Discourse of self-legitimation: Self- and other-presentation in the European Parliament’s soft law on Brexit

Abstract

The article proposes an original conceptual framework that captures the discursive logic of self-legitimation and applies it to the empirical case of European Union soft law and the process of Brexit. Adopting the general orientation of Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis and working with a dataset of all European Parliament (EP) resolutions on Brexit in the 2016–2023 period, the article investigates how, and interprets the particular ways in which, the EP legitimised itself as an actor vis-à-vis Brexit, through different linguistic and discursive devices in its resolutions. The analysis illustrates that the EP’s use of soft law for self-legitimation purposes is an intriguing case of how legal instruments can be leveraged in multifaceted ways beyond their traditional function for broader communicative and political purposes. As such, the article extends the traditional understanding of the purposes of EP resolutions by explicitly acknowledging them as powerful discursive resources for self-legitimation.