Truly ‘Global Britain’: The vision for the United Kingdom during the Brexit process

With the Brexit referendum, new visions for the future of the United Kingdom’s (UK) foreign policy emerged. The term ‘Global Britain’ became present daily in the British political discourse. Particularly with the leadership of Theresa May, the vision of building a truly ‘Global Britain’ started to be vital in British foreign policy. But what does 'Global Britain' really mean? Is it just a popular expression used, or does it represent a solid idea for guiding foreign policy strategy? Does this idea include the relationship with the European Union (EU) in the context of Brexit? This paper develops a mixed-methods content analysis, based on historical research design, to explore the time series of 2017 and 2018. More than 40 documents were selected through non-probability purposive sampling, produced by political actors as the UK Government, Parliament, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and British think tanks. Findings indicate that this period was crucial to the transformation of the popular term used in the political discourse, to an idea that revealed a serious possibility to the construction of a foreign policy strategy.