Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration (Routledge Advances in European Politics)

Governing Europe

Governing Europe is the first book to systematically link Michel Foucault’s hypotheses on power and ‘governmentality’ with the study of European integration. Through a series of empirical encounters that span the fifty-year history of European integration, it explores both the diverse political dreams that have framed means and ends of integration and the political technologies that have made ‘Europe’ a calculable, administrable domain. The book illustrates how a genealogy of European integration differs from conventional approaches. By suspending the assumption that we already know what/where Europe is, it opens a space for analysis where we can ask: how did Europe come to be governed as this and not that? The themes covered by this book include: • • •

The different constructions of Europe within discourses of modernization, democratization, insecurity and ‘governance’. The imprint of modernism, liberalism, ordoliberalism, neoliberalism and crime on the identity of the European Community/European Union. The historical relationship between European government and specific technologies of power, technologies as diverse as planning, price control, transparency and benchmarking.

Governing Europe will be essential reading not only for researchers of European integration, but for political scientists and sociologists interested in developing a dialogue between Foucauldian themes and political studies. William Walters is Associate Professor in Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. Jens Henrik Haahr is a Senior Consultant at the Danish Technological Institute.

Routledge Advances in European Politics 1 Russian Messianism Third Rome, revolution, communism and after Peter J.S. Duncan 2 European Integration and the Postmodern Condition Governance, democracy, identity Peter van Ham 3 Nationalism in Italian Politics The stories of the Northern League, 1980–2000 Damian Tambini 4 International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995 Edited by Peter Siani-Davies 5 Widening the European Union The politics of institutional change and reform Edited by Bernard Steunenberg 6 Institutional Challenges in the European Union Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrén 7 Europe Unbound Enlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European Union Edited by Jan Zielonka 8 Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans Nationalism and the destruction of tradition Cathie Carmichael 9 Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe The democratisation of the general public in fifteen Central and Eastern European countries, 1991–1998 Christian W. Haerpfer 10 Private Sector Involvement in the Euro The power of ideas Stefan Collignon and Daniela Schwarzer 11 Europe A Nietzschean perspective Stefan Elbe 12 European Union and E-Voting Addressing the European Parliament’s internet voting challenge Edited by Alexander H. Trechsel and Fernando Mendez 13 European Union Council Presidencies A comparative perspective Edited by Ole Elgström

14 European Governance and Supranational Institutions Making states comply Jonas Tallberg 15 European Union, NATO and Russia Martin Smith and Graham Timmins 16 Business, The State and Economic Policy The case of Italy G. Grant Amyot 17 Europeanization and Transnational States Comparing Nordic central governments Bengt Jacobsson, Per Lægreid and Ove K. Pedersen 18 European Union Enlargement A comparative history Edited by Wolfram Kaiser and Jürgen Elvert 19 Gibraltar British or Spanish? Peter Gold 20 Gender Politics and Society in Spain Monica Threlfall, Christine Cousins and Celia Valiente 21 European Union Negotiations Processes, networks and negotiations Edited by Ole Elgström and Christer Jönsson 22 Evaluating Euro-Mediterranean Relations Stephen C. Calleya 23 The Changing Face of European Identity A seven-nation study of (supra)national attachments Edited by Richard Robyn 24 Governing Europe Discourse, governmentality and European integration William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr 25 Territory and Terror Conflicting nationalisms in the Basque Country Jan Mansvelt Beck 26 Multilateralism, German Foreign Policy and Central Europe Claus Hofhansel 27 Popular Protest in East Germany Gareth Dale 28 Germany’s Relations with Poland and the Czech Republic An analysis of contemporary foreign policy Karl Cordell and Stephan Wolff

Governing Europe Discourse, governmentality and European integration William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr

1111 2

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Walters, William, 1964– Governing Europe: discourse, governmentality and European integration/William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. European federation. 2. Reason of state. 3. European Union countries – Politics and government – Philosophy. 4. European Union. I. Haahr, Jens Henrik, 1963– II. Title. JN15.W32 2005 341.242′2 – dc22 2004012469 ISBN 0-203-29972-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33875-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32198–0 (Print Edition)

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements 1 Governing Europe

vi 1

2 ‘Seeing like a high authority?’: High modernism and European government

21

3 The Common Market: Governing Europe through freedom?

42

4 Of democratic deficits

65

5 In/secure community: Governing Schengenland

91

6 Benchmarking Europe: Advanced liberalism and the open method of coordination

114

Conclusion: On the governmentalization of Europe

137

Bibliography Index

147 163

Preface and acknowledgements

For all their variety and richness, there is at least one thing the great majority of political studies of European integration have in common. This is a certain realism. Most studies seek to diagram actual configurations of social forces, structures, institutions and, more recently, ideas, in order to explain particular political decisions, policy outcomes and trajectories within European Union affairs. Research which concerns itself with the political dreams, rationalities, presuppositions and techniques embedded in various attempts to govern Europe is rarer. We hope this study will in some way contribute to this latter project. This is an experimental book regarding a European experiment in government. It evolved through a process of writing, conversation, and paper presentation in many cities. Either one or both of us presented portions of the book at the following events: the International Studies Association meetings, Los Angeles (2000), the First Pan-European Conference on EU Politics, University of Bordeaux (2002), the International Political Science Association meetings, Durban, South Africa (2003), the University Association for Contemporary European Studies Annual Research Conference, University of Newcastle, UK (2003), the European Consortium for Political Research, BiAnnual Conference, Marburg, Germany (2003), and the Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for European Research, Aalborg, Denmark (2003). We are indebted to many participants and discussants at those events for their criticism and encouragement. We are particularly grateful to Thomas Diez and Vèronique Mottier for their comments on an earlier version of Chapter one and to Andrew Barry, Christina Gabriel, Barry Hindess, Knud Erik Jørgensen and Wendy Larner for their input at an early stage of our project. From its inception, Heidi Bagtazo and Grace McInnes at Routledge have been highly supportive and patient editors, so we would like to express our thanks to them as well. All the usual disclaimers apply. As a genuinely transatlantic endeavour, our project would not have been possible without various forms of support. William Walters would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grants Program, 410–2000–1415), and the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Public

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Affairs and Management for their generous financial support. His contribution to the book benefited from the research assistance of Todd Alway, Andreas Janz and Oguz Kolasin. He also thanks the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence where, as a visiting Fellow in spring 2004, he was able to rework several of the chapters. Finally, he thanks Christina Gabriel for her unconditional support and patience while he devoted too many hours to this project. Jens Henrik Haahr wishes to thank the Danish School of Journalism for generous financial support in connection with the participation in conferences in Bordeaux, Durban and Marburg in 2002 and 2003 and for opening up the opportunity of necessary and highly stimulating research visits to the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa in May 2003 and to the European University Institute in Florence in March 2004. An earlier version of Chapter six appeared as Haahr, J.H. (2004) ‘Open Coordination as Advanced Liberal Government’, Journal of European Public Policy 11(2): 209–230. We gratefully acknowledge permission from Taylor and Francis (see their website at http://www.tandf.co.uk) to revise and reproduce it here. William Walters Jens Henrik Haahr Ottawa and Århus, May 2004

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On February 15, 2000, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, spoke before the European Parliament. The event was to mark the start of his term in office, a moment that, he observed, coincided with the ‘dawn of the third millennium’ (Prodi 2000). In this speech he set out what he saw as the main issues facing his presidency. Since its inception European integration had accomplished much including fifty years of unprecedented peace and prosperity. With the completion of the single market and the launch of the euro, the European Union (EU) was well set to meet what he saw as ‘the challenges of globalisation’. But despite these notable successes, the EU continued to be met with scepticism and anxiety on the part of ‘Europe’s citizens’. People have lost faith in European institutions, Prodi lamented, in their ability to engineer a better future for Europe. To be successful in the third millennium the European project would have to meet two kinds of ‘needs’. First, there were the needs of Europe. These included ‘vigorous and sustained growth’, ‘external’ and ‘internal security’, a greater ‘sense of purpose and meaning’, and a more prominent role as a ‘global civil power’ operating for good within the wider world. Second, there were the needs of the EU itself. These would have to be met if the EU was to serve these European ‘needs’. Amongst the EU’s most pressing needs, as Prodi saw it, were an improved and cohesive decision-making process within and between the European institutions and the member states, more accountable institutions and improved policies in a number of areas. Prodi has no doubt reiterated these themes on many occasions in numerous other speeches. Many others who have expressed concern over the current state of the European project share his views. And no doubt some analysts would want to emphasize other needs – whether the need for a coherent constitution, improved economic productivity, greater multicultural understanding or a more secure external frontier. Europe and its governing agencies, as policy experts never cease to remind us, has many needs. But the point that interests us here is not to identify which of these needs is the most pressing or most attainable. Instead, we want to ask what is at stake when people speak of Europe in this way? Prodi’s speech involves a

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certain way of talking about Europe that has become second-nature. Implicit in this speech – and the countless others which take up its themes whether to amplify, contest or even reject its points – is a set of assump-tions. It is that Europe exists as something which has needs, that certain authorities can identify these needs, and devise policies that will address them. This way of speaking about Europe is one that, as R. B. J. Walker observes, knows what and where Europe is. Europe exists within its parameters as a ‘known quantity/quality’. Europe, as so many analysts insist, is changing, growing, developing. Frequent references are now made to the New Europe: to somewhere – a geographical place – or something – a cultural, political, economic or military presence, or achievement, or possibility – that is bold and dynamic, its revered traditions now tinged with auras of millenial or globalizing innovation. (Walker 2000: 14) A great deal of research done under the heading of EU studies assumes we know where and what Europe is. Europe is a space of transnational economic activity where flows of capital and people challenge the sovereignty of bounded nation-states and call for new forms of politics and regulation. Europe is the site of a multi-level polity, a space where complex processes of intergovernmental, interregional and supranational bargaining give rise to novel patterns of governance. Europe is an actor that, following the end of the Cold War, finds itself searching for an appropriate role in world politics, an economic superpower that must acquire the corresponding political muscle if it is to bring a modicum of balance to a dangerously unipolar world. But what would accounts of European integration look like if they did not depart from the assumption of a Europe that, if not already there, is, at least, emergent? How would they appear if they didn’t presuppose a fullness, an objectivity of interests, institutions and identities that determine its evolution? How might we study European integration if, as Walker puts it, ‘Europe is not where it’s supposed to be’? What might we learn from an inessential perspective on European integration?

DENATURALIZING EUROPE It is precisely the givenness of this Europe, a conspicuous feature within discourses of European integration, that we want to address in this book. If we cannot assume that Europe is somehow already there then a series of questions are brought to the fore. How did Europe come to have needs? On what basis did Europe become something that could be said to experience economic ‘growth’ or suffer from deficits of ‘internal security’ and ‘democracy’?

