You’re projecting! Global Britain, European strategic autonomy, and the discursive rescue of the internationalised state

How do leaders respond to costly demands to re-nationalise political control? The re-shaping of state–society relations engendered by globalisation has produced a backlash in the form of populist demands to “take back control”, yet leaders face significant costs in responding to demands to re-nationalise highly interdependent economies. In this article, we show how leaders respond to these demands by crafting new discourses of their polity’s position in the international system, a process we term “discursive externalisation”. Externalisation is a cheap way of responding to domestic pressures which avoids powerful domestic veto players while benefiting from the rallying effects of foreign policy renewal. By keeping rhetoric broad, externalisation can co-opt elements of the status quo in favour of new representations of state–society relations and a new basis for political legitimacy. We demonstrate our argument empirically by examining the articulation of new discourses in the foreign and security policy domain after the 2016 Brexit referendum in both the UK and the EU. We show how ideas of “Global Britain” and “European strategic autonomy” both helped to rearticulate the relationship between the polity and its citizens by externalising agendas for internal reform, transforming crises of legitimacy into discourses of international renewal.