THE_OFFICIAL_VISION_FOR_GLOBAL_BRITAIN_F.pdf

This contribution focuses on internationalism as a key driver of discourses of Brexit. It examines a corpus of official documents published by the newly created Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in which the British government sets out its vision for ‘a new partnership with the European Union’ and ‘a truly global Britain’. This data is analysed through argumentation theory (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) to identify how specific representations of internationalism act as legitimizing tools of Brexit. This contribution argues that the official vision of a new, global, and out-of-the-EU Britain imagined in the texts legitimises Brexit as both rupture and continuity of liberal international narratives and through shifting national, European, and global discursive contexts. On the one hand, the ideological approach to ‘global Britain’ and free trade reproduces historical discourses informed by mercantile rationales and indulges in post-imperial nostalgia and a resurgent English nationalism. On the other hand, such a vision rejects the EU’s transnational social and political project in favour of economic neoliberalism, which raises the ultimate question of who will benefit from Brexit and ‘global Britain’.