History as a Feature of Language in the Articulation of Global Britain

TY - CONF

T1 - History as a Feature of Language in the Articulation of Global Britain

AU - Eaton, Mark

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - This paper presents results from an ongoing project examining the use of history in the construction and communication of narratives, including political myths, which promote a post-Brexit global orientation and identity for the UK. The mainly English and C/conservative advocates of one such influential Eurosceptic narrative, identified as Global Britain, infuse it with analogous and non-analogous historical content with the aim of situating the UK outside of Europe and alongside ‘kith and kin’ societies and peoples in Britain’s former colonies. The Global Britain narrative accomplishes this through the communication of a positive and harmonious historical vision of the UK’s colonial and post-colonial ties with other, yet portrayed as very similar, Commonwealth countries and peoples. At the same time, historical language is used in the depiction of the UK and its people as ‘Un-European’, which further contributes to the aim of Global Britain’s advocates – helping the British people imagine a more democratic and prosperous future beyond Europe.This work is rooted in the conviction that an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach – one that incorporates elements of political science, history, and linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative methods facilitated by digital analytical tools – can lead to innovative and nuanced insights into the construction of the international identities of nation-states, including inter-state transnational identities. Through the application of computational methods to analyses of a substantial digitised corpus of Brexit and European Union-themed parliamentary speeches, another of the research goals in this project is the development of an original theory on the use of history as a functional yet attractive feature of language that contributes to the persuasiveness of political narratives.

AB - This paper presents results from an ongoing project examining the use of history in the construction and communication of narratives, including political myths, which promote a post-Brexit global orientation and identity for the UK. The mainly English and C/conservative advocates of one such influential Eurosceptic narrative, identified as Global Britain, infuse it with analogous and non-analogous historical content with the aim of situating the UK outside of Europe and alongside ‘kith and kin’ societies and peoples in Britain’s former colonies. The Global Britain narrative accomplishes this through the communication of a positive and harmonious historical vision of the UK’s colonial and post-colonial ties with other, yet portrayed as very similar, Commonwealth countries and peoples. At the same time, historical language is used in the depiction of the UK and its people as ‘Un-European’, which further contributes to the aim of Global Britain’s advocates – helping the British people imagine a more democratic and prosperous future beyond Europe.This work is rooted in the conviction that an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach – one that incorporates elements of political science, history, and linguistics, as well as qualitative and quantitative methods facilitated by digital analytical tools – can lead to innovative and nuanced insights into the construction of the international identities of nation-states, including inter-state transnational identities. Through the application of computational methods to analyses of a substantial digitised corpus of Brexit and European Union-themed parliamentary speeches, another of the research goals in this project is the development of an original theory on the use of history as a functional yet attractive feature of language that contributes to the persuasiveness of political narratives.

M3 - Paper

T2 - British International Studies Association annual conference

Y2 - 17 June 2020 through 19 June 2020

ER -