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How did Europe become the site of its own ‘economy’? How do certain persons like Romano Prodi and the institution he represents come to pronounce authoritatively about those needs? Within what kind of a politics, and by what means has it been possible to propose solutions to those needs? To seek answers to these questions we turn to what we consider one of the most exciting and challenging developments within post-structuralist political analysis. This is the advent of studies in ‘governmentality’. This neologism was coined by Michel Foucault in reference to a domain he called ‘governmental rationality’ (Gordon 1991: 1). Under this heading he conducted research into the history of government, embracing a period that begins with the Ancient Greeks through to the emergence of modern neo-liberalism. Foucault’s focus was not government understood in an institutional or philosophical sense but the history of the art of government. Due to his untimely death, Foucault never developed this research into a major publication project.1 Nevertheless, many of the seminal themes, concepts and hypotheses he sketched have proved highly influential. They have been taken up by Foucault’s colleagues but more recently a wide assortment of scholars in disciplines as diverse as human geography, finance and management, anthropology, sociology and political science.2 As a research agenda, governmentality has been especially influential in Britain, Australia, Canada, and Scandinavia. At least as far as political studies are concerned, governmentality research has been particularly focused on the analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism as arts of government (Barry et al. 1996a). In this book we call for much greater connection between governmentality studies and research on European integration. To date there has been remarkably little crossover between these two areas.3 We think this is unfortunate and seek to demonstrate the potential of bringing a governmentality lens to bear on themes and problems of European integration. We offer a fuller account of our understanding of governmentality below. But before doing so we wish to emphasize that Europe may be a known quantity/quality for many practitioners of EU studies, but by no means all. Governmentality is not the only research paradigm capable of exploring the constructedness of Europe. On the contrary, it might be better to situate it alongside a series of approaches which are all, in different ways, contributing to the denaturalization of the idea of Europe, and the task of fashioning a more reflexive and critical tradition within EU studies. Perhaps the most influential of recent developments within EU studies, at least within political science, is the development of ‘social constructivism’ as a perspective on European integration theory. Social constructivism has arisen within International Relations out of a move to explore a ‘middle ground’ between rationalist and positivist approaches on the one hand, and postmodernism on the other. (Adler 1997). Most theorists within this area emphasize a commitment to the study of ideational and identity-related elements in their explanations of social change. According to the editors of a volume dedicated to studying ‘The Social Construction of Europe’, a

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constructivist approach stresses the impact of ‘social ontologies’, ‘social institutions’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ on European integration (Christiansen et al. 2001; see also Jørgensen 1997). It should be mentioned, however, that there is considerable variation amongst those associated with this approach. A more conventional strand is interested in studying ideas and identities as a sort of missing variable which, once factored into the explanatory mix alongside interests and institutions, will yield more powerful causal explanations. For instance, this is evident in work which examines different normative conceptions of Europe held by political elites in order to account for national divergences in policy-making around issues like the Economic and Monetary Union (Risse et al. 1999). On the other hand there is work which is much closer to post-structuralism. Here one sees a move to treat EU studies itself as a participant in the construction of Europe. As Diez has forcefully argued, inasmuch as they are active in the naming of Europe, the social sciences are not beyond power relations; they are not ‘politically innocent, and may themselves become the subject of analysis’ (Diez 1999: 599). Notwithstanding these significant epistemological differences, by attending to the different conceptions of ‘Europe’ which social actors mobilize, social constructivism has challenged the notion that Europe is simply there. On the contrary, the idea of Europe is shown to be implicated in political and representational struggles. The notion that Europe is a stable identity has been unsettled in other ways. The work of political theorists and intellectual historians on the idea of Europe is notable in this respect (alf Malmborg and Stråth 2001; Delanty 1995; Pagden 2002a; Wilson and Van der Dussen 1993). This research expands our temporal horizons, drawing attention to the very long history of thinking about Europe, a history that includes the medieval concept of Christendom and the Napoleonic vision of a quasi-imperial confederation of states. In this way it reminds us that the EU is not Europe per se – a point that is often overlooked by those for whom the spread of EU policies is synonymous with a process of ‘Europeanization’ (cf. Olsen 2003). Rather, the EU can be seen as merely the most recent political project to speak in the name of Europe. In terms of its institutional capacities and powers it is a particularly successful project. But as with the Papacy in the fifteenth century, or Napoleonic France, the EU defines a particular Europe in such a way that its claim to represent that Europe appears quite natural. But equally noteworthy is work by practitioners of critical geopolitics and political geography. According to Agnew and Ó Tuathail, critical geopolitics investigates ‘the spatialization of international politics by core powers and hegemonic states’ (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992: 192). Work in this area has traced the changing geopolitical meanings and spatial identities of Europe (Heffernan 1998). It has mapped the changing political spatiality of Europe, revealing that this has at different times been imagined as a space of empires, states, regions and, most recently, networks (Anderson 1996; Jönsson et al. 2000). But it has also emphasized how understandings of

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Europe have always been structured by certain constitutive Others. The EU’s version of Europe is thus not self-identical but constituted through shifting oppositions, including the ideological Other of an unfree, communist ‘Eastern Europe’ and the more-recently revived civilizational and cultural Other of a ‘non-Western’ and ‘un-modern’ Islamic world (Neumann 1999; Taylor 1991; Tunander et al. 1997). We offer these three areas as examples of exciting research which is challenging and destabilizing the notion that Europe is already there. We do not view these approaches as competing paradigms but as intellectual fields which are in many cases complementary to a perspective of governmentality. If we choose to focus on governmentality in this book it is for two reasons. First, to make the case for its utilization within EU studies since it has so far been curiously overlooked. But second there is a question of conceptual orientation and focus. Governmentality can be viewed as a form of political analysis, as we argue below. But, unlike discourse analysis, for example, it also has a conceptual-empirical orientation which we find particularly valuable. Governmentality combines discourse analysis with a focus on the history of governing. As such it allows us to situate the study of European integration in relation to the much broader history of rationalities, arts and techniques of government. In the following section we set out the four aspects of studies in governmentality which inform this book. Governmentality is open to diverse interpretations and uses (O’Malley et al. 1997), and we do not present our version as definitive. We approach governmentality as a tool kit rather than a theory. There are four kinds of tools which we take from it. Our use of governmentality is as: 1) a particular form of critical and reflexive political analysis which focuses on mentalities of government; 2) an historicized investigation of changing forms of power; 3) a thematization of the relationality of power and the identity of the governed; 4) a concern with the technologies of power. In the following section we will discuss each of these in turn, identifying each with a particular research theme. We should emphasize that our aim is not to present some kind of systematic governmentality theory, but to open up useful analytical possibilities. We illustrate each of these themes with certain brief historical observations.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

Governmentality as political analysis Governmentality can be understood as a critical approach to political research. Whether it is the class struggle, institutional dynamics or rational choice-making individuals, each different theory or method has its particular objects and variables which it privileges. Studies in governmentality pay special attention to mentalities of government (Dean 1999b: 16). They are

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interested in the changing ways in which political authority, as well as those who contest that authority, pose the questions: How should we govern? What should we govern? Why do we need to govern? Whether it is looking at poverty policy in the nineteenth century, or economic competitiveness policy at the end of the twentieth century, governmentality research pays close attention to the language, mentality, and idiom through which political problems and aspirations come to be expressed. What kind of problem did the poor present to social reformers? What kind of economy is it that today’s gurus of competitiveness exalt? But why this concern with mentalities and language? Mentalities of government are studied not out of a concern to reconstruct the past more accurately, nor to reveal how language somehow distorts true realities. Instead, these studies are motivated by a concern with political reason. Political reason is embedded in the ways we are governed, but often in ways that we are not fully conscious about. Governmentality research is a critical, diagnostic practice because it seeks to make political reason more intelligible, and thereby more available to political practice. The point is that power and government are never exercised in general terms. As Foucault put it, ‘at least in this respect, political practices resemble scientific ones: it’s not “reason in general” that is implemented, but always a very specific type of rationality’ (Foucault 1988: 73). Where do we find these mentalities of government? How does one research them? It is important to note, as Rose and Miller put it, that ‘Government is a problematizing activity . . . The ideals of government are intrinsically linked to the problems around which it circulates, the failings it seeks to rectify, the ills it seeks to cure. Indeed, the history of government might well be written as a history of problematizations . . . ’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 181; original emphasis). It is in acts and moments of problematization that mentalities and their forms of reason can be identified. It is in all those sites where a given policy or practice is called into question, identified as deficient, failing, too costly, unethical – it is in these places that mentalities of government lend themselves most readily to our scrutiny. But the study of problematizations, mentalities and rationalities involves something else. The subtitle of this book refers to Discourse, governmentality and European integration. We want to emphasize that we take governmentality to be continuous with, and indeed inconceivable without the work of post-structuralist discourse analysis (Howarth et al. 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Milliken 1999; Carver et al. 2002). To reconstruct governmentalities, to excavate the forms of political reason embedded in them, requires that we take language as an irreducible medium. As theorists of discourse have emphasized, we need to understand language not as a mere reflection of an underlying ‘real’ world, but as a constitutive dimension of reality. Political struggles are also conflicts over meaning. At the same time, we note that governmentality pushes discourse analysis in new directions. For one thing, as we have already noted, it connects it

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to the history of arts and practices of government. This is perhaps one reason why governmentality analysis has tended to look to the realm of policy papers, official publications, legal texts, and academic publications as its sources, rather than, say, media or popular discourse. This is a pattern we tend to continue here. But it also pushes discourse analysis to engage with the technical aspect of discourse. Where some strands of discourse analysis emphasize semiotic practices of signification, or the slippage and the indeterminacy of meaning, governmentality has focused on the materiality of discourse. It draws our attention to the much neglected world of inscription, the eminently technical ways in which the world is represented by means of little things like charts, tables, graphs, numbers, diagrams and reports (Rose and Miller 1992). These are more than the ‘dull ephemera of bureaucracy’; they are the materials through which the world is made visible, calculable and amenable to practices of rule. These countless little practices play a silent but hitherto largely neglected role in the construction of Europe (Walters 2002b). We argue that as an approach governmentality has much to offer the study of European integration. It does not presume to know in advance what or where Europe is. Instead, it enjoins us to ask certain kinds of questions. How is Europe being governed here – as a space of markets, a cultural domain, or perhaps a civilization? What kind of rule is being proposed for Europe – are its subjects to be encouraged to exercise freedoms and responsibilities, like citizens? Or are they to be harnessed, like resources? Under what circumstances do we find different mentalities of government combining in complex patterns? Theme 1 – We can ask of any EU policy: How is Europe being imagined /governed here? To answer this question it will prove fruitful to situate the policy in question within a historical and analytical field of governmentalities that often exceeds the institutional domain of the European Union. Just as comparative politics compares the EU to other kinds of polity (Caporaso 1996; Schmitter 1996), we propose to compare its constitutive practices and arts to other pertinent cases within the history of government. Example: Authoritarian mentalities of European government It is a fact that the twentieth century saw authoritarian as well as federalist and functionalist dreams and projects of European integration (Keegan 1997; Stirk 1996: 19). This is the lesson of historians who have examined National Socialist proposals for a New Economic Order and their particular conception of European economic integration. As Tribe has noted, ‘the movement for European integration, articulated as a deliberate policy by a government in a position to carry it forward into actual fact, can be

