In the context of Brexit, anti-EU stances of British citizens have been attributed to perceptions of the EU as a threat to national identity. The constitutive reproduction of national identity through mass communication is a central feature of Michael Billig’s “banal nationalism”. In order to understand identity construction mechanisms of Brexit and populist discourse in general, this BA paper examines representations of national identity and belonging in journalistic texts covering the UK’s Brexit negotiations with the European Union and the 2019 European elections.
This case study responds to several underexamined aspects of the field: First, it specifically connects the national to the trans- and subnational identity level. Second, it considers an electoral context during which media coverage and identity constructions are particularly impactful. Third, it allows for a detailed qualitative analysis of linguistic identity markers in context, responding to a need for in-depth understanding of how they function beyond their surface-level presence.
The paper examines how British newspaper coverage imagines the nation of Britain and the supra-national EU. Additionally, it examines how the British government is imagined in comparison to the populace. To this end, a discourse-analytical approach drawing on multi-disciplinary literature from cultural, communication, and media studies is employed. The analyses at both the national and sub-national levels are guided by the discourse-historical approach developed by Ruth Wodak. The subject of analysis is a sample of articles compiled from four British newspapers published on May 23, 2019.
Within the scope of this sample, this paper finds that British newspaper coverage of Brexit and the 2019 EU elections imagines the nation of Britain and the EU as mutually exclusive natural units. Additionally, the British government is discursively situated outside of the nation. The nation itself is instead characterized through its democratic function as an electorate, which furthers populist conceptions of an undemocratic political elite versus a homogenous, national, and sovereign community of voters.