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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’.

This contribution focuses on internationalism as a key driver of discourses of Brexit. It examines a corpus of official documents published by the newly created Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in which the British government sets out its vision for ‘a new partnership with the European Union’ and ‘a truly global Britain’. This data is analysed through argumentation theory (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) to identify how specific representations of internationalism act as legitimizing tools of Brexit. This contribution argues that the official vision of a new, global, and out-of-the-EU Britain imagined in the texts legitimises Brexit as both rupture and continuity of liberal international narratives and through shifting national, European, and global discursive contexts. On the one hand, the ideological approach to ‘global Britain’ and free trade reproduces historical discourses informed by mercantile rationales and indulges in post-imperial nostalgia and a resurgent English nationalism. On the other hand, such a vision rejects the EU’s transnational social and political project in favour of economic neoliberalism, which raises the ultimate question of who will benefit from Brexit and ‘global Britain’.

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widelyresemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with otherdiscourses and practices. This paper examines the emergence of IntegratedReport (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information,organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts oftheir activities in one single document. Specifically, this paper analyses aselected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses ofsustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macrodiscourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have playedout in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large,the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses andsemantically ‘bent’ to construct the organization itself as being financiallysustainable i.e. viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders.From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companieshave primarily colonized discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purposeof self- legitimation.

Transnationalism is a multifaceted phenomenon which has impacted on society and challenged,inter alia, the paradigm of national affiliations. The trasnationalisation of the EU-ropean field hasarguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belongingare being negotiated, challenged and legitimized. By investigating the discourses of members of a transnationalNGO of ‘active’ citizens, this paper seeks to understand how current European identities are discursivelyconstructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA this paper offers insights intohow discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers, and predicated on the indexicalityof transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This paper suggests differentconceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summarisedas: nation-centric, Euro-centric, and cosmopolitan.

Based on empirical research, this book closely analyses how European identities are discursively produced. It focuses on discourse from members of a civic association active in promoting democracy and attempting participation in the transnational public sphere. Unlike previous books that have addressed the question of European identity from top-down stances or through methodological nationalism, this book engages with the multifaceted concept of transnationalism as a key to the negotiation of 'glocal' identities. Applying a discourse historical approach (DHA) through a transnational reading, it shows how grassroots actors/speakers construct their different cultural and political affiliations as both world and European citizens. They negotiate institutional identities and historical discourses of nationhood through new forms of mobility, cultural diversity and the imagination of Europe as a proxy for a cosmopolitan civil society. These discourses are ever more important in a fractured and polarised Europe falling prey to contrary discourses of nationhood and ethnic solidarity.Highlighting how transnational narratives of solidarity and the de-territorialisation of civic participation can impact on the (re)imagination of the European community beyond tropes like 'Fortress Europe' or intragovernmental politics, this important book shows how identification processes must be read through historical and global as well as localised contexts.

Transnational dynamics have significantly changed established notions of communities and belonging. Transnational perspectives however remain marginal in research on European identities which has typically conceptualised the latter as emerging from and relying on essential national referents. Drawing on data derived from members of a transnational organisation promoting civic participation in Europe, this paper challenges existing representations of Europeanness by offering a new interpretive metaphor of networked identities. Findings suggest that through this schema members are able to construct and reimagine their belonging along axes that often bypass national identification. Identities are constructed along a spatial dimension that challenges a stable core–periphery or bounded logic, instead dynamically reorganising hierarchies and bringing to the fore individual agency, fluidity and creativity. In this context we argue, from an emic perspective, that the network metaphor represents a powerful referent for (re)imagining European identity as more dynamic, complex and processual than previously conceptualised.

This thesis examines the construction of ‘European identity’ in the discourses of members of European Alternatives (EA), an association of citizens which characterizes itself as committed to the grassroots construction of a better society ‘beyond the nation-state’. By taking bottom-up and transnational perspectives, this study intends to fill a gap in the field of Critical Discourse Studies that seems to have largely underestimated the value of social action and the need to move away from ‘methodological nationalism’ in conceiving of how Europeanness is transformed and enacted. The study applies the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001) to a corpus of data comprising of four focus groups and nine individual interviews with EA members from 10 different branches across Europe. The results suggest a complex and very dynamic picture of how European identities are constructed, challenged and transformed by members who, typically, adopted strategies of dismantling of nationhood, and strategies of ‘imagining’ new communities, spaces and social orders. Two key linguistic features conspicuously drive the members’ discourses of ‘belonging to Europe/being European’. One is the metaphorical scenario of spatial dynamics that, by and large, makes sense of the ‘European space’ as unbounded and interconnected with the world and whereby the European society is seen as progression and expansion of an ‘imagined’ community towards certain cosmopolitan ideals. The second element is the indexicality of transnationalism and Europe, two terms that members invested with a range of meanings including ideals of democracy, diversity, and equality but that were also constructed through the recontextualisation of historical discourses of nationhood. This thesis thus suggests that, for EA members, the transformation of Europeanness is not a linear process (as for example some theories of the ‘Europeanisation’ of society would have it) but, rather a dialectic one which relates to one’s situatedness within temporal, spatial, and social dimensions and which is achieved via multiple and dynamic identification processes with different communities of relevance.