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backdated to the New Economic Order of 1940’ (Tribe 1995: 260). By briefly considering the mentality of government within which Nazi Germany imagined an integrated Europe we can better understand the specificity of the EC/EU version that was ultimately to replace it. Central to the National Socialist plan for European integration was the idea of a Grossraumwirtschaft. That is, Europe was perceived in terms of an ‘extended economic space’ onto which the Nazi dream of German economic autarky, self-sufficiency and racial supremacy was projected. Germany was to be the manufacturing heartland along with bordering industrial areas like North-east France, Belgium and Bohemia. Peripheral areas, especially to the east and towards the Urals, were destined to supply raw materials and foodstuffs. This Grossraumwirtschaft was to be an ‘organized economic space’ governed not in the name of a community of equal and interdependent states but that of the German Volk; free market exchanges were subordinated to German supremacy. Pivotal to this scheme was the assumption of hierarchy amongst peoples, one that was to have terrible, genocidal implications. The populations of the European Grossraumwirtschaft, the ‘European Economic Space’ were hierarchised in a scale descending from the Germans, through similar Northern European people, to the populations of Central Europe, and finally to the Slavic populations of the East. Within this scheme it was the fate of the European Jewry to be assigned some indefinite location in the East, where in fact they were then destroyed. (Tribe 1995: 254) We mention the New Economic Order here not because we want to suggest it has continuities with the EC/EU project, but because it can serve to defamiliarize the latter. EU studies very rarely make reference to this discredited project, this authoritarian and genocidal ‘other’ attempt at European integration. Instead, the EU is usually compared to other liberaldemocratic polities (e.g., the United States) or regional integration projects (e.g., NAFTA). The unconventional comparison we have suggested here brings into focus the fact that the EU stands for a particular form of European integration (and not European integration per se), and, moreover, the specifically liberal political character of the EC/EU model. If we can speak of a mentality of government at the level of this model, it is one where arts and practices of indirect government are a central feature. For instance, consider how the idea of a Grossraumwirtschaft places the common market in a new light. Rather than just the obvious institutional expression of increasing economic interdependence, or a strategy of gradual, functionalist integration, the common market can be seen as a particular art of governing. The Grossraumwirtschaft sought to impose by political and military means an ‘organic’ and starkly hierarchical division of labour upon

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its peoples and territories (Stirk 1989: 133–4), and did so to realize the destiny of a German Volk. The common market imagines an indirect, liberal art of government. It constitutes a self-organizing economic space where political intervention (for example, EC/EU competition policy) has the goal of warding off economic (and by implication, political) domination, with the aim of actualizing a non-hierarchical European community of states and citizens. It is possible to identify arts and mentalities of government at any particular temporal or political scale. The comparison we have just offered is a relatively abstract one, in the sense that it operates at the level of historical forms of European integration. For the most part we will be concerned with mutations within the governmentality of the EU.

Governmentality as a form of power As we have seen, governmentality has come to refer to a particular kind of political analysis, one that interrogates ‘the relation between government and thought’ (Dean 1999b: 19). But it also has a more substantive meaning. When Foucault uses the term it is to identify a particular way of thinking about and exercising political power that only emerged in eighteenth century Europe and ‘which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security’ (Foucault 1991a: 102). This moment of governmentality is one where political rule begins to turn away from transcendental and religious forms of reason and towards a concern with material questions. Foucault equates governmentality with the emergence of ‘societies of security’ (Gordon 1991: 20) because the security of the state comes to be thought not just in terms of armed bodies defending its borders and cities but increasingly within a discourse of wealth, prosperity and resources. Nothing makes the rise of governmentality more palpable than the dramatic spread of bureaucracy coupled with statistics, surveys, social sciences and other calculative practices (Hacking 1991). In these ways states will acquire the ‘infrastructural power’ (Mann 1986) to classify, and quantify their subjects, constructing them as ‘populations’, sorting them into administrable (and, as Chatterjee (2004) emphasizes, politicizable) categories like ‘unemployed’ or ‘immigrant’, routinely intervening in their daily lives in ways that seek to rationalize their general well-being. Foucault clarified the peculiar nature of governmentality as a form of power by contrasting it, albeit schematically, with other forms (1991a). One of these is sovereign power. If one can speak of a mentality of sovereign power, it is one where the problem is how to perpetuate one’s rule over a given territory and its subjects. It is an approach to governing which takes law, violence and pageantry as its privileged instruments. But governmentality can also be contrasted with discipline. Disciplinary power targets the body. It

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operates upon confined spaces like the school or the prison where it employs surveillance and normalizing techniques to produce useful, calculable subjects. Governmentality operates at the level of population. Utilizing such means as social and economic policy (which Foucault calls ‘apparatuses of security’) it acts upon ‘ongoing processes to direct’ but not totally control them. Governmentality seeks to ‘guide disorder’ (Agamben 2002). European integration is typically regarded as a process in which economies, societies and polities become more interdependent. Following what we have just said, it is also possible to understand European integration in terms of changing forms and logics of power. Foucault spoke of a long-term process he called ‘the governmentalization of the state’. This was the movement by which the state of justice and sovereign power of the Middle Ages turns into the state of governmentality, the population-state, the social security state of the twentieth century (Foucault 1991a: 103). It is a movement which does not signal the demise of sovereign power, but does see it recodified and redeployed in terms of the priorities and logics of governmentality. We think one can also speak of the governmentalization of Europe. Theme 2 – The history of European integration can be recast in terms of the governmentalization of Europe. Within the discourse of European integration, Europe is made knowable and governable as a space of social, economic and political processes In previous centuries the conduct of interstate politics in Europe was dominated by the image of the balance of power (Gulick 1955). It is true that thinkers such as Montesquieu, Kant and later Constant drew positive associations between the melding forces of ‘doux commerce’ and the eventual emergence of a Europe resembling a great confederation or republic (Pagden 2002b: 18; Pocock 2002: 64–5). But the dominant thought of Europe was framed by the mentalities of sovereign power. As a calculated system of interstate rivalries and alliances, the balance of power was central to problematics and practices of European security. But it was also at the heart of Europe’s vision of freedom. Inasmuch as the balance of power was supposed to prevent any one state becoming truly hegemonic within Europe, then statespersons and scholars invoked this principle to mark Europe as different from and superior to ‘Asian’ and other despotisms (Wilson and Van der Dussen 1993: 38–44). Put very schematically, European integration implies a mutation in the logic of power. As with the governmentalization of the state, one sees questions of power and rule reformulated in terms of the governance of social and economic processes. Power is transformed by the recognition, institutionalization and actualization of spaces irreducible, and transversal to the formal system of states or international organizations. The most significant of these is surely the emergence following World War Two of a European

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economy as a presupposition and institutionalized object of policy.4 But, in fact, this field of European governmentality will be built in successive layers as various social and economic spaces are created/discovered. Spaces like the common market, the eurozone, the Europe of cities and regions, not to mention European social areas, research areas and areas of freedom, security and justice. European government orients itself to the creation, maintenance and regulation of these spaces. European security becomes intimately linked to the security of their processes (Beeson and Jayasuriya 1998). Chapters two to six can be read as moments within this governmentalization of Europe. However, we attach at least three caveats to our use of this term. First, governmentalization should not be understood as a teleological process. Unlike ‘modernization’ or ‘globalization’, it does not presume an unfolding towards a particular end point. Rather, it draws attention to the way in which diverse policies and programmes serve to render Europe as a dense matrix of positivities, an apparatus connected to the enhancement of various aspects of social and economic life. Second, the governmentalization of Europe is not reducible to the history of the EC/EU, but exceeds it. However, for practical purposes our project does confine itself to the EC/EU. But authoritarian schemes to govern a European Grossraumwirtschaft could be read in this light just as could the pioneering attempts of the OEEC to statisticalize a European economy and invent ways to govern its financial and trading relations. Finally, the governmentalization of Europe does not spell the end of problematics of sovereignty, so much as their reorganization. For one thing European integration leads to mutations in the practice of sovereignty. Nothing illustrates this so clearly as the emergence of an entire apparatus of European law, which must be seen as a specific expression of a sovereign form of power. But interestingly, the governmentalization of Europe also provokes the enactment of new displays of sovereignty at a national level. For instance, when the EC/EU is accused of ‘encroaching’ on national sovereignty, and opt-outs from European legislation are sought as a response to such fears, these and other practices actually produce an experience of state sovereignty which was simply not possible until the advent of the EC/EU. In this book we confine our attention to questions of governmental power. But future work could profitably examine the EU as a site where sovereignty is not so much eclipsed as made to proliferate.

Government as ‘the conduct of conduct’ – the relationality of power There is a third theme within studies of governmentality that informs our project. This concerns the relational character of power relations. Here we need to shift for a moment from the question of governmentality to that of ‘government’. In contemporary parlance government usually refers to the

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officials and institutions vested with the power to make decisions for the state. But we follow Foucault and others who invoke a much wider, and older sense of the term. Foucault defined government as ‘the conduct of conduct’; in other words, ‘a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons’ (Gordon 1991: 2). In this way he consciously reactivates the way government was understood in the sixteenth century when it referred not just to the management of states but ‘the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups (children, souls, communities, the sick, etc.) might be directed’ (Foucault 1983: 221). This wider understanding of government is connected in turn to Foucault’s better known arguments about the pervasiveness of power relations. It stems from his dissatisfaction with what he calls the ‘juridical– political’ view of power. With the latter power is something that can be possessed, stored, accumulated and exchanged. Certain ‘powerful’ actors like The State of the Bourgeoisie possess power while others lack it. Foucault challenges the juridical-political view with a conception of power as pervasive and relational: ‘power is exercised (not possessed) from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations . . . Power comes from below, that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations’ (Foucault 1990: 94–5). Power is not the monopoly of the state or big business. Power and government are exercised across the social field, within families, offices and countless other settings. Moreover, there is no power without resistance. In fact, resistance is not merely a reaction to power, but a condition of its exercise. Power relations arise from the fact that subjects always have a certain scope to act otherwise. Government consists of relatively rationalized attempts to shape the conduct of the governed. There is a valuable lesson here concerning the nature of the governed. It is that the identity of the governed is not constant or eternal (Veyne 1997). This view of government alerts us to the mutable and contingent identity of the governed. Studies of governmentality draw our attention to the multiple ways in which we are governed and subjectified. For example, there are pastoral modes of governing where rule assumes a paternalistic outlook – we are addressed as subjects who need to be nurtured, protected and led (Dean 1999b: 74–6); there is the ‘city-citizen game’ which governs not a flock-people but a community of free persons, and where rule adopts a relationship of ‘hardened solidarity’ rather than charity towards the governed (Dean 1999b: 76–9); there is biopolitics, where political power intersects the governed in their capacity as living beings and populations, as organisms whose life must be secured, promoted, but also, in certain cases, terminated (Foucault 1990). And there are the subjectifications of the governed which we encounter within the programmes and politics of liberalism and neoliberalism, where we are governed as subjects of freedom and choice. Here, government occurs

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‘at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 180). Here, power works in terms of the ways we govern ourselves; it encourages us to adopt such subjectivities as the active jobseeker, the empowered citizen, the discerning consumer, the interested stakeholder, the informed investor, and so on. Governing through the production of, and obligation to exercise, certain forms of freedom, these liberal and neoliberal identities are particularly characteristic of our present (Barry et al. 1996a; Rose 1999). These kinds of power relations, and the identities of the governed (and, importantly, of the governors) which they presume, inform our study. They provide a set of analytics which can help to uncover the plurality and heterogeneity of power relations and identities in the context of European integration. Theme 3 – With respect to any particular programme or policy of European integration it is important to ask: what forms of identity does it presume and construct for the governed? In pursuing this theme we want to move away from the notion of a singular or homogenous European citizenship. By attending to the multiple identities of the governed it will be possible to see that the government of Europe has taken a variety of subjectivities as its correlates. For instance, we will see that policies of Justice and Home Affairs are anchored by a conception of the European subject as a threatened and anxious individual. This is quite different from the mobile, enterprising subjects of freedom that underwrite the construction of the common/single market project. Political studies of the EU have developed a rich vocabulary of political terms. Concepts of federalism, confederalism, functionalism, and, more recently, multi-level governance have allowed for its mapping against wider political processes. With our references to the pastoral, the biopolitical, the neoliberal and so on, we seek to introduce a new line of concepts into EU studies. This is not with the intention of displacing the existing language of EU studies, so much as enriching and complicating it by attending to the nexus between European integration and political subjectivity. But while we seek to emphasize the diversity of relations and identities of government at stake within European integration, we do not make any claims to be comprehensive. For instance, we pay close attention to liberal and neoliberal conceptions of the subject, but, with the exception of Chapter three, far less to the biopolitical dimension of European integration. This is a matter of space: it is not our intention to rank subjectivities in terms of their importance. For clearly, whether it is a question of environmental regulation (Barry 2001) or the provision of frameworks for biotechnological research (Gottweis 1999), there are numerous ways in which the EU is implicated in biopolitical subjectivity, as it is in other identities.

