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Article published In:
(De)legitimising EUrope in times of crisis
Edited by Franco Zappettini and Samuel Bennett
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:2] 2022
► pp. 320–343

Taking the left way out of Europe

Labour party’s strategic, ideological and ambivalent de/legitimation of Brexit

ORCID logo | University of Liverpool
This paper investigates how Brexit was de/legitimised by different Labour actors in a corpus of texts published after the referendum (2016–2020). It thus contributes an intra-party perspective to understanding discursive dynamics of European (dis)integration by building on the notorious ‘European question’ historically debated inside Labour and on the polysemy of Brexit constructed by/reflected in such discourses. The analysis, conducted at lexical-semantic and discursive-pragmatic levels, points to distinct strategic, ideological and ambivalent forms of de/legitimation of Brexit in the discourses of Labour. While strategic and ambivalent de/legitimation point to the Brexit debate being mainly driven by political communication logics, ideological de/legitimation highlights a deeper struggle inside Labour over EU-rope, especially in relation to international vs. national conceptualisations of socialism. While EU-rope was de/legitimised (and Brexit legitimised) by advocates of ‘socialism in one country’, reverse stances tended to be adopted by supporters of ‘international socialism’.
Keywords: Brexit, Labour, socialism, strategy, ideology, ambivalence, language, CDA
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The ideological polysemy of Brexit and its implementation
  • 2.Corbyn’s constructive ambiguity during the Brexit institutionalisation phase
  • 3.Methodological approach and toolbox
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Strategic de/legitimation
    • 4.2Ideological de/legitimation
    • 4.3Ambivalent de/legitimation
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21069.zap
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