Origins of Brexit: History at the service of media representation

Abstract

Brexit is an ideal media event for analysing the circulation of imaginaries and the identity construction within Europe. The analysis focuses on the history writing as a device in the context of the controversies sparked by Brexit. The device concept allows us to identify the relationships between the media as a framework in which the journalist's writing has the dual objective of informing and arguing, in response to an implicit contract with the readership. The analysis of journalists' choices in writing the past leading to Brexit thus shows the constructed public by the media outlet and the fractures that Brexit reveals in the unity imaginaries conveyed by European institutions. The analysis is based on a thesis work and draws on a corpus of nine press titles in three countries: Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Quantitative and qualitative analyses highlight the circulation of different historical motives: the 1930s, the Suez Canal crisis and the immemorial times of Athenian democracy, Christianity and the Enlightenment. The circulatory approach consists of not comparing differences on a national basis, but rather identifying variations in historical motives according to their polarising power. The historical motives analysis shows the formation of a European semiosphere (Bal, 2023) around Brexit, but also the limits of a European public sphere constitution in Habermas' sense.

Keywords : Brexit, representation, press, history, France, Germany, United Kingdom