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Technologies of power Nikolas Rose has described research in governmentality as ‘studies of a particular “stratum” of knowing and acting’ (Rose 1999: 19; our emphasis). They are not confined to the study of mentalities of government, but also ‘the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses and devices for exercising power and intervening upon particular problems’ (Rose 1999: 19). Studies of governmentality are notable because they consider not only the changing ways in which questions of government have been formulated, but also what Dean has called the domain of ‘techne’. They ask: ‘by what means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, technologies and vocabularies is authority and rule accomplished’ (Dean 1999b: 31). There are several things that we think the perspective of technologies can bring to the study of European integration. First, it raises questions about the ‘how’ of government. It is our sense that EU studies have been much more oriented to the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’ of European integration. As Joseph Weiler notes, ‘the largest part of EC studies is instrumentalist, rooting all explanation in actors, interests, structures and processes, trying to explain why things are the way they are’ (1999: 243). Why did the integration process revive in the 1980s and not before? Why is Britain such an ‘awkward partner’ in Europe? By asking how is Europe governed, we can see new aspects of the EU. With their focus on European policies of regulation and harmonization, the work of Barry (1994, 2001) and Majone (1993) is exemplary in this respect. By foregrounding regulatory practices they are able to convey something of the uniqueness of the EU: how it is able to govern extended social and economic spaces without possessing anything like the administrative apparatus, or financial capacity of a nation-state. If nothing else, the studies collected in this book are an injunction to investigate the ‘how’ of European government. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we affirm the concept of technologies because it allows us to defamiliarize the taken for granted. ‘It is unquestionably an odd thing’, writes Paul Veyne, ‘this capacity of human beings to remain unaware of their limits, their exceptionality . . . to believe that at any moment they are ensconced in the plenitude of reason’ (Veyne 1997: 158; original emphasis). Exceptionality is a key term here. It points to the fact that most of the time we take governmental practices for granted. But they are exceptional, rare and historical. Words like The State and The Citizen can make governing appear like a timeless activity. Yet our political and social actions are always in some sense dependent upon the existence of certain practices – historically specific ways of rewarding and punishing, befriending and alienating, promoting and suppressing, etc. There is no generic European government or European integration. There are only particular regimes of thought and practice within which certain ways of governing Europe become possible.

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Theme 4 – A concern with technologies of power alerts us to the exceptionality of European government Example: ‘Socializing’ the Ruhr? An example should clarify what we mean by exceptional. At the end of World War Two, the fate of occupied Germany was a key question facing the Allies (Milward 1984: 126–67). As the major industrial power of continental Europe, a solution to the question of Germany was integral to any attempt to stabilize and reconstruct Western Europe. As the heartland of German industry, the question of the future of the Ruhr was particularly sensitive, especially for France which feared the revival of German industrial hegemony. Britain proposed a particular solution. It was to create a new land, North Rhine-Westphalia, which would include the Ruhr. But the key to the proposal was to ‘socialize’ the coal, steel and engineering firms by the creation of public corporations. Eventually, it was assumed, their ownership could be transferred to a future central national government. It is, of course, well-known, that the question of the Ruhr and the governance of its industries was finally resolved not by the British proposal but along the lines of the Schuman Plan which emanated from the French Government. A transnational community of coal and steel was to be created which would be placed under the auspices of a ‘supranational’ ‘high authority’. However, the point to note is the way in which both the British and the French plans embodied particular technologies of power. In the case of Britain, this was the technique of ‘nationalization’ (as it was called in Britain). This entailed governing key aspects of social and economic life in terms of the apparatus of the public corporation. Whether it was the organization of broadcasting, railways or coal industries, it was to the diagram of the public corporation that successive post-war governments in Britain would look. The British merely sought to transpose this practice to Europe. In the case of France the diagram was one of expert-led planning which was to coordinate and stimulate strategic sectors of the private economy (Kuisel 1981; Thompson 1992), the political method at the heart of France’s ‘modernization plan’. Conventional approaches tend to model European integration as a process or a variable, sometimes dependent, other times independent. They utilize generic and somewhat lumpy concepts like intergovernmental bargaining and spillover to model outcomes. These approaches obscure the historicity and particularity of European government. We insist that European integration and European government are not generic but exceptional. We want to see them in terms of a space of governance, a space that is always configured and composed in terms of specific practices and technologies. As public corporations or modernization planning suggests, each of these technologies has its own history – the circumstances under which it comes into existence, mutates, and migrates across policy domains and countries. By emphasizing

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technologies of power we want to capture some of those little cross-cutting, diagonal lines which connect the phenomena of European integration to other spaces. No one has yet written the history of European integration from this perspective of technologies of power. Such a history would detail the unpredictable pathways by which certain technologies of power have migrated across the field of governmentality to be assimilated into the practice of European government, as well as the obstacles which have blocked the movement of others. Likewise it would document how the EU has itself been a laboratory for the development of new governmental technologies which find their application in other domestic and international spheres. This book falls well short of being such a history which must, by its sheer scale, be a collective endeavour. Nevertheless, if nothing else, our discussions of the technologies of planning (Chapter two), of democracy (Chapter five) and of performance (Chapter six) are intended to confirm the promise of such an approach. Emphasizing technologies of power has its advantages but also its risks. For example, our move to understand citizenship or even agency itself as the correlates of particular technologies, rather than fundamental values or natural attributes, might be interpreted as a rejection of political agency. We could be accused of fostering a subject-less, automated view of the world in which there is no resistance, only technology and control. We beg to differ. The point is to recognize that our societies as well as our own human capacities are ‘inescapably technologized’ (Barry et al. 1996b: 13). It is not a question of rejecting the fact of agency so much as specifying the historical and technical conditions which make it possible.

Genealogy of European integration – from process to events The final concept we want to clarify is genealogy. At various points within this book we refer to our project as a possible contribution to a genealogy of European integration or European government. As a method, genealogy is unlike conventional history. It does not aim to reconstruct a totalizable past. As Dean explains, genealogy constructs ‘specific lineages of difference’ and so constitutes synthetic ‘historical series’ that do not claim the status of ‘successive moments coherent in themselves’ (Dean 1994: 52). One of the main purposes of these lineages is to historicize features of the present that otherwise appear timeless and necessary, to place the present in a slightly less familiar light, and thereby, to open up a critical space around its ‘given-ness’. Let us consider one little example. In Chapter four we observe how contemporary discourses of European democracy valorize a certain ethos of proximity and locality. This is institutionalized in practices like subsidiarity. Now it may strike us as quite self-evident that the EU should affirm the project of moving closer to the people, seeking out greater involvement for its citizens in its bid to become more democratically legitimate. Who would

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argue that a greater sense of involvement is not beneficial and even essential for democracy? But a genealogical perspective would reveal that practices of liberal democracy have a rather ambivalent relationship towards themes of proximity, devolvement and locality. For it would demonstrate that as recently as the 1940s and 1950s there was a pessimistic acceptance on the part of key thinkers that even in liberal democracies the people would inevitably be located at a considerable distance from government. This was the so-called realist theory of democracy associated with the likes of Joseph Schumpeter (Connolly 1995). The fact that themes of community and proximity have come to be affirmed as desirable and necessary features of any democratic project, whether by the EU or in any other contexts, is not something to be taken for granted but explained. A genealogy is not a history of European integration in the conventional sense, but neither does it aspire to be a theory of European integration. Genealogy emphasizes the contingent, the unexpected, the unpredictable. ‘History is figured less as a stream linking past and future than as a cluttered and dynamic field of eruptions, forces, emergences, and partial formations’ (Brown 2001: 116). Instead of building theories based on macro-processes unfolding towards a given end (modernization, globalization, European integration) it deals with ‘events’. To orient ourselves towards the event is to make visible ‘a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant’ (Foucault 1991b: 76 original emphasis). It is to ask: what happened there and then that allowed things to be like this? Theories often seek to formulate causal propositions. Genealogies speak in terms of conditions of possibility.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK A genealogical perspective informs the organization of this book. The chapters which follow can each be read as events within the trajectory we have called the governmentalization of Europe. Each chapter explores a particular ‘worksite’, to adopt a term from Étienne Balibar (2004: 156). For each one concerns a play of forces and identities, an experimental construction of spaces, a deployment of technologies and a reconfiguring of relations such that something that did not hitherto exist in quite that form is brought into existence. At each of these worksites we can identify the emergence of a particular Europe. Our chapters cover a considerable amount of historical and empirical territory. Of course, this has certain disadvantages. For one thing it precludes us from engaging with any one topic in the kind of detail we would like. And we are conspicuously silent on such burning issues as the constitutional process, monetary union, EU enlargement, and foreign and security policy. But there are specific advantages to this relatively broad, if highly uneven sweep. Perhaps the most significant of these is the potential for novel forms

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of comparison. This move enables us to contrast the different Europes that emerge from, or exist in outline at these different worksites. No doubt, a book that confined itself to the economic integration of Europe would be able to get into the complexities of questions of economic regulation, transformations in economic policy, and much else. Similarly a book devoted to European cooperation in immigration and asylum policy would consider in greater detail how the institutional and conceptual field has shifted since Maastricht. But neither would be fully equipped to pursue questions about the way these different Europes – a Europe governed through markets, and an insecure Europe of external borders and transnational policing – look when placed side by side. For example, what should we make of the fact that they are apparently inhabited by different kinds of subject, a subject of economic freedoms in the case of the former, and a threatened, ‘Hobbesian’ citizen in the latter? If our aim is to denaturalize the Europe(s) within, and presumed by European integration, if our task is to trace out the governmentalities and rationalities where the ‘how’ of governing Europe is articulated, if our goal is to reflect on the conditions which make certain Europes possible, then the play of similarity and dissonance between the various chapters is crucial. Our hope is that this play brings the different worksites into a productive tension such that the unique features of their respective building projects – their architectures, decors, styles – becomes more readily grasped. Chapter two demonstrates how a focus on discourse, power and governmentality can shed new light on the politics and programmes usually associated with the ‘origins’ of the European Community. Its focus is Jean Monnet’s plan to create a coal and steel community, with a ‘high authority’ as its centrepiece. Mindful of the democratic problems of the EU today, many studies emphasize Monnet’s elitism and the technocratic method he proposed. Our point is not to deny Monnet’s ‘elitism’, but to place it in a different context. We relate Monnet and his plans not to the usual debates about functionalism and federalism, but to a different discursive space, that of ‘high modernism’ (Scott 1998). Embodying the dream of a rationally-planned, post-conflictual society, high modernism was a powerful current within the politics of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries by the middle of the twentieth century. Making such conceptual connections helps us grasp the modernity of European integration. A sub-theme of Chapter two concerns the early common market, and how it contains intimations of a sort of industrial public sphere. However, it is in Chapter three where we engage most fully with the theme of the common market. Undertaking a close reading of the Treaty of Rome, we pose a series of questions about the forms of power associated with the project of European economic integration. At the centre of our discussion is the particular technical conception of freedom, which is at work within the Treaty, and the relationship it bears to security. We argue that approaching

