Franco Zappettini

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.

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 through shifting national, European, and global contexts as both rupture and continuity of liberal international narratives. On the one hand, the ideological approach to ‘global Britain’ and free trade perpetrates historical discourses informed by mercantile rationales and indulges in post-imperial nostalgia and a resurgent English nationalism. On the other hand, such 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’.

This paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, which adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in CDS, is aimed at illuminating the main discursive strategies, argumentative schemes and key representations of Britain in/and Europe that sustained the ideological (de)legitimation of Brexit on either side. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that the specific ideological articulation of two key discursive elements – namely trade and immigration – and the argumentative schemes deployed in the campaign engendered and legitimised a new toxic (inter)national logic of Brexit: by leaving the EU, Britain ‘takes back control’ to pursue mercantile policies whose benefits ‘outsiders’ should be excluded from.

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This article examines the emergence of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this article analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organisation itself as being financially sustainable, that is, viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders. From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies have primarily colonised discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose of 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 has arguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belonging are being negotiated, challenged and legitimized. By investigating the discourses of members of a trans-national NGO of 'active' citizens, this paper seeks to understand how current European identities are discur-sively constructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA this paper offers insights into how discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers, and predicated on the indexicality of transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This paper suggests different conceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summa-rised as: nation-centric, Euro-centric, and cosmopolitan.

Drawing on a study conducted with an association of citizens operating in the European public sphere and applying the Discourse Historical Approach, this paper investigates how the organisation’s members construct their transnational citizenship and how they negotiate it vis-à-vis European, national, and local identities. The analysis reveals that informants often claim their transnational identities as membership of an expanded community of relevance, through the transportability of their civic engagement and through meta-narratives of spatiality and progress whereby cosmopolitan scenarios are often reterritorialised within the European space. These arguments are frequently realised through the metaphorical scenario of ‘spatial dynamics’ which makes sense of identities as emergent from unbounded social interaction, and through the indexicality of transnational narratives as specific discourses of socio-historical transformation of nationhood.

‘A badge of Europeanness’

Shaping identity through the European Union’s institutional discourse on multilingualism

Franco Zappettini
Royal Holloway, University of London
This paper contributes to the advancement of the established body of literature on language and identity by ascertaining how discursive representations of multilingualism at an institutional level have interplayed with the construction and the definition of European identities. Using the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001), the analysis focuses on a corpus of official speeches given by the European Commissioner for Multilingualism to identify discursive strategies and linguistic devices and link them to wider socio-political and historic dynamics. Findings suggest that the institutional construction of Europeanness has primarily occurred through macro discourses predicated on cultural, civic and economic dimensions of multilingualism with some inherent tensions in contrasting representations of ‘diverse’ and multilingual EU-rope. It is suggested that through heterogeneous representations of multilingualism torn between identity politics and commodification, European identities emerge as hybrid and fragmented constructs in between national, post national and global dimensions. Keywords: European identities; multilingualism in EU discourses; institutional representations of language and identity; Discourse Historical Approach
In: Journal of Language and Politics 13:3. 2014. (pp. 375–403)

The result of the Brexit referendum epitomised the momentum gained by populist ideologies that have increasingly dominated the British and international political landscape. Building on Laclau's (1994) account of 'people' as a key 'floating signifier' in populist discourses, this paper focuses on the context of Brexit to examine how populist ideologies circulating in the public sphere were echoed in the British media and how, in most cases, provided the dominant discursive frame that legitimised the referendum 'in/out' binary choice. Adopting a critical discursive approach and linguistic methodologies, the textual analysis engages with the use of rhetorical and evaluative language in the representations of social actors and events and with the semantic relations constructed around the key term 'people' to address the following questions:

This article highlights the social importance of figurative language in discourse. Starting with a brief review of the literature on the socio-cognitive approach to discourse - understood in its amplest sense of ‘text in context’ - I stress that the notion of social semantics might help explain the inherent potential of the metaphor as both a tool of reproduction and of renewal of social structures.

