Taking the left way out of Europe : Labour party’s strategic, ideological and ambivalent de/legitimation of Brexit

Abstract

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’.