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the common market in terms of its political rationality opens the way to a revised way of understanding the subsequent attempt to ‘complete’ economic integration in the form of a single market. Chapters two and three are historical in their focus. This turn to history is not to uncover the origins of the integration project. Rather, in grasping the governmentalities that invested the genesis of the Community we want to establish a point of comparison for contemporary forms of European political reason. With the final three chapters our focus shifts to some very current preoccupations within EU studies. Chapter four looks at the democratic legitimacy of the EU and the production of what we term un/democratic Europe. Many studies operate with an assumption that we already know what democracy is. We propose an inessential perspective on democracy in the EU. We regard democracy as a ‘floating signifier’ whose precise identity only emerges in the course of political struggles. For instance, in many Western nation-states one of the ways in which the meaning of democracy was settled, however provisionally, was through a set of oppositions to a communist/totalitarian Other. Turning to the EU, what is interesting is precisely the absence of any one fix. Instead, there is what we call a ‘semi-crystallized’ problem-space, with no consensus on a single democratic identity. We seek to analyse this problemspace not in terms of its apparent failure with regard to a particular criterion (public sphere, party system, etc.), but by locating it within certain technologies of power. This move brings into focus the exceptionality of the EU’s democratic question. If Chapter four explores the worksite of un/democratic Europe, Chapter five investigates the construction of the Europe of ‘Schengenland’. Here we encounter a Europe troubled by all manner of mobile threats personified in figures like the human smuggler, the asylum-seekers and organized crime. Understood as an event, Schengenland is highly significant for the governmentalization of Europe. The rise of the common/single market marked a certain delinking of European security from territory, since security was organized not in terms of the defence of borders, but the regulation of markets. One consequence of Schengenland is that security and territory are re-linked, but now in new ways (as the awkward term, ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ implies). European security comes to be linked to anxieties about the movement of risky persons and staked on such practices as the common management of the ‘external frontier’. Finally, in Chapter six we examine what is sometimes regarded as a new form of integration and governance for the EU – the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC). We argue that under the rubric of the OMC, the space of European government is remodelled according to an ethos of enterprise and ‘self-improvement’. Through the deployment of such technologies as league tables, best practice, peer review and partnership, European institutions and their national and local partners, are enjoined to become a sort of community of self-improvement that is dedicated to making Europe into a sort of

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social and economic ‘centre of excellence’. If European government was imagined partly in terms of the technology of high modernist planning in the 1950s, today it is being rethought in part in terms of the idioms and practices of management theory. The governmentalization of Europe is indeed contingent and open-ended.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Foucault’s research on governmentality was presented largely in the form of a series of lectures. They were delivered in 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France under the titles of ‘security, territory and population’ (Foucault 1997) and ‘the birth of biopolitics’. For extensive discussion of ‘governmentality’ see Foucault (1991a); on the closely related theme of political rationality see Foucault (1988). For major collections and overviews see: Burchell et al. (1991); Rose and Miller (1992); Barry et al. (1996a); Dean and Hindess (1998); Rose (1999); Dean (1999b); Larner and Walters (2004). There are some important exceptions to this rule. Perhaps the foremost attempt to think the governmentality underpinning the EC/EU project is work by Andrew Barry on networks, communication, harmonization and the governance of extended spaces (Barry 1993, 1994, 1996, 2001). Barry and Walters (2003) discuss changing technological imaginations of Europe. For discussions of the political rationality of European integration see Walters (2004a) and on the comparison of European and Asian regional governmentalities see Beeson and Jayasuriya (1998). While not framed as governmentality, other work has explored the potential of Foucauldian analytics for our understanding of European government. See, inter alia, Diez (1999), Jørgensen (1999), Gottweis (1999) and Böröcz and Kovács (2001). It is only with the creation of international organizations in the 1940s and 1950s like the EC and the OEEC that this European economy emerges as an institutionalized object of policy. However, it is nevertheless anticipated and theorized somewhat earlier. Nothing better captures its significance and the governmentality made possible by the ‘discovery’ of the European economy than Keynes’ bitter remarks on the inadequacies of Versailles. ‘By excessive concentration on political objects and on the attainment of an illusory security, they overlooked the economic unity of Europe – illusory because security is to be found least of all in the occupation of extended frontiers’ (Keynes 1971: xix).

2

‘Seeing like a high authority?’ High modernism and European government

I was moving into territory that had hitherto had neither occupant nor name. (Monnet 1978: 241)

THE MODERNITY OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION It has become something of a commonplace today to observe that the EU, and the processes of European integration more generally, are linked in important ways to the emergence of postmodernity. Postmodernity is a somewhat elusive concept so it is hardly surprising that there are many ways in which this link is made. They include arguments about its connection to the ‘unbundling’ of modern territoriality and the ‘multiperspectival’ character of its polity (Ruggie 1993: 172); the fact that the integration process has become fragmented and relatively incoherent (Caporaso 1996: 49); and the observation that the EU has dispensed with the line which divides domestic and foreign affairs in favour of ‘a highly developed system for mutual interference in each other’s domestic affairs’ (Cooper 2000: 17). Scholars have found these and other iterations of the postmodern useful for thinking about the present and emerging character of European governance. However, far less attention has been paid in current debates to the relationship between the processes and practices of European integration and what we might call ‘the modern’.1 Yet this was not always the case. Earlier neofunctionalist theories of European integration were certainly underpinned by the assumptions of modernization theory. This was a theory which cast a long shadow across the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, much as ‘globalization’ does today. Modernization theory took a relatively positive view of the prospects for Western societies. It assumed they were developing away from conditions of scarcity, tradition and conflict towards a modern political culture of stable liberal democracy and personal achievement (cf. Delanty 1996). In an essay entitled ‘Technocracy, Pluralism and the New Europe’, Ernst Haas typified a great deal of the early thinking about European integration when he located the European Community squarely within this narrative of modernization. Equating the EC with the emergence

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of ‘supranationality’ he notes how its advent ‘symbolizes the victory of economics over politics, over that familiar ethnocentric nationalism which used to subordinate butter to guns, reason to passion, statistical bargaining to excited demands’ (Haas 1968: 159). Through these asymmetrical juxtapositions, Haas draws an equation between modernization and European integration. This chapter is concerned with the relationship of European integration to the modern. But we do not understand the modern in the above sense. It is not for us a dynamic or process which propels social change, nor an epoch whose logic touches everything. We want to eschew a substantialized understanding of the modern in favour of a position which treats it as a discourse about its present, a particular mentality of government. For this purpose we find the recent work of James Scott concerning ‘high modernism’ very useful (Scott 1998). For our purposes high modernism can be understood as a set of ideas, a social movement, and an approach to governance. As a set of ideas it takes shape in the early-twentieth century and is marked by a powerful faith in scientific and technical progress, the belief that expanded production could satisfy all human needs, and that the social order could be rationallyand scientifically-ordered (Scott 1998: 4). As a social movement, high modernism is borne by and affirms the knowledge, identity and prestige of a particular social stratum – planners, technocrats, engineers, architects and other experts. As a form of governance, high modernism is linked to ambitious, large-scale projects – the building of dams and highways, the rationalization of whole cities and economies. High modernism is big and bold: it makes the state responsible for nothing less than the modernization of society. We argue that this concept of high modernism can shed new light on the political identity and rationality, the governmentality of the EU/EC, particularly in its formative years when it first took shape as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).2 To focus our discussion we concentrate on the career of Jean Monnet and the critical role he played in launching the ECSC. In the case of the ECSC we are in the presence of a particular form of high modernism which we call liberal high modernism. We use this concept as a sensitizing device which allows us to see the genesis of the EC/EU in a slightly different light. While the ECSC is often located at the ‘origin’ of the EC/EU, our study explores the discursive space around the ECSC. It highlights its affinities with a range of contemporaneous modernizing projects. In this way we aim to produce a more historicized account of this event. There are two specific questions that we want to pursue in this chapter. The first is to develop at the level of a concrete case the theme of exceptionality which we introduced in Chapter one. Conventional histories

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practice a kind of presentism: they look for the seeds of the present in the past.3 One sees this in EU studies, for instance, whenever the beginnings of the EC/EU are discussed as a case of ‘early’ or ‘precocious’ globalization.4 Salient categories from the present are used to narrate the past. This move is quite at odds with the kind of genealogical mode of inquiry that we favour. It is at odds because it tends to smooth over the various ruptures, contingencies, accidents and discontinuities that are so constitutive of our present. To capture the specificity and the exceptionality of the past we need to pay close attention to its own forms of political reason and governmental practice. Studies of liberal high modernism can be helpful in this respect. They suggest other ways to read the moment of the ECSC besides seeing it as a first step towards a more integrated Europe. For it can also be seen as a moment where Europe emerges as something quite specific: as a positivity which, thanks to the availability of an ethos, a knowledge and a practice of modernization, can become governable in ways that were previously not possible – not as a geopolitical power system or a culture but as a space of industrial and social forces that can be calculated, reformed, and modernized. The second is to take up the theme of political invention. We want to avoid the impression that Monnet is simply a passive relay for high modernism, someone who takes a governmental formula from elsewhere and simply implements it. The historical record reveals the extent to which he had to negotiate between the pressures of the geopolitics of reconstruction, the intrigues of French politics, institutional rivalries and much else in establishing his coal and steel community (cf. Brinkley and Hackett 1991; Schwabe 1988). Monnet is connected to the world of high modernism, but he must adapt its methods of modernization and planning to make them suited for Europe. Hence we speak of Monnet in terms of liberal high modernism. This is to capture the way in which his relationship to European government is a highly inventive and creative one, a relationship that involves bringing into existence a way of thinking about and acting on Europe that was novel. Monnet transforms Europe; at the same time he transforms high modernism.

WHAT IS HIGH MODERNISM?

