The EU as a Choice: Populist and Technocratic Narratives of the EU in the Brexit Referendum Campaign

Abstract

The article investigates the main populist and technocratic narratives employed in the campaign in the run-up to the 2016 British EU referendum. Based on a qualitative dataset comprising 40 selected speeches, interviews and other public interventions by prominent Leave and Remain protagonists and adopting the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper discusses how the language of the Remain and Leave camps bore signs of both populist and technocratic discourses. The key argument developed in this article is that while, at the most general level, the populist rhetoric was discursively appropriated by the Leave campaign (with the key narratives of the EU as a failure, EU as an oppressor and of anti-establishment fury) and the technocratic rhetoric by the Remain campaign (with the key narratives of the EU as a tool, the single market benefits and the withdrawal economic effects), the Remain side displayed a lower degree of narrative consistency.

In Quest for Discursive Legitimation of Ongoing Policy Processes: Constructing Brexit as a Success Story

“…In summation, the UK government is keen to promote the understanding of EU membership as entailing a loss of national sovereignty, democracy and independence, hence pitting the EU directly against the UK (and, by extension, any other member state). In this way, its discourse is marked by strong continuity with the Leavers' rhetoric during the referendum campaign (Cap, 2019; Bennet, 2019; Breeze, 2020; Brusenbauch Meislová, 2021).…”

“…What with Brexit being a policy of rupture, in the sense of ending an existing relationship, my expectation is that the UK government will glorify the presence and future by delegitimating the EU as its ex‐community, its policies and the UK's membership therein. Built around the very idea of difference, this process of contestation will be realized primarily by means of anti‐EU narrative patterns and various functional means of othering (van Dijk, 2005; Wodak, 2001), and will bear a strong resemblance to the Leave campaign's discursive positioning during the referendum campaign (Bennet, 2019; Brusenbauch Meislová, 2021; Buckledee, 2018).…”

Politics by other means: an analysis of the discourses of Italian technocratic Prime Ministers

“…Recent studies on technocracy have focused on issues such as the composition of technocratic governments (Marangoni, 2012; McDonnell and Valbruzzi, 2014; Fabbrini, 2015; Marangoni and Verzichelli, 2015), their legitimacy and democratic credentials (Radaelli, 2017), ensuing challenges to democracy (Bertsou and Caramani, 2020; Gallo, 2022), citizens' aptitude (Bertsou, 2022), factors favouring the formation of technocratic governments (Wratil and Pastorella, 2018; Brunclík and Parìzek, 2019), the growing number of technocratic ministers (Improta, 2021), the appointment of technocrats to key government positions (Emanuele et al ., 2023). While this literature sheds light on important aspects of technocracy, there is a significant lack of more systematic analyses of how technocrats discursively construct and legitimise their policy agendas and the establishment of their governments (for exceptions see McKenna and Graham, 2000; Meislová, 2021). This article aims to fill this gap.…”