A bilingual comparable analysis: the European Union in the speeches of British and Italian leaders

Britain has always been an awkward partner in EU affairs, with its peculiar cherry-picking attitude of opting in/opting out at will, in many ways half in/half out, for the sake of what has now become the signature of the coalition government of Conservative David Cameron and Liberal-Democrat Nick Clegg: in the national interest, in Britain’s national interest. In this work both British and Italian speeches are investigated, with the purpose of analysing the techniques and the strategies used by the politicians of these two countries for the management of discourse and knowledge, and seeing how specialized knowledge, political knowledge of European affairs in the case in point, is disseminated and mediated to the lay public across the UK and Italy.