The European Union as an in-group in British press and parliamentary debates

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the representation of the European Union as an ingroup in British parliamentary debates and newspaper articles in 1974-2015. The focus is on contexts in which the EU is referred to by the first-person plural pronoun we or us. Employing the methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies, the chapter will give a diachronic view of how the EU has been represented in British broadsheets and tabloids as well as in Labour and Conservative MPs' speeches. Comparisons are also made between leftwing and right-wing discourses. The results suggest that (1) the EU is rarely included in the in-group, but (2) when it is, it is commonly evaluated positively or at least neutrally, but also criticized.