If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyere. (Scott 1998: 88)

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Jean Monnet is in unfamiliar company here. Scholars of European integration are used to roll calls and anthologies which place him alongside statespersons like de Gaulle, Schuman and Adenauer, or, perhaps, champions of a certain idea of European unity ranging from Kant, through Spaak to Jacques Delors. To encounter his name side-by-side with the likes of Lenin and the Shah is therefore somewhat jarring and unusual. On what basis is it justified? What’s the connection? To answer these questions we need, of course, to interrogate the idea of high modernism. Scott defines high modernism as follows. It is a particularly pronounced version – one might say intensification – of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress and instrumental rationality that first appear in association with industrialization in Western Europe and North America by the middle of the nineteenth century. At its centre it manifests

. . . a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied – usually through the state – in every field of human activity. (Scott 1998: 89–90; original emphasis)

It is important to note that high modernism represents a mutation within the much longer history of modernism understood as a political and cultural movement. This is clear in the work of David Harvey (1989), from whom Scott borrows the term. If modernism arose within politics, art or architecture as a challenge to tradition and to the established order, high modernism marks the point – sometime after World War Two – at which key elements of this complex formation become assimilated and appropriated within regimes of governance. High modernism signals the moment when modernist currents make their peace with the political establishment. High modernism monumentalized itself with the building of totallyplanned capital cities like Chadigarh, the capital of India’s Punjab, and Brasília. It is marked more generally with the take-up of the architectural ideas of CIAM, Le Corbusier and van der Rohe within programmes ‘to revitalize war-torn or ageing cities . . ., to reorganize transport systems, build factories, hospitals, schools . . . and last, but not least, to build adequate housing for a potentially restless working class’ (Harvey 1989: 35). For centuries modernists had dreamt of reorganizing society. But as long as states

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remained small agencies with limited coercive and organizational capacities such dreams were inevitably unfulfilled. The time of high modernism is one where the massive expansion of the state, greatly accelerated by two World Wars and the Great Depression, created the preconditions where these aspirations for societal engineering could begin to take programmatic forms. It is this programmatic moment that interests Scott. High modernism certainly left its imprint on liberal democracies, whether through schemes of urban planning and public housing, or plans for the modernization of industrial sectors and national economies. However, its more ambitious dreams of totalized social re-organization were typically checked and even stymied by representative mechanisms and counter-movements. But this was not always the case under authoritarian regimes or states of emergency. Its most fertile soil has been conditions of war, revolution, depression or struggles for national liberation; those situations where the future of society is on the line, when emergency powers can be issued, when the state is able and willing ‘to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these highmodernist designs into being’ (Scott 1998: 5). Under such conditions high modernism could be pursued much more fully, often with disastrous outcomes. The cases he explores include the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR and compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia. What is so striking is the way in which these and other schemes, each of which aspired to improve society, yet so often culminated in the opposite, giving rise to human and ecological disaster. For Scott high modernism is thus crucial for understanding, in the words of his subtitle, ‘how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed’. Our interest is somewhat different. We think high modernism is useful because it provides a name for a certain governmentality that became particularly prominent by the middle of the twentieth century. This was a governmentality which privileged a particular conception of science and technology as forces for social progress; elevated the status of the architect, the planner and the engineer as governmental authorities; and took as its privileged technologies of power, the bureaucracy and the plan. As a governmentality, high modernism has been a relatively flexible discourse. It has been capable of combining with the programmes of the political left and the right.5 But it has also operated upon a number of different political scales. It has shaped the way in which the locale of the factory and the city were governed as much as the national economy. In the remainder of this chapter we argue that if the name of Jean Monnet can be associated with high modernism – as Scott suggests it can – it is not an authoritarian high modernism but a specifically liberal version. Moreover, we argue that the case of Monnet reveals that in addition to spaces of work and leisure, or urban spaces and national orders, high modernism has also been instrumental in configuring a certain space of Europe.

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HIGH MODERNISM, COAL AND STEEL

Changing forms of expertise One of the valuable things about the idea of high modernism is that it alerts us to what we might call the historicity of expertise. It suggests that expertise does not take generic or unchanging forms. Rather, there is a history to those forms of expertise which societies valorize. Thus one must ask of any regime of power: what are the forms of expertise that it privileges? What are the forms of knowledge, the epistemological formations which particular kinds of expertise draw upon? If we can say that the last twenty years or so has seen programmes of neoliberalism and marketization strongly imprint themselves upon regimes of governance in Western countries, then we can also point to particular forms of expertise that these programmes have affirmed. Schemes to promote and diffuse market mechanisms have assumed as their epistemic correlates the know how of the accountant, the auditor, the advertising executive, the management guru, the charismatic entrepreneur and other exponents and exemplars of what Rose has called the ‘grey sciences’ (Rose 1996: 54). These know-hows are very much the counterparts of the kinds of governmental techniques we encounter with today’s ‘Open Method of Coordination’, a regime of European governance we discuss in Chapter six. High modernism, by contrast, can be mapped onto a somewhat different social milieu. Most of all its main carriers were ‘the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries’ (Scott 1998: 88). Biographies of Monnet (Duchêne 1994), not to mention his own memoirs (Monnet 1978) demonstrate his proximity to this social habitat. As such they illustrate at least one clear line connecting the world of high modernism and the formation of the Coal and Steel Community. Although Monnet had extensive experience in the world of business as a result of his family’s Cognac business, he also had a long record of involvement in various schemes of national and international planning. During World War One he was centrally involved in inter-allied executive committees concerning the planning of economic supplies. His success there saw him appointed as deputy to the Secretary-General of the ill-fated League of Nations. During World War Two he once again concerned himself with economic mobilization, serving as president of the Committee of Co-operation of the Allied War Effort. In 1946 Monnet’s activities turned explicitly towards ‘modernization’ as he became the first Commissaire Générale du Plan de Modernisation et d’Equipement. The ‘Monnet Plan’ would occupy him until his involvement with the Schuman Plan, his blueprint for European integration (Featherstone 1994: 152). Further light on the nature of Monnet’s relationship to this world of planners and engineers of the social is afforded by Rabinow (1989) who has

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undertaken an anthropology of the discursive formation he calls ‘French modern’. Rabinow highlights the particular role which ‘unbureaucratic bureaucrats’ played in programmes to modernize France. These were highlevel bureaucrats like Albert Thomas, Louis Loucheur and Etienne Clémentel who first achieved prominence during World War One (Rabinow 1989: 322–30). They were characterized as ‘unbureaucratic’ because they worked with very small teams within state departments, utilizing innovative planning methods in their bid to modernize key aspects of France’s industrial and armaments sectors. Many of their experiments in encouraging mass production and promoting productivisme were abandoned after World War One. Nevertheless, these experiments in high modern governance were to leave their mark on future developments in France and beyond. One way they did so was through Monnet, who was director of Clémentel’s cabinet. As we will see in the following section, if small teams working within larger bureaucracies proved to be a novel and creative social form, it was an invention that Monnet would later utilize in his efforts to fashion a form of governance for Europe. There is a second way in which the idea of high modernism can illuminate the form of the expertise which Monnet was to mobilize in his attempts to make Europe governable. This pertains to the question of elitism. Contemporary scholarship on European integration has criticized the elitist assumptions of Monnet’s formula for European integration. This is in large part because it is now seen as a contributory factor in the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’. As Featherstone has put it, ‘Monnet established the European integration process with a particular character – which was marked by technocracy and elitism . . . . [T]he legacy of this early strategy has been to afford the Commission a weak and fragile democratic legitimacy’ (Featherstone 1994: 150). As Monnet saw it, European integration was not to be achieved through explicitly political approaches but behind the public’s back, albeit assuming a ‘permissive consensus’ concerning the validity of its goals. ‘I have never believed that one fine day Europe would be created by some great political mutation’, he writes, ‘and I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of the Community of which they had no practical experience’ (Monnet 1978: 367). European integration was to be accomplished gradually, by pragmatic steps beginning in areas like coal, steel and nuclear power well away from the glare of public opinion and the controversies of ‘high’ politics. The understanding was that a combination of elite negotiations, interest group pressures, and ‘spillover’ would lead to integration in other areas. Eventually, almost inevitably, political integration would be called forth. Our point is not, at least at this stage, to dispute Monnet’s elitism, nor to query its political ramifications for the present, but to place it in a different context. By connecting Monnet to the field of high modernism we want to suggest that this elitism was certainly not merely a quirk of his personality,

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or the expression of his personal background. Nor is it even the legacy of the longer tradition of functionalism associated with the likes of Mitrany and Carr, notwithstanding the obvious affinities that functionalism has with high modernism. Our point is that Monnet belonged to a wider and in some ways more heterogenous regime of thought and practice that traversed multiple domains, such as business, finance and government. High modernism affirmed that human affairs could be rationally planned and improved by the application of specific knowledge and techniques of planning, engineering, and design. It offered a programmatic vision in which small groups of experts could dispassionately and objectively engineer the improvement of social life in all its aspects. These small groups constituted themselves not merely as an elite but something more specific – an avant garde that had a capacity and a responsibility to intervene in human affairs, pushing history forward. Seen in the context of high modernism, Monnet’s elitism was not exceptional but normal. This is not to excuse or justify it, but simply to contextualize it as a form of political (or, more appropriately, anti-political ) subjectivity.

Liberal high modernism and practices of European integration Thus far we have suggested that Monnet belongs at some level to the social milieu of high modernism; its networks – of both persons and concepts – served as conditions of possibility to think of the government of Europe in a particular way. However, we do not want to present high modernism as something monolithic or homogenous, to imply the existence of a singular high modernist doctrine that is invariant across different political and institutional settings. High modernism is a field of invention and variation; it can be articulated with different political regimes. Scott suggests as much with his explorations of authoritarian high modernism. In considering the actual methods Monnet envisaged as appropriate to the promotion of European integration, we will argue that he improvises a form of liberal high modernism. From Lenin to Le Corbusier high modernists dreamt of a complete reconstruction of society. A common element in their dreams is the aspiration to govern from the centre, to engineer a new society from the top down. High modernism prioritizes the bureaucracy and the plan as its technologies of power. These cease to be merely methods or institutions; rather, like the market or the network today, they can be regarded as ‘diagrams’. This is because they express a privileged technique which is transposable across the social space, and an abstract understanding of how social order is to be organized in a given setting.6 Like other high modernists, Monnet was a keen advocate of the plan. What is fascinating about his case is how he re-invents the whole practice of planning. He reveals that planning is not some invariant instrument to be grasped and applied by the technocrat. Rather the word conceals a regime of

‘‘Seeing like a high authority?’ 29 practices, whose composition will vary from one site to another. When Monnet undertook the creation of the French modernization plan in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the dominant idea of planning at that time was centralist and inspired in significant ways by the Soviet experience. It assumed the creation of a ‘super-ministry’ which was to impose coordination upon the different centres of expertise and administration (Duchêne 1991: 187). France had also experienced ‘administrative’ planning under Vichy (Kuisel 1981). Monnet’s approach was different, but how? Monnet assumed a much greater role for dialogue, negotiation and collective problem-solving with representatives of industry, labour, the civil service and other interested parties. The term concertation was invented to name this novel process (Miller 1986: 89). Within the context of the French modernization plan, concertation was institutionalized in the form of 18 Modernization Commissions. Under the mentorship of Monnet’s experts, these were fora where the various actors were to contribute to the formulation of programmes for modernization. Monnet saw concertation as a persuasive technique of ‘having people share in the setting of economic targets they would then be asked to attain’ (Monnet 1978: 239). This relatively flexible and inclusive vision of planning was something he would transpose to the operations of the High Authority in the form of a ‘Consultative Committee’. As scholars of European integration have noted, its legacy was to give neofunctionalist integration its distinctive character – one in which the European Commission relies heavily on ‘elite capture’ and the formation of extensive networks which reach well beyond its institutional boundaries (Featherstone 1994: 155). There are two points we wish to make here concerning Monnet’s vision of planning. The first is to reiterate how it contrasts with the more authoritarian forms of high modernism which Scott describes. Monnet’s method has been aptly called ‘a kind of working compromise between economic liberalism and dirigisme’ (Ardagh 1977: 43–4; quoted by Miller 1986: 89). From our perspective it is a liberal version of high modernism because it seeks to govern not in a totalizing fashion, but by enrolling and coopting others. ‘The High Authority ought to remain a nucleus and confine itself to organizing and stimulating the work of others,’ Monnet remarks, ‘The French Modernization Plan had shown that authority could best be exercised by small teams’ (Monnet 1978: 373). The challenge was one of ‘transposing into the organization of Europe the principle underlying the Modernization Commissions, and running a complex entity with a small team very precisely aware of what existed and what was needed in every field’ (Monnet 1978: 329). Whether modernizing France or integrating Europe this style of governing aims to achieve its ends with a minimal deployment of energy and force. The fact that Monnet valorized the small, closely knit team can appear in retrospect as another expression of his famous elitism. On closer inspection its rationale is somewhat more sophisticated. The emphasis on

