Chapter 4. The European Union as an in-group in British press and parliamentary debates

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the representation of the European Union as an in-group in British parliamentary debates and newspaper articles in 1974–2015. The focus is on contexts in which the EU is referred to by the first-person plural pronoun we or us. Employing the methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies, the chapter will give a diachronic view of how the EU has been represented in British broadsheets and tabloids as well as in Labour and Conservative MPs’ speeches. Comparisons are also made between left-wing and right-wing discourses. The results suggest that (1) the EU is rarely included in the in-group, but (2) when it is, it is commonly evaluated positively or at least neutrally, but also criticized.