The Use of Historical Analogy in the 2017 Parliamentary Debates on the Future of Post-Brexit Commonwealth Trade
| Author | Mark Ølholm Eaton,Andrew D Smith |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919875377 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919875377
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(4) 591 –610
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919875377
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The Use of Historical
Analogy in the 2017
Parliamentary Debates on
the Future of Post-Brexit
Commonwealth Trade
Mark Ølholm Eaton1
and Andrew D Smith2
Abstract
This study examines how (and how well) politicians in the UK Parliament use their historical
knowledge in debates about intra–Commonwealth trade following Brexit. Based on a rigorous
analysis of 2 days of parliamentary debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords in
early 2017, one of our conclusions is that UK parliamentarians used their historical knowledge
in cross-domain (the practice of applying historical knowledge to a field of human activity that
is very different from the original historical circumstances) ways. Our study thus develops our
understanding of the role of analogical reasoning in the cognition of policymakers. On the other
hand, although Conservative speakers did not refer to a wide range of economic or trade historical
topics, they did use their historical knowledge from other domains in the promotion of deepening
intra–Commonwealth ties as an alternative to the Europe-dominated focus of British international
policies since 1973. In these ways, our study thus adds to our knowledge of how policymakers use
historical knowledge to understand complex issues such as Brexit.
Keywords
uses of history, UK parliament, Brexit, Commonwealth, trade policy
Accepted: 13 August 2019
Introduction
The recent debates about the UK’s international trade policy post-Brexit offer us the
opportunity to develop our understanding of how policymakers apply their knowledge of
history. A recurring idea in the debates on whether Britain should remain in the European
Union (EU) and/or the European Economic Area is the notion that the UK ought to
1School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
2University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Corresponding author:
Andrew D Smith, Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK.
Email: A.D.Smith@liverpool.ac.uk
875377PSW0010.1177/1478929919875377Political Studies ReviewSmith and Eaton
research-article2019
Article
592 Political Studies Review 18(4)
resurrect the Commonwealth trade ties that were more important to the country before it
joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. As a BBC reporter observed
in late 2015, ‘whenever the word “Brexit” is mentioned, the word “Commonwealth” is
usually not far behind’ (Plummer, 2015). Journalists have documented that leading Brexit
advocates frequently use historical arguments to justify leaving the Single Market and
striking replacement trade agreements with Britain’s ‘kith and kin’ (Boffey, 2018;
Financial Times, 2018; Tharoor, 2017). Indeed, some British civil servants privately refer
to the vision of post-Brexit Commonwealth trade articulated by some ministers as ‘Empire
2.0’ (Schultz, 2018; Tharoor, 2017). Political scientists have noted the prominent role that
conservative historians who support the idea of deepening Anglosphere ties have played
in the debate about Brexit (Vucetic, in press). A study of how speakers in parliament rep-
resented the Commonwealth in the period between June 2015 and October 2018 (Eaton,
2019) has shown that there was a marked increase in the frequency of references to the
Commonwealth as a ‘family of nations’ in the 2-month period following Theresa May’s
17 January 2017 ‘Global Britain’ speech. Eaton (2019) found that Conservative speakers
were far more likely to use the metaphor of the Commonwealth as a family than were
speakers in other political parties, particularly Labour, with this metaphor being used 59
times by Conservative MPs and just four times by Labour MPs.
It would be easy to assemble a collection of statements by leading supporters and
opponents of Brexit that shows that historical references were frequently made by people
on all sides of the Brexit debates. However, such a haphazard collection of statements
would preclude us from drawing robust and generalizable conclusions about the use of
historical knowledge by policymakers. With a view to producing a rigorous study of how
historical knowledge was mobilized in debates about the future of UK’s trade policy after
Brexit, as well as how historical knowledge was used to promote particular visions about
the UK’s proper place and roles in the world, we have focused on the use of historical
ideas in a delimited data set. Specifically, we analysed the use of historical knowledge in
the UK Parliament on 22 February and 16 March 2017, respectively, in debates on the
subject of Commonwealth relations, and specifically trade, after Britain leaves the EU.
The advantage of restricting our analysis to a single data set is that it allows us to com-
pare speeches delivered at the same time, in the same venue and under similar conditions,
as has existing scholarship focussing on the use of historical analogy in narrowly defined
UK parliamentary debates (Kaarbo and Kenealy, 2017). As expanding intra–Common-
wealth trade was the overarching theme of the debates in which the speeches were deliv-
ered, they represent an ideal concentrated information resource to observe contrasting
uses of historical knowledge, in this specific thematic domain, by speakers of different
political backgrounds. Finally, and crucially, restricting the analysis to this particular data
set was influenced by the context in which it was produced. The speeches were delivered
in debates initiated by Conservative MPs and peers, only weeks following Prime Minister
Theresa May’s so-called ‘Global Britain’ speech (delivered on 17 January 2017), in which
she articulated her government’s vision of a more internationalist future for the UK
beyond Europe. This more internationalist future, she argued, is one rooted in the past and
is more in keeping with the UK’s history as well as the instincts and interests of its people.
This vision could be realized, according to May, by revitalizing Commonwealth trade
relations, which had been allowed to stagnate since the UK joined the EEC (May, 2017).
With this context in mind, these speeches are therefore approached as part of a pre-exist-
ing and sustained rhetorical effort to promote a more global orientation for the UK as it
leaves the EU.
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