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teams derives in part from the French tradition of ‘unbureaucratic bureaucrats’ which we mentioned above. Teams were to be small, flexible, creative organizations. But the team had an additional value: in terms of its very image, the small team was itself envisaged as a technology of cooperation. ‘People collaborate willingly when they see you are not trying to supplant them or take their place’ (Monnet 1978: 373).7 Foucault observes how modern political economy derives its name in part from the attempt to introduce economy into the running of the state (Foucault 1991a: 92). Monnet’s vision of governance is economic in a similar sense because it seeks to harness the energies of others – existing agencies and actors – rather than replacing them with a giant bureaucracy. But it is economical in a second sense: in terms of its relationship to the economy. The French Modernization Plan did not aspire to govern across the entire economic space. Instead, it identified strategic ‘sectors’ such as coal, steel and farming which were deemed ‘bottlenecks’ from the perspective of the wider productive effort (Kuisel 1981). We tend to take the idea of sectors as self-evident. However, as Peter Miller has noted, like the distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ or the notion of ‘branches of industry’, they should be seen as elements within an epistemology of planning, particular ways of constructing the economy as a knowable and manipulable field (Miller 1986). Like the method of concertation, the political epistemology of the sector would provide a template for European governance. In certain respects the founding premiss of neofunctionalism – namely that the governance of Europe might follow from the governance of strategic industrial sectors – is unthinkable without it. The second point we make about Monnet’s notion of planning concerns its potential to illuminate the relationship between governance and invention. Deleuze and Guattari note how political creation always takes place in ‘cramped space’; it is called forth in the encounter with ‘choked passages’ (Thoburn 2003: 19), under conditions where certain possibilities are closed off. This is perhaps a helpful way to consider Monnet’s reinvention of planning, and with it, the possibilities for European governance which it opens up. He may have enjoyed a political alliance with De Gaulle, but it is not as an elected leader that Monnet appears on the political scene in post-war France. Nor can he act as one who occupies the apex of the state’s administrative machinery. He does not head the Ministry of Finance. The question Monnet confronts when he undertakes the Modernization Plan in France is this: how to govern, how to modernize when you don’t and can’t occupy the established centres of authority? How to govern as one who arrives, as it were, from outside? Or as he put it himself: ‘how to lead an immense collective effort without ourselves controlling the decision-making apparatus – of either the state or the firms’ (Kuisel 1981: 226). In short, with the modernization of France Monnet fashioned a method of governing that was to work through and around entrenched interests and institutions. This was a lesson, a formula (small teams, concertation, etc.) that would prove transposable –

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albeit not without certain modifications and reversals – to the ‘organization’ of Europe.8 Without the extensive powers to compel member states, lacking the prestige of a superstate, the High Authority will look to this art of governing without ‘controlling the decision-making apparatus’.

Seeing like an international state? Reflecting on the relatively plural and open vision of planning which Monnet embraced, and at the modest but strategic role he accorded the High Authority in the governance of Europe, we noted that this move deserves the title of liberal high modernism. The character of this liberal high modernism is further clarified when we consider another dimension: the way in which the interventions of the High Authority, and the European Community more generally, bring a new visibility to the space of the European economy. Perhaps we can say that planning and coordinating coal and steel production were only one part of the significance of the High Authority and its institutions for the government of Europe. As integral to their mode of governing is the fact that they will enable Europe to be seen in new ways. In close connection to his thematization of high modernism, Scott develops an argument concerning the place of ‘legibility’ within statebuilding. The exercise of modern power within the state, he insists, is bound up closely with multiple practices of standardization, measurement and surveillance, practices that make the state’s domain legible. To tax or to conscript, to educate or to punish its population, the state must first be able to see them. Scott offers us many examples of practices of legibility. They include the struggle within France to impose standardized units of measurement – most notably the metre – upon the complicated, local and customary ways in which peasants had measured produce; and the phenomenon of cadastral mapping, a measure used, for instance, in nineteenth century Russia as a way of determining who owned what land. Armed with the cadastral map, authorities sought to cut through the tangled undergrowth of local tenure relations and their ‘fiscal illegibility’ and determine what exactly was owed to the state by whom. Social security numbers and biometric profiles are thus only the most recent ways in which questions of commerce, property, taxation, and security have gone hand in hand with these games of making populations and social processes legible to political and other authorities. It goes without saying that these and many other forms of legibility have been prerequisites and outcomes of projects of high modernism. Monnet’s balance sheet But it is not just states that must be able to see in order to govern. As Rose and Miller insist, government requires inscription, whatever the locale or

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scale. ‘By means of inscription, reality is made stable, mobile, comparable, combinable. It is rendered in a form in which it can be debated and diagnosed’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 185). The governance of Europe is endlessly debated in terms of laws, institutions, and policies. But what of the inscription of Europe? Very little attention has been paid to the construction of Europe at the level of practices of legibility. Evidently Monnet was no stranger to these practices of legibility. His commitment to the balance sheet illustrates rather nicely how governance was for him intimately linked to the invention of new ways of seeing. While he was not much given to philosophical introspection, it seems the figure of the bilan or balance sheet formed a central motif throughout his career. The bilan was both a technique, a working method, and a political ethos. On the practical side it was, as George Ball (a senior American diplomat involved in the reconstruction of Europe) notes in his introduction to Monnet’s memoirs, a ‘technique of analysis and persuasion’ (Monnet 1978: 13). It served as ‘a balance sheet of needs and resources’ which Monnet used in the context of his consultative planning sessions. Each participant in the planning exercise knew their own situation in detail. The aim of the bilan was to demonstrate to these partners in hard, statistical terms the bigger picture or overall view. In this way Monnet hoped, as Ball puts it, ‘to compel less imaginative men to view the problem as a whole’ (Monnet 1978: 13). ‘Industrialists, engineers, and trade unionists . . . were usually right about their own subjects but wrong, more often than not, about the problem as a whole’ (Monnet 1978: 257). For Monnet this grasp of the bigger picture was the essential starting point for any successful planning venture. Rather like national income accounting or any other technology of national economic measurement (Miller 1986), the bilan sought to give a tangible, calculable form to the industrial performance of its units, whether these were connected with the modernization of the French economy, or later, the economic needs and priorities of the nascent common market. But it also suggests that for Monnet planning was a transformative process, bringing new realities into existence and striving to shape the subjectivity of its participants. Perhaps it is not surprising that Monnet described the first and most urgent task of the High Authority as drafting a balance sheet. Drawing in three hundred national experts from the member countries the High Authority began its life with an audit of the Community’s coal and steel output (Monnet 1978: 376). Duchêne notes that by the 1950s as Monnet became engaged in the Schuman Plan the ethos underlying the bilan was ‘expanded into a political concept as the general view (vue générale). This logical extension was much more profound and, in effect, still underpins the whole rationale of the Community system’ (Duchêne 1991: 201). In other words Monnet saw the High Authority and later the European Commission as the repository of a general view which member states alone were incapable

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of visualizing. These bodies were to be vested with various legal powers such that they could act in the name of this general, ‘European’ view. But equally important is the understanding that compulsion should not be the rule. The very fact of making a European view available to participants was intended to modify their conduct. The production of this general view, whether through balance sheets, reports or any of the other ways in which the European institutions make ‘Europe’ visible and tangible, is to implicate them in more European ways of governing. The concept of the bilan illustrates how Monnet saw the High Authority and later the Commission as an agent which governs by making Europe visible as a positivity which could be said to have ‘needs’ or ‘priorities’. At the same time it confronts member states with this construct as a framework for governing their own conduct. It lends support to our case for the liberal character of Monnet’s high modernism since it utilizes forms of governance which work not by compulsion but more by the mobilization of technical knowledge as a mechanism of persuasion. This line of argumentation can be better grasped if we turn our attention away from Monnet’s own methods, and consider the working practices of the High Authority which he was to inaugurate. The ‘transparency’ of the common market One of the more novel features of the High Authority was that it was committed not just to removing tariffs, unfair subsidies and ending quotas on trade in the areas of coal and steel, but the enhancement of competition in a properly transnational common market. Anti-trust ideas pervaded its economic policy (Gillingham 1991). Various explanations have been given for this emphasis on competition which Monnet in particular brought to the European Community. These include the connection between competition and modernization which Monnet first drew in the French context, and a political calculation that a commitment to competition would help to gain acceptance for the Community project within the United States Government (Stirk 1996: 125). There was a long history of protectionism within French industry while the high degree of cartels within its coal and steel industries was a central feature of Germany’s distinctive form of ‘organized capitalism’. Americans like Dean Acheson feared the coal and steel community was simply a new form of European cartel (Dinan 1999: 22). The United States viewed industrial cartels as an obstacle to raising productivity in Europe – a key goal of the Marshall Plan. But the cartel also provoked certain political fears. Especially during the 1930s, the cartel had also featured in an economic theory of fascism. This theory drew connections between fascism and the rise of monopoly capitalism. Roosevelt went so far as to define fascism as ‘ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power’ (Maier 1987: 131).

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De-cartelization was not just an economic imperative; it was seen to be an instrument in the campaign to rebuild democracy in Western Europe. If a commitment to improved competition within Europe’s coal and steel industries was of paramount importance to the High Authority, and the notion of a common market more generally, then one way this was made into a positive field of knowledge and intervention was in the area of pricing. Here we want to note the way in which the High Authority makes the ‘price mechanism’ into a technology of European government. For this move reveals the particular salience of practices of legibility in European government. It also leads to further nuancing of our attempt to relate Monnet and the European Community to the wider field of high modernism. It underscores the liberal character of its high modernism. Within the highly cartelized and protected coal and steel industries which the European Community sought to reform, the widespread practice of ‘double-pricing’ came to stand as a symptom of much that was wrong. It was a discriminatory practice in which foreigners generally paid more for the same products than domestic buyers, another legacy of those ‘absurd regulations which were legitimate in a context of national rivalry’ (Monnet 1978: 387). What is significant for our purposes is that the High Authority did not utilize price controls to tackle this issue directly. Instead, it seeks to govern at a distance by shaping the conditions under which prices were set. As one French working group put it when devising the common market, ‘The essential task of the Authority in this [pricing] field would be to set general rules designed to enable the price system to perform its real function’ (quoted in Diebold 1959: 240). To set prices, other than under emergency or exceptional circumstances, would be to usurp an essential ‘freedom’ that was proper to any functioning economy. The task was not to set prices but to encourage commercial actors to exercise this freedom in responsible ways. Not only were some companies unfamiliar with price competition, in some countries and sectors they were unused to the right of being able to set prices. Monnet displays a classically liberal understanding of liberty when he notes that ‘business as well as consumers will have to undergo a veritable apprenticeship in liberty’ (quoted in Diebold 1959: 256). The objective becomes one of constituting the coal and steel industries as a self-regulating domain populated by responsible economic actors, agents who begin to resemble industrial citizens. But the question remains, how did the High Authority seek to install a functioning price mechanism as both an instrument and an end of European governance? More broadly, how did it strive to fashion itself as a tutor in the arts and responsibilities of economic freedom? Of particular interest here is the novel principle of ‘price publicity’. This was contained in the ‘fair trade code’ which set out the basic rules of conduct for firms operating in the common market. As Haas notes, it was a method not unlike that of the Fair Trade Commission in the United States (Haas 1958: 64). It called

