Pronouns Separating the UK from the EU: We and us in British newspaper articles and parliamentary debates in 1973–2015

This doctoral dissertation examines the use of we and us in British newspapers and parliamentary debates. The focus is on the pronouns that were used in relation to the European Union and referred either to the nation (the United Kingdom) or the EU. The time period studied spans from 1973 to 2015, which allows for a diachronic analysis of how often and in which contexts we and us were used to refer to the UK or the EU. Two primary datasets are used: 1) the Hansard transcripts of the debates of the House of Commons, and 2) 940 EU-related articles from four British newspapers (the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail). To get a comprehensive picture of how the pronouns were used in relation to the EU, the study employs methods of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), combining quantitative and qualitative approaches such as manual concordance analysis, collocation analysis, word frequencies and word lists.

In the EU referendum of 2016, a majority of the British people voted for leaving the EU. The UK’s membership of the EU ended in January 2020. Although the result of the referendum was a surprise for many, the mainstream politics in the UK already had a long history of Euroscepticism. The EU was commonly seen as hurting the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty and taking power away from the nation Furthermore, the image of the UK as an island nation, separated and different from the mainland Europe, did not fit well with the image of the EU that was constantly integrating and bringing European countries closer together.

By focusing on the use of the first-person plural pronouns we and us, the dissertation aims at finding out how often and in relation to which issues “we” (the EU) were represented as working together, and which issues were seen as national issues, where “we” (the UK) worked separately from the rest of the EU, reacting to what happened in the EU. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and theories related to the first-person plural pronoun as well as national identity construction are particularly relevant in analysing the instances of these pronouns.

In the case of the parliamentary debates, the findings show that the proportion of the pronouns we and us referring to the UK increased between 2002 and 2010, while that of the pronouns referring to the EU decreased. This suggests that EUrelated issues were increasingly discussed from the national perspective in the parliament, focusing on the UK’s reactions to the EU’s actions. In the right-wing newspapers (the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail), EU-related articles were rarely written from the EU’s perspective during the membership years, while the left-wing papers (the Guardian and Daily Mirror) more evenly reported EU-issues from the national and EU’s perspectives.

The results also reveal that when we and us referred to the UK in the debates, the discussion often focused on the UK’s membership of the EU and how much the UK contributed to the EU. Similarly, the UK’s membership was a common topic in newspaper articles written from the national perspective. When the pronouns referred to the EU the focus was on the processes of and negotiations within the EU. In addition, newspaper articles related to migration and economy were reported from both the EU’s and national perspective, while climate-related topics were merely seen as a common European issue and reported from the EU’s perspective.

When we or us was used referring to the UK, the UK was commonly represented as leading the EU or being above or ahead the other EU members. In these representations the UK was described as different and separated from the rest of the EU. The UK was also represented as insecure of its role in the EU. This insecurity stemmed from the mismatch between wanting to be at the forefront, leading others but at the same time not wanting to integrate more, which caused that the UK’s role in the EU remained unclear.

Using we or us referring to the EU was rare in both datasets. However, when included in the ingroup, the EU was commonly criticised, which was surprising given that the ingroup (“we”) is usually connected with positive attributes.

The dissertation adds to our knowledge of the possible reasons behind Brexit, as well as contributes to the field of CDA by increasing our knowledge of the significance of first-person plural pronouns in political discourse, particularly in relation to national identity construction. Furthermore, the dissertation contributes to the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies by offering an example of how two different datasets can be combined and analysed by combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis.