GlobalBritain™: the discursive construction of Britain’s post-Brexit world role

ABSTRACT

Of the many dilemmas faced by Theresa May in negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, finding a workable narrative to explain Britain’s new world role post-Brexit proved one of the most intractable. She and her top government ministers alighted on the idea of “Global Britain”. Giving it the shorthand GlobalBritain™, the article interprets the vision using qualitative discourse analysis. It begins by positioning the article as a contribution to constructivist foreign policy analysis. Next, it explains the method used to select the relevant sources, develop the codebook and interpret the data. The third section outlines the policy architecture intended to make GlobalBritain™ practical reality. The final section demonstrates the rhetorical techniques through which GlobalBritain™ is framed as the story of Britain escaping a damaging period of confinement inside the EU “prison”. The central argument is that GlobalBritain™ puts a marked Eurosceptic twist on a long-standing UK grand strategy aimed at a global leadership role in which “Europe” has always played an ambiguous part. The conclusion critically reflects on the research we can now conduct to discover more about this foreign policy narrative in-the-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• discourse analysis
• British foreign policy
• global Britain
• narrative
• Theresa may

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the two anonymous journal reviewers plus the following for their insightful comments on previous drafts: John Bew, Hannah Pembury, Patrick Porter and Ian Wash.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Oliver Daddow is Assistant Professor in British Politics and Security and an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge. He is the author of Britain and Europe since 1945 (2004), New Labour and the European Union (2011), International Relations Theory (3rd edn, 2017) and co-edits Politics UK (9th edn, 2018).

Notes

1. See the online appendix which shows how to code a speech using research questions. A full codebook is available on request.

2. Political speeches also function through intertextuality, a means of establishing authority by calling back to “great” predecessors or memorable sayings (Todd, 2016, p. 22; Fontana & Parsons, 2015). Intertextuality often therefore features as part of the data gathering and reporting in a discourse analysis. Due to space, however, it was decided not to treat intertextuality as a separate analytical category.

3. I have borrowed the telling word “insurgent” from one of the anonymous reviewer’s comments on an earlier draft.

4. For a characteristic list of Britain’s hard and soft power capabilities, see “The Prize” segment of (Davis, 2016).

5. The imposition of Conservative interpretations of Englishness onto UK foreign policy and GlobalBritain™ discourse is beyond the remit of this article, but see (Kumar, 2003; Marquand, 2007; Vail, 2015).

6. The marked use of the word “beacon” to describe Britain’s international “character” evokes the Britain “standing alone in 1940” frame supported by a “lightness” metaphor, showing the overlapping nature of spatiality, temporality and ethicality, all of which can be captured in single words or metaphors.