At the heart and in the margins: Discursive construction of British national identity in relation to the EU in British parliamentary debates from 1973 to 2015

Abstract

The study focuses on the discursive construction of the UK’s identity in the European Union (EU) in the debates of the British House of Commons. The data come from the Hansard, and the time period analysed is from the start of the UK’s membership in the European Community (EC) in 1973 up to the general election of 2015, in which Brexit, that is, the national referendum on leaving the EU, was one of the main themes. Methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) were adopted in the analysis of the debates. The findings suggest that even though the identity of a ‘leader’ in the EU has been frequently constructed in parliamentary discourse, a competing representation of the United Kingdom as an outsider and as a nation insecure of its role in the EU has been strongly present throughout the membership.