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

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’.