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The 1997 New Labour government set about modernising British foreign policy by devising new ways of conceptualising, making and talking about Britain’s role in the world. First, in May 1997 Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously announced that he wanted to give British foreign policy an ‘ethical dimension’. Second, in April 1999 the Prime Minister set out his ‘doctrine of the international community’ in which he spelt out the multifarious security challenges posed to individual nation states by global interdependence and the ‘circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’. Finally, Chancellor Gordon Brown has returned time and again to the potential gains to be had from exploiting what he calls the ‘British genius’ on the world stage.New ways of representing foreign policy, together with a sophisticated communications strategy on the part of the government since 1997 demands new ways of researching British foreign policy. In this paper I consider two questions arising from this challenge: first of all, what can discourse analysis contribute to political research in general? Second, how can we design a workable research programme into New Labour’s European policy that has discourse analysis at its very centre? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]