This paper focuses on the discourses of members of a transnational grassroots political association with particular regards to members’ linguistic constructions of ‘European space’ and the role of such metaphorical scenario in members’ self-perception as transnational citizens.
The analysis reveals that the definition of space in members’ discourses often emerged through meta-geographical representations of Europe predicated, inter alia, on the deconstruction of borders (as a symbol of nation states) and the de/re-territorialisation of Europe as a socio-political project. Moreover, representations of movement of people and culture as flows across glocal networks - rather than bounded by states and regions - contributed to a redefinition of European geopolitical dynamics in line with cosmopolitan views.
It is contended that these conceptualizations of the European space have important implications for the definition of members’ Europeanness, for their orientation to citizenship, their social locations, and the negotiation of binaries such as in/out; close/open; and core/periphery.

Questo articolo offre uno studio comparativo delle forme di esclusione societaria nei confronti di persone LGBT nelle societa’ inglese ed italiana negli ultimi 30 anni. Vengono esaminati nello specifico una serie di testi e pubblicazioni e attraverso l’analisi critica del discorso si cerca di fare luce su come le diverse opinioni ed (eventuali) aperture societarie verso sessualita’ ‘non-standard’ abbiano interagito con la costruzione e realizzazione di identita’ LGBT.

Contributions are sought for the panel 'Legitimation processes in discourse: new theoretical and empirical insights' which is expected to be presented at the 23rd DiscourseNet Conference: Discourse, power and mind: between reason and emotion, held at the University of Bergamo, Italy 6-8 June 2019. The aim of the panel is to explore the different ways in which discourse (in its amplest meaning of 'language in use') is key in processes of legitimation across a variety of socio-political contexts. Whilst contributions can be theoretically focused or driven by empirical analysis, they are expected to build on the wealth of literature on the topic and to show how they contribute to the advancement of the knowledge in the field of Critical Discourse Studies from fresh perspectives. Possible suggested topics include (but are not limited to): The role of (new) media in legitimation processes Theoretical contributions to understanding the construction of 'legitimation chains' Legitimation crisis of the EU Naturalisation/Institutionalisation of extreme political discourses Legitimation through 'fake news' Deadlines A 500 words abstract in English should initially be submitted to franco.zappettini@liverpool.ac.uk no later than 7th October 2018 with: title of the paper, author's affiliation, topic, key theoretical/analytical approach and key contribution to the field. Acceptance to the panel will be notified to contributors by 10 th October. Authors of accepted contributions will be required to submit a shorter version of their abstract to the conference organisers following the instructions detailed on the conference website It is expected that papers successfully presented at the panel will be included in an edited publication. Further enquiries can be addressed to: franco.zappettini@liverpool.ac.uk

Since the IIRC was founded in 2010, its aims for Integrated Reporting have shifted from providing a report to a broad range of stakeholders offering an integrated holistic understanding of an entity’s social, environmental and economic sustainability, to a report providing financial investors with an understanding of the medium- and long-term economic sustainability of the entity. In this paper we refer to this shift as the economic turn in the IIRC’s version of, and vison for, Integrated Reporting (IR).
Through the theory and methods of Critical Discourse Analysis applied to a sample of IRs from UK companies, this paper assesses the extent to which the economic turn in the IIRC’s policies is reflected in an economic and shareholder focus in UK IR practice. Our analysis concentrates on the two key concepts from the IIRC’s 2013 International Integrated Reporting Framework: Value and Capital.
We find, consistent with the notion of an economic turn in IR policies, that discourses about value and capital are predominately related to economic conceptions of both value and capital from the perspective of shareholders. However, perhaps inconsistent with the notion of an economic turn in the IIRC’s vision for IR, we found that some discourses constructed value along contradictory macro narratives of sustainability and responsibility on the one hand and growth and performance on the other. We found the most conspicuous divergence in the use of the term value when comparing discourses between the financial statement and strategic review sections of IRs.
Our analysis also found that discourses of capital other than financial capital (and its increase and decrease) were notably absent from, or marginal in, the IRs of most companies. Only the small number of public service entities in our sample engaged in discussion of broader, non-financial, forms of capital.
While the relatively small incidence of discourses of value and capital that were not directly economic and shareholder focused in nature might be taken as evidence against the universality of a claimed economic turn in IIRC IR in practice, caution needs to be exercised in reaching such an interpretation. The IIRC Framework makes clear that providing some forms of value to stakeholders other than investors, and managing some forms of capital other than financial capital, can and do have an impact on the value of financial capital for shareholders. A further study would be necessary to ascertain whether, and/or to what extent, any non-economic IR discourses of value and capital of the type we found signpost any impact upon financial capital for investors – consistent with an economic turn in IR.

