“Brexit" as a Social & Political Crisis: Discourses in Media & Politics (Critical Discourse Studies 16:4) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critical Discourse Studies, 2019
This paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, which adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in CDS, is aimed at illuminating the main discursive strategies, argumentative schemes and key representations of Britain in/and Europe that sustained the ideological (de)legitimation of Brexit on either side. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that the specific ideological articulation of two key discursive elements – namely trade and immigration – and the argumentative schemes deployed in the campaign engendered and legitimised a new toxic (inter)national logic of Brexit: by leaving the EU, Britain ‘takes back control’ to pursue mercantile policies whose benefits ‘outsiders’ should be excluded from.
Critical Discourse Studies, 2019
While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several aca- demic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Clarke & Newman, 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017; Koller, Kopf, & Miglbauer, 2019; Ridge-Newman, Leon-Solis, & O’Donnell, 2018; Outhwaite, 2017; Wincott, Peterson, & Convery, 2017). While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and econ- omic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally. Our contribution has thus three interrelated aims. First, the articles in this special issue provide evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, we show how such discourses reflect the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in defining the discursive and mediatic contexts within which Brexit has been articulated. Third, we identify discursive trajectories at play in the ongoing process of Brexit putting forward an agenda for further analysis of such trajectories.
2019
I would like to express my appreciation to those who helped me to successfully complete this master thesis. First, I would like to express the deepest appreciation to Mr. David Chan, my promotor, for the efficient email communication and for meeting me on a regular basis. Without his help and feedback I would never have been able to elaborate on the theme of the study and to finish the paper. Advice given by Mr. Chan was very useful and he was always willing to help me whenever I needed his guidance. Second, my special thanks are extended to the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy for helping me acquire the right language competences and academic writing skills. Finally, I would like to offer my special thanks to my parents, brothers, boyfriend, grandparents and friends for helping me through difficult times and for always believing in me. I wish to acknowledge the help provided by Alec and Emile Buyse for helping me create the figures in Excel and I am very grateful for the assistance given by Jeroen Candries and my father for proofreading parts of this thesis. I would also like to offer my special thanks to my mom, Cheyenne Kersmaekers and Laura Gosseye for never giving up on me and for the encouraging talks.
The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report
Making Sense of the Brexit Referendum: writers on the crisis ‘Let’s Take Back Control’ was the slogan that won the UK’s EU Referendum. But what did those words mean to campaigners and voters? Control of what was being wrested from whom and why? And in whose interest was this done? The Brexit Crisis gathers together some of the most insightful and provocative reactions to this moment, from the UK and abroad, examining what happened on the 23 June and what this might mean for the UK and the EU as a whole. It looks at the ruptures, false promises and ingrained racism revealed during the campaign and afterwards. As the UK heads towards the exit, what is to be done? Authors include: Étienne Balibar, William Davies, Akwugo Emejulu, John R. Gillingham, Peter Hallward, Laleh Khalili, Stathis Kouvelakis, Sam Kriss, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Lara Pawson, Wail Qasim, Salvage Editors, Wolfgang Streeck, Antonis Vradis
Hitit Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi / Journal of Divinity Faculty of Hitit University , 2020
United Kingdom’s relation with the European Union has been always distant. Nevertheless, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, socalled the Brexit decision, has been one of the shocking developments happening in 2016. Prima facia the referendum result shows the electorate’s historic decision to break away from the EU, however it is actually a product of a populist political discourse, which has been shaped by increasing antiimmigrant sentiments in the UK. In this paper, we argue that anti-immigrant discourses behind the Brexit campaign actually are a part of larger historical relations with the European Union. Following on from the literature, we argue that the role of the UK in the EU throughout the history of European integration has always been one of ‘British exceptionalism’. The immigration question, on the other hand, provided an important opportunity for following this exceptionalist policy and leave the EU membership, but it resulted in racist and xenophobic attacks towards all “others” within society. In this process, discourses on the leave side contributed to anti-immigrant feelings and racism within society, although we cannot say this was the main aim. In this paper, we conduct the political discourse analysis developed by Teun van Dijk to examine the campaign of the United Kingdom Independence Party during the referendum process. Taken together, these aspects of the article show how the anti-immigration discourse has contributed to the racist and xenophobic actions, while the main aim has been to finalise the UK’s longstanding distance from the EU.
Reflections on the Rhetoric of (De)Colonization in Brexit Discourse
Open arts journal, 2020
This essay begins with an acknowledgment that attempts to understand Brexit are, at this stage, condemned to partial understanding, at best, because as an event it is incomplete and moving in contradictory directions. Just a brief inventory of the many ways in which Brexit can be, and has been, approached gives one a sense of this centrifugalism-sovereignty; globalization; free trade; immigration; racism; disenfranchisement; nostalgia; affect; generational schism; post-imperial decline; neoliberalism; populism; poverty; austerity; class; multiculturalism; cosmopolitanism; far-right and Islamist extremism; Islam and Muslims; refugees; and so on and so on. One particular line of thought emerging among more scholarly treatments from within the arts and humanities (for example, as found in several essays in the volume Brexit and Literature) concerns itself with Brexit as an affective phenomenon, one that speaks to the structures of feeling that bind 'Britishness' into a cultural assemblage that goes beyond the artefactual sense of 'culture' to that nebulous and barely perceptible 'way of life' which constitutes the affective economy of most people living in the British Isles. This, however, is articulated-in the sense used by Stuart Hall-in very different ways depending on class, gender, region, educational background, nationality and, of course, race and ethnicity. This essay will probe the ways in which the affective economy of Brexit is mobilized by picking out one particular thread from within the tangled knot of multiple determinations that have brought the United Kingdom to where it now is: this thread follows the trope of (de)colonization across Brexit rhetorics and places it within a long durée that illuminates the extent to which the affective economy underlying Brexit is deeply embedded in a racialized sense of nationhood that reaches back to the beginnings of Britain's colonial and thence post-colonial history.