From Fragmentation to Strategic Integration: Discursive Consolidation in the Aftermath of Brexit

Brexit marked the first formal withdrawal from the European Union and posed a fundamental challenge to the durability of European integration. While existing theories anticipate either sustained fragmentation or adaptive consolidation, less attention has been paid to how supranational institutions reconstruct the meaning of exit over time. This article introduces the concept of discursive consolidation to capture the temporal reordering of interpretive frames through which withdrawal is reframed from rupture to embedded episode. Drawing on a longitudinal frame analysis of European Parliament State of the Union debates (2016–2025), the study traces shifts across four frames: fragmentation, defensive/boundary, resilience/solidarity, and strategic reform/integration. The findings reveal a structured transformation: fragmentation declines, defensive framing becomes routinised, and strategic integration emerges as dominant in the final phase. Brexit was not discursively normalised as disintegration, but progressively reabsorbed into a forward-looking integration narrative.