This paper presents the results of a study on cohesion in some political speeches pointing to the advantages of the systemic-functional approach. The first part of the study set cohesion against its diachronic background of successive enquiries into the nature of the object ‘text’ and finally places it within the system of language. The second part offers a detailed analysis of the cohesive resources contained in the corpus which consists of speech delivered by U.K. and Italian members of the European Parliament between 9th September 1985 and 1st January 1986. In light of the increasing relevance of text studies centered upon cohesion for both the field of artificial intelligence and stylistics, the conclusion of the paper strives to explain the significance of cohesive resources in texts belonging to the genre of political language.