Evolving Conceptualisations of Internationalism in the UK Parliament: Collocation Analyses from the League to Brexit

Abstract

This chapter explores a historical distant reading strategy of British Parliamentary discourse. It uses historical collocation analyses of ‘internationalism’ and the ‘international’ in the British Hansard Corpus and a selection of Commons and Lords debates concerning British membership in international organisations as it relates to the League of Nations, United Nations, Council of Europe, EEC and Brexit. The collocates that were deemed to be politically significant are grouped in 13 loose semantic fields. This macro-level analysis of long-term trends of discourse is supplemented with an analysis of the said key debates in their historical contexts, including comparisons between the two Houses, and with additional micro-level analyses of contextualised individual speeches in which politicians defined ‘internationalism’ by using the concepts in political action. This provides one general view on the historical evolvement of the discourse on internationalism over the past hundred years.

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