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Abstract

Research on nationalism, nationalist movements, successions, and revolutions has historically featured on physical action and material interests over discourse and ideas, likely because of the disproportionate availability and persistence of physical and material phenomena as data. This dissertation takes advantage of the increasingly vast availability of text data from news and political documents, along with emerging methods from natural language processing, to complicate these accounts and demonstrate the importance of ideas and ideology in shaping nation- invoking political movements. The potential fragmentation of the United Kingdom (UK) and its actual fragmentation from the European Union (EU) present a uniquely documented context in which to explore the range of discursive influences that shape such nation-invoking and secessionist movements. While the Scottish National Party (SNP) sought to have Scotland secede from the UK, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) sought to have the UK secede from the EU. These parties disagree in style and, on most issues, also on substance: UKIP is largely a single- issue vehicle for EU opposition, while the SNP is the dominant and ultimately ruling party in Scotland, the region of the UK most strongly opposed Brexit. Despite this general opposition, UKIP and the SNP participate in a common political register at the periphery of the broader discursive field and that joint participation unintentionally and ironically lends support to UKIP’s critique of traditional parties, increasing the likelihood of otherwise unlikely outcomes, such as Brexit. These patterns paint a compelling and ironic portrait of the SNP unintentionally allying with UKIP in their opposition to classic politics and therefore enabling UKIP in its pursuit of Brexit. Not only does the SNP draw away from the historical parties and their control over the exit vote, but the SNP contributes to an argument about opposition that becomes semantically coopted in subsequent discussion of Brexit. In this way, despite the SNP’s focused opposition to Britain’s established parties, it cannot control the contexts in which this semantic position plays out, including the debate surrounding Brexit.

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