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
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‘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.

Theresa May's speech: a flight of international escapism In the knowledge that it would be impossible for Britain to have its cake and eat it too (i.e. to fully control immigration whilst being part of the single market) the government has now made clear that they've opted for the hard Brexit solution so much favoured by David Davies, Liam Fox and other staunch Brexiteers. In her speech given at Lancaster House, Prime Minister Theresa May invoked internationalism as the future direction for the UK outside the EU. However, this was rhetorical escapism, a convenient way out of the Brexit empasse for, let's be clear, the kind of internationalism that Mrs. May is advocating is purely based on economic logics, it is driven by the most extreme discourses of the 'Leave' campaign and it has very little to do with the cosmopolitan ideal of the common humanity of peoples coming together as nations. To be sure, like many other political concepts, the notion of internationalism has been appropriated by many different political agendas and it has changed through history referring to different, sometimes opposed, ideologies. What Marx meant by internationalism – solidarity across borders that would unite workers under a common socialist cause – is different from say the American idea of internationalism (as opposed to isolationism) denoting involvement in world affairs in the name of democracy and justice ideals that has shaped much of America's postwar role. Again, the kind of internationalism that Italian politician and active promoter of the unification of Italy Giuseppe Mazzini had in mind in the 19 th century somewhat shares elements of classical liberals Ricardo and Adam Smith, namely that the organisation of statehood and the cooperation between states (whether through trade or political interests) would help the development of democratic institutions and ultimately benefit individuals as they prosper in a peaceful society. Whilst most of all these interpretations of internationalism engaged with some sense of cosmopolitan brotherhood, they did not have to account for questions of immigration nor did they emerge at a time of increased awareness of global issues and interconnectedness that characterizes our societies. The extent to which we are experiencing migration flows in the 21 st century is dramatically different from anything of the past and it has certainly a lot to do with the voices of the 'left behind' or the Syrian migrants that Europe has failed to listen to. Nevertheless, appealing to the traditional international order based on border and nation-centric visions of politics is rather problematic. Because, for all the rhetoric of Britain being a 'truly global' nation and Britain's history and culture " profoundly internationalist " (euphemism for colonialist), the grand internationalist vision of post-Brexit Britain that Mrs. May projected in her speech relies, on the one hand, on the idea that state-containers regulate immigration flows and, on the other, on striking 'deals' with other state-containers. It is important however to stress the weakness of the argument that out-of-the-EU deals are a type of cake that Britain will be able to have and eat too.

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 has arguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belonging are being negotiated, challenged and legitimized. By investigating the discourses of members of a transnational NGO of 'active' citizens, this paper seeks to understand how current European identities are discursively constructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA, this paper offers insights into how discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers and predicated on the indexicality of transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This paper suggests different conceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summarised as: nation-centric, Euro-centric, and cosmopolitan.

