Abstract
In this book, Justin Gibbins analyses British political elites’ evaluative discourses about three historical events: the 1975 Referendum on Continued Membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), the 1993 ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. Gibbins maintains that British national identity is incessantly constructed and reconstructed according to critical episodes in Britain’s relationship with Europe.
The book is divided into an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion. The introduction presents Gibbins’ view of the nation-state as the most significant form of collective identity produced in social interaction and discusses the Self/Other distinction. It also provides an overview of the essential premises of the book’s methodological framework, based on three linguistic devices: predication, presupposition and subject positioning. Gibbins argues that predicate analysis is useful for examining how the object (the Other) is linguistically constructed and characterised by the subject (the Self) through a description of how verbs, adverbs and adjectives add meaning to nouns. Presuppositions, in turn, help identify the assumptions that political subjects have and explain how Britain, Europe and other subjects and objects are linguistically created in accordance with these ideas. Finally, subject positioning reveals the linguistic configurations and reconfigurations of subjects and objects.
The following empirical chapters each discuss a key historical event in its broad social, cultural, economic and political context before offering an analysis of the surrounding discourses. Thus, Chapter 2 presents the historical background leading up to the 1975 Referendum on Continued Membership of the EEC. Gibbins examines predication and description strategies used to characterise Britain, the EEC and other countries and organisations in both the pro- and anti-camps, before discussing how the presuppositions they invoke are structured along a series of binary oppositions. The conclusions drawn from the analysis form the basis for the determination of the process of Othering with the range of friendly, non-friendly and radical configurations. Gibbins argues that these debates construct six British Selves: Britain as a European nation-state; as a transatlantic, securitised nation-state; as a transnational European power; as a transnational nation-state; as a cooperative European power; and as a sovereign parliamentary body. Chapter 3 finds four British national identities being produced in discourses on the Maastricht Treaty: Britain as a liberalising European nation-state, as a reformist role model, as a global European authority and as a sovereign civic body. Chapter 4, finally, focuses on the Treaty of Lisbon and identifies six discursive constructions of Britain: Britain as a free trade catalyst, liberal interdependency, global nation-state, Anglo-Saxon network, hyperglobalist nation-state and interventionist European power. The conclusion addresses the evolution of British national identities.
The book employs a unique discursive approach to determine a spectrum of British national identities based on references to Europe. It provides an explanatory framework of the British political environment and the associations Britain has with other states, nations and unions. By applying the Self/Other nexus, the analysis shows radical, non-radical and friendly forms of Othering embedded in the various British national identities. Gibbins’ clear analytic framework results in a systematic and well-organised account of the perceptions the Self has of the Other. It is unclear, however, to what extent this might have been influenced by the selection of sources; though the author mentions the exclusion of sources such as ‘political speeches’ or ‘memoirs’ (p. 19) from the research sample, the overall rationale for the corpus composition is not clearly explained.
From a more conceptual point of view, the debates considered by Gibbins are divided into two types: arguments for and against continued membership of the EEC. The author highlights that these two camps are ideal types that make possible the diversity of views to be sorted out into a systematic structure (p. 36). However, the wisdom of such a binary classification may be questionable. An analytic approach that distinguished not only the sign but also the strength of (dis)approval would have been better able to identify potentially different identities attached to manifestations of strong and weak approval of EEC unification.
Overall, even though the work contains minor drawbacks, Gibbins indisputably makes an innovative contribution to the empirical studies of evaluation in political discourses. The three events examined are linked discursively and in terms of time, allowing in-depth interpretation of the configuration and reconfiguration of attitudes towards the Self/Other. Significantly, it sheds light on the evolution of identities. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars working on discourse in the political sciences, cultural studies and sociology.