proposes a pragmatic UK-EU relationship (Daddow, 2015) that will naturally produce emotive and ideational bonds, allowing the UK and the EU to serve their mutual interests. At the same time, politicians draw on British history to conceptualise post-Brexit Britain as an international linchpin that stabilises the world order. There is little suggestion that fulfilling this role will not be possible; indeed, officials imply that the UK has an ethical responsibility to be a world leader.

In the later years, the likelihood that the UK and the EU will negotiate a stronger deal appears slimmer. Responding to (and constructing) this context, Dominic Raab, then Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, repeatedly accuses the EU of not approaching negotiations fairly (even though May’s Withdrawal Agreement is eventually rejected by British politicians). Although Raab obscures his allegations behind kinship terms, his provocative stance only increases the likelihood that trust between the UK and the EU will plummet, and that the EU will retaliate. The rising antagonism between the UK and the EU is constructed as negatively affecting international perceptions of Britain and Brexit in 2019; politicians allude to the chaos of intranational political divisions in international newspapers. Forced to address Britain’s weaknesses, officials illustrate that their plan for Global Britain is becoming untenable: Britain cannot claim to be a global trading nation without strong international relationships, but ongoing disagreements could compromise future deals by negatively affecting Britain’s reputation. In other words, Government officials begin to reluctantly position the UK as an ‘outsider’ and ‘supplicant’ (Daddow, 2015: 75) to both European and extra-European countries.

Despite the precarity of Global Britain, the Government remains faithful to its narrative of post-Brexit national identity as the UK approaches its withdrawal from the EU. While this consistency might suggest that there is a coherent blueprint for life outside of the EU, public opinion, as measured by think tanks, points to confusion about what being a global nation entails (Gaston, 2020). Think tanks have responded to public uncertainty by calling on the UK Government to publish a values statement to demystify the Global Britain vision (Gaston, 2020; Hug, 2020). At the time of writing, no such statement has been produced. Arguably, the inconsistencies in the UK Government’s Brexit-related documents and the dwindling argumentative value of the Global Britain vision fail to provide the British public or future trade partners with a coherent blueprint for Britain outside of the EU. The sense of insecurity about the tenability of the Global Britain vision puts the UK’s international standing at risk. This perilous position is a far cry from the early promise that Brexit would reinvigorate Britain’s historical identity as a global trading nation.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Programme,whose funding made this research possible.

Author biography

Tamsin Parnell is a doctoral student with the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

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Unravelling the Global Britain vision? International relationships and national identity in UK Government documents about Brexit,2016–2019

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Identity and the nation

Global Britain and the UK-EU relationship

Texts and methodology

Analytical framework

Data collection

Data analysis

Results and discussion

The ‘Personal Relationship: General’ key semantic domain

2016-2017: Constructing optimism and unity

2018–2019: Towards disorder and disarray

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Author biography

References