This paper discusses the discursive nexus of 'the people' drawing from the mediatisation and institutionalisation of Brexit. It focuses on how metadiscourses of popular sovereignty have been instrumental in the legitimation of Brexit and on how such discourses are now more widely echoed in different populist and nativist political projects across Europe that are seeking consensus through a delegitimation of the EU. The discussion draws attention to the emergence of counter discourses of the people but also to the structural conditions that prevent or limit the consolidation of robust transnational forms of European citizenry. This scenario will arguably define the next European elections as a critical juncture where the legitimacy of the European project will be contested in the name of different 'peoples' and 'values'. The European project and the people at a critical legitimacy juncture The European project stands at a critical juncture. In the last decade, there has been a gradual shift from 'permissive consensus'-whereby citizens have accepted further integration while showing low levels of political involvement-to an overt legitimation challenge of the European project (see, for example, Hooghe and Marks, 2009; Bouza and Oleart, 2018). This challenge has been largely compounded by a complex interaction between financial and social crises and has been articulated along different discursive axes, not least in the recent surge of populist and sovereignist discourses that have increasingly brought the people to the forefront of such legitimation struggle. For sure, the people has always been a key discursive element of political processes. The term has been invoked by all democratic and populist narratives and it has often been politically mobilised for different projects. In this sense the idea of the people, albeit inevitably semantically vague, is a powerful one which, since the volonté générale (the will of the people) celebrated by the French Revolution, has been widely taken for granted as the basis of legitimacy in any modern democratic system. The idea of the 'will of the people' moving up the metaphorical chain of legitimacy to be exercised at the national level by citizens' representatives and through nationally organized institutions is a well established tenet of constitutional democracies (Schneider et al. 2016). However, in relation to a wider conceptualization of the EU and its member states as organized along a national/transnational hierarchy, such metaphorical chain of legitimacy has been at its weakest in enabling the transfer of power from the nation to the EU (Nulmeier and Pritzlaff, 2010). So while a European demos has, at best, only manifested in embryonic forms (Zappettini, 2017; Zappettini, 2019a) we are now increasingly seeing an overt challenge to any transnational form of legitimacy of the European project coming from bottom up. This ideological struggle is likely to consolidate and to polarize discourses of the people in the forthcoming election for the European Parliament in May 2019. This paper discusses the current legitimation struggle from the ontological perspective that the people as a political subject does not exist a priori but it is constituted in and through discourse (Laclau, 2005). As a way of example, I will first focus on the ideological and discursive arena of Brexit to show how populist

While the exact nature of Britain’s exit from the EU – or ‘Brexit’ as it has been popularised – is still as unclear as whether it will take place at all, the complex ontology, unfolding and impact of such an unprecedented event have been investigated widely in several academic fields and especially in the sizeable body of work at the intersection of sociological, political and communicative dimensions (see for example, Outhwaite, 2017; Evans and Menon, 2017, Clarke and Newman, 2017, Wincott et al. 2017, Newman et al, 2018; Koller et al, 2019).
While our special issue joins the existent studies, it also differs from such work by specifically taking a critical discursive perspective. In doing so, we rely on an interpretation of Brexit as a ‘critical juncture’ (see below) in which different historical and contingent discursive nexuses and trajectories have been at play. Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Through our focus, we explore a variety of context-dependent, ideologically-driven social, political and economic imaginaries that were attached to the idea/concept of Brexit and related notions in the process of their discursive articulation and legitimation in the UK and internationally.

This paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, which adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in CDS, is aimed at illuminating the main discursive strategies, argumentative schemes and key representations of Britain in/and Europe that sustained the ideological (de)legitimation of Brexit on either side. Based on this analysis, this paper argues that the specific ideological articulation of two key discursive elements – namely trade and immigration – and the argumentative schemes deployed in the campaign engendered and legitimised a new toxic (inter)national logic of Brexit: by leaving the EU, Britain ‘takes back control’ to pursue mercantile policies whose benefits ‘outsiders’ should be excluded from.