British participation in the historical process of European integration has been persistently framed as a policy dilemma of the highest order. This dilemma was itself coloured by the existence of policy traditions that oriented Britain away from Europe and towards political communities tied to a historical interpretation of British nationality. Euroscepticism is symptomatic of these traditions and dilemmas while at the same time sustaining them. But Eurosceptics face a dilemma of their own. What serious alternative do they propose? The notion of the 'Anglosphere' was adopted on the Eurosceptic right of British politics as an alternative to European integration. As a politics of disengagement by the Cameron government played out in Europe, a policy of re-engagement began with Britain's former Dominions. Here was a response to a political dilemma that not only used historical consciousness and political tradition as its point of departure, but as its place of destination too.

Political resistance to European integration in the United Kingdom laid important ideological foundations for contemporary English nationalism. The politics surrounding accession to the EEC was such that it signaled that accession was both a matter of supreme national importance and via the device of a referendum it led to the fusing of Parliamentary and popular sovereignty. The unfolding of the Thatcherite project in Britain added an individualistic -and eventually an antiEuropean -dimension to this nascent English nationalism. Resistance to the deepening political and monetary integration of Europe, coupled with the effects of devolution in the United Kingdom, led to the emergence of a populist English nationalism, by now fundamentally shaped by opposition to European integration, although a nationalism which merged the defence of British and English sovereignty. Underpinning these three developments was a popular version of the past which saw "Europe" as the ultimate institutional expression of British decline. Thus Euroscpeticism generated the ideology of contemporary English nationalism by legitimising the defence of Parliamentary sovereignty through the invocation of popular sovereignty underpinned by reference to the past.

Drawing on newly released archival material, this article reassesses Margaret Thatcher's 1988 Bruges speech, widely depicted to have instigated Britain's drift towards Brexit. It opens by giving an essential recap of the main contents of the speech. Next, the article explains why and how we use the address as a prism through which to see Thatcher's European policy-making in action. The third section tells how the speech was written to show how intra-government fault lines began to surface in its earliest incarnations. We then process trace to the two main battles publicly rehearsed at Bruges: over the Conservative Party's approach to European integration (fourth section); and, reinforcing this, over the desirability of an Anglo-American reading of British history in which 'Europe' occupied a subordinate place (fifth section). Our central claim is that the study of political speeches, including the speechwriting process, can be a compelling addition to our accounts of the ways in which politicians frame policy dilemmas, debate them behind the scenes and manage their political communication to achieved desired policy objectives, in this case opening up Britain's place in 'Europe' for domestic discussion. We therefore contribute to three overlapping domains of inquiry: Thatcher's foreign and European policy decision-making; the Conservative Party and European integration leading to Brexit; and finally, speeches as tools for policy-making and agenda setting.

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