"...Whether Autumn Should Follow Summer:" The Discourse of Globalization and British Party Politics

British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that debating globalization would be akin to debating "whether autumn should follow summer." This projection of globalization into domestic debates as an inevitable and constraining force is one of the most important developments in European politics since the 1990s. This dissertation uses an in-depth qualitative case study and discourse analysis of British party competition to examine the relationship between these developments. Why have British parties consistently referred to globalization as an objective facet, especially emergent parties whose appeal is built on challenging mainstream consensus? What might this tell us about the rhetorical strategies available to political parties generally? To deal with these questions, I synthesize a theory of political rhetoric, drawing from William Riker's work on political manipulation, or "heresthetics," and Norman Fairclough's "Critical Discourse Analysis." My approach interprets parties as using discursive constructions, such as globalization, as tools to restructure voters' underlying calculations. This challenges the existing literatures on party competition and critical political economy, both of which treat rhetoric and discourses as secondary to policy competition. I apply the theory through three discourse analyses of speeches and publications from different parties within the British system: Blair's center-left Labour Party, the pro-independence Scottish National Party, and the anti-EU UK Independence Party.Across the cases, I find that references to globalization closely parallel concrete political goals: Labour used the rhetoric of economic globalization to represent the world as fundamentally changed, forcing voters to reevaluate their perceptions of the party. The smaller parties deployed the same kind of language to project political responsibility, even as they mounted major challenges to the constitutional status quo. These findings challenge the conventional understanding of Blair's globalization discourse as entirely ideological and complicate the assumption that new parties have been successful precisely because they challenge mainstream globalist consensus.