Description
The 2016 EU referendum was a “critical situation” for the UK’s ontological security on the international stage (Giddens 1991). Brexit meant a material effort to restructure the UK system and decouple it from EU bureaucracy, but also a more ideational effort to delineate British identity and foreign policy from the EU. Most work on post-Brexit foreign policy narratives has focused on the “Global Britain” narrative as an effort to recast the role of the UK. By shifting from the macro to the micro, this paper will examine how even small speech acts on the global stage demand a Brexit performance. In the throes of ontological insecurity, UK state agents used narrative performances to build a “cognitive bridge” to allow for pre- and post-Brexit biographical continuity (Subotic 2016). These performances incrementally redefine which actors matter, shift the temporal frame, and envision a new future.
The setting for this paper is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where the UK holds a permanent seat, and the EU plays an ever-increasing role in security operations. The data are UK speeches during the annual UNSC meeting on cooperation with the EU (2010-2021). Narrative analysis is used to show how pre- and post-Brexit narratives are performed by UK state agents to counteract the ontological stress precipitated from the announcement of the Brexit vote (2014) until the ultimate exit (2021).
Keywords: Brexit; Ontological Security; British Foreign Policy; United Nations Security Council; Strategic Narratives