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upon all producers to regularly submit their price schedules, terms of sale and transport to the High Authority. These terms would then be circulated to any interested purchasers. The code did not forbid producers from aligning prices at any time to match competition. But such changes could not be arbitrary. Any discrimination in the application of price schedules was forbidden. Price, quantity and other terms were to be equalized across the community (Haas 1958: 63–4). Publication of price lists, reports by the High Authority, and the discussion throughout the Community about the issues involved, all help to focus the attention of labour, consumers, governments, and the general public on prices, their changes, justification, and effects. This is bound to cramp the style of a price-raiser who might be tempted to go to extremes if unobserved. The need to make a reasonable case, to present a responsible front to the world, and to avoid generating too much opposition, all operate to moderate price rises . . . This kind of publicity and attention, we are told, is new in Europe and is largely the contribution of the Community. (Diebold 1959: 168) No doubt this indirect mode of regulating price was imperfect and compromised in practice. It was to be supplemented by a complicated formula concerning ‘basing points’, a method influenced by the United States’ experience with market regulation (Diebold 1959: 275–8). And it would need to be bolstered by certain surveillance and police powers: the High Authority was to wield an inspectorate conducting spot-checks on producers (Haas 1958: 65). Nevertheless, Diebold is correct to observe that at issue here are a series of interventions which seek to enhance the ‘transparency of the market’ (Diebold 1959: 276). We see how price publicity serves to constitute the Community as a sort of industrial public sphere. A functioning price mechanism is constituted not by the Community understood as a directing centre, but as a space of mutual observation, criticism and peer pressure. It is the gaze of the fellow industrialist, or the watchful consumer as much as the scrutiny of the Community official which is to accomplish the ends of a European industrial community. We will return to the governmental character of the common market in the following chapter. Here we want to make two further remarks pertaining to our discussion of high modernism. The first concerns the issue of seeing like a state. The high modernism, which Scott so eloquently documents, operates along starkly hierarchical lines. The practices of legibility he describes, whether censuses, cadastral maps, tax registers, architectural plans, or even the redesign of the urban space of the city, are about making the world visible at a centre. This centre is the planner’s office, the government department. The ambition, which invests these interventions, is one of

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maximizing control over these domains and optimizing their performance. We have seen that Monnet and his High Authority share some of these concerns. However, it is a different plane of visibility which is at issue in the high modernism of the European Community. Europe is to be rendered legible within the reports, offices and bureaux of the organizational centres in Luxembourg and Brussels. But equally, it is about making Europe visible to its members. The common market and the European Community are lateral or transversal spaces which intersect the hierarchical, centre/periphery lines of high modernism. They constitute horizontal spaces whereby political order and economic progress are tied to relations of mutual observation and regulated competition. In short, it is a regime which installs practices of legibility within its population to constitute them as a matrix of progressive forces. This is liberal high modernism because it combines a confidence in planning and other technocratic methods with a commitment to self-regulation on the part of the governed. Our second point concerns the question of elitism. We have already noted how Monnet’s outlook shares a certain ethos of elitism that is common to the high modernist dispensation. However, in light of what we have noted concerning this industrial public sphere, elitism is a somewhat problematic and ambiguous term. It is true that this was a vision of European integration which presupposed the active involvement of a relatively narrow section of society – leaders of business, labour and national and European public officials. Inasmuch as it did not assume the participation or interest of a mass public then indeed we might concur that what Bellamy and Warleigh (1998) call the ‘ethics of integration’ were elitist. Inasmuch as Monnet (unsuccessfully) resisted moves to balance the power of the High Authority with an elected European body, then there would appear to be an aversion to wider public involvement. However, this move to name this model of integration as elitism runs the risk of a certain presentism. It involves a negative assessment of Monnet’s vision of integration which is made from the perspective of a present where the problem has become one of ‘involving’ the European public. Monnet’s approach is certainly elitist in terms of current political and cultural norms. Yet when seen within its own temporal horizon it becomes apparent that this was a move designed to open up an industrial domain which had been previously characterized by collusion and secrecy. By promoting the transparency of the market the High Authority advanced the principle of openness and dialogue in industrial affairs. It challenged the deeply rooted discriminatory practices of an industrial world ruled by coal and steel barons. The fact that its imagined public sphere was to take shape across a transnational industrial space rather than following the conventional lines of political institutions – parliaments, media, etc – should not obscure the fact that this was still at some level an attempt to govern through a certain form of publicity.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS The concept of high modernism sheds new light on the genesis of the EC/EU. But let us be clear: we do not propose it as a superior concept to functionalism, supranationalism or other terms which have more conventionally been used to theorize the genesis, structure and development of European integration. We do not freight it with the promise of a truer grasp of the reality of European integration, if that were possible, but something more modest. We see high modernism as a lens or a sensitizing device. It reveals that while they are different in most respects, Lenin’s USSR, Niemeyer’s Brasília and Monnet’s Coal and Steel Community bear certain affinities or, as Wittgenstein might have put it, ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1958: para 67). These include a powerful will to be modern, a profound faith in the power of planning and order, a certain strain of techno-utopianism, and an obsession with visibility. Yet these resemblances and traits are often missed when comparisons of the European Community are confined to other international organizations and policies, or federal polities. The value of a concept like high modernism is to provoke comparisons that cut across the usual boundaries which divide the international from the domestic or the urban.

From ‘origins’ to ‘conditions of possibility’ But high modernism has also allowed us to consider the discursive space of European governance. It has enabled us to frame the genesis of the EU/EC not as a question of ‘origins’ but at the level of its conditions of possibility. For high modernism names the regime of concepts and practices within which it becomes possible to imagine ‘Europe’ as something that might become the object of certain ‘policies’ of ‘integration’. It helps us identify the political, epistemological, technical and ethical conditions under which small groups of individuals could accord to themselves a seemingly momentous responsibility: to engineer the future of ‘Europe’. High modernism made available a certain ethos of expertise, a certain productivist politics, and certain governmental techniques through which Monnet and others were able to think about and act on Europe. This is not a question of adopting and applying forms in any sort of instrumental way, but as we showed in discussing Monnet’s reinvention of planning, always one of improvising, mutating, bending the materials at hand. To speak of conditions of possibility is to gesture towards studies which are always, and necessarily incomplete. High modernism may have furnished certain conditions which made it possible to think the governance of Europe in a particular way, but it cannot stand as any kind of final explanation. Different studies of this period would uncover the way in which other discursive formations allowed Europe to be thought as a space of governance. One

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would be the discourse of Zollverein. But the one we take up in the following chapter is the German discourse of ‘ordoliberalism’, and how it proved capable of rationalizing the idea of a common market.

From high modernism to high postmodernism? If the concept of high modernism allows for new ways of comparing the European Community across space, it also suggests novel ways to plot it temporally. One question this observation of the liberal high modernism of the EC begs is the following: is the EU still modern? Or might we follow the line of analysis we sketched at the outset, the one that highlights its postmodernity? Much depends of course on the criteria we use to contrast the modern and the postmodern. While it is not our intention to undertake this kind of investigation here, there is at least one axis of change that the concept of high modernism can help us to plot. This concerns the relationship of expert knowledge to politics. High modernism espoused an avant-gardist view of the knowledge/ politics nexus. It upheld the image of the visionary planner who was to grasp the bigger picture and to shape reality in accordance with this superior rationality. But according to the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, expertise can no longer work like this under postmodern social conditions. He gives several explanations, including the decentredness and ‘complexity’ of the postmodern ‘habitat’ or social space. Modern social theories of society worked with mechanical models in which lines of cause and effect were relatively clear. These were also to be vectors of policy action. However, Postmodern habitat is a complex (non-mechanical) system … [t]here is no ‘goal setting’ agency with overall managing and coordinating capacities or ambitions – one whose presence would provide a vantage point from which the aggregate of effective agents appears as a ‘totality’ with a determined structure of relevances; a totality one can think of as an organization. (Bauman 2001: 177–8; original emphasis) The future role of the European Commission is currently under debate. Amongst the more visible and pressing issues are new methods of choosing the president and the allocation of Commission seats. However, it is also possible to find echoes of this theme of complexity, and its implication for the role of expert knowledge and policy-making within the Commission within these debates. Consider, for instance, the work of the Forward Studies Unit (FSU), a think-tank linked to the Commission. This has been a forum for a line of analysis which seems to outline a postmodern vision for the Commission.

‘Seeing like a high authority?’

39

In a series of papers produced as inputs for the recent White Paper on European Governance (European Commission 2001a), we find the FSU advancing an argument that bears certain affinities with Bauman’s.9 Here we find the argument that in its heyday the welfare state embodied a model of substantive rationality. It ‘proceeded on the basis that the organs of government have the cognitive and material resources and abilities to understand and resolve the problems of society’ (Lebessis and Paterson 1997: 13). This model is no longer viable under the kind of ‘complex’ conditions which Bauman describes. But complexity also exposes the limits of the neoliberal alternative to the welfare state, namely a return to the formal rationality of the liberal state and the generalization of the market solution. Instead, the FSU calls for a third position, an ethos of procedural rationality. This position recognizes that there exists ‘no single universal model of reality’ available, and, moreover, no means by which we could arrive at one (Lebessis and Paterson 1997: 13). It affirms the contingency and contestability of all models of reality. Rather than govern on the basis of a single model, it sees the challenge as one of developing new forms of governance where competing systems of knowledge are encouraged and accommodated. ‘The emphasis shifts away from improving information and action based on a dominant model … and towards a concern with the adequacy of the procedures by which different models are exposed to each other, that is confronted with their own contingency and encouraged into a posture of collective learning’ (Lebessis and Paterson 1997: 14). It is perhaps too soon to discern whether, and how far the European Commission might travel along this path towards procedural rationality and a more postmodern understanding of expertise. However, in its rethinking of the future role of the Commission within policy-making, the 2001 White Paper on European Governance certainly hints at this rationality. Mindful of the need to enhance the legitimacy of the EU, it notes that the ‘the linear model of dispensing policies from above must be replaced by a virtuous circle, based on feedback, networks and involvement from policy creation to implementation at all levels’ (European Commission 2001a: 11). It calls for greater connection with ‘civil society’ and a ‘reinforced culture of consultation and dialogue’ (16). This is to include attempts to enhance the plurality and transparency of sources of expert advice within EU policy-making (19). Insofar as the Commission has been identified with proliferating policy networks, a non-hierarchical, partly informal and relatively decentralized space which connects it to all manner of ‘non-state’ actors (Risse-Kappen 1996: 60), perhaps we could find evidence in these networks for a postmodern turn in its conception of expertise. At the same time, given that it still faces the problem of how to win the interest and involvement of a wider ‘European’ public – an issue we take up in Chapter four – could we perhaps say this is a restricted postmodernism, possibly an instance of high postmodernism?

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

One important exception is Hansen and Williams (1999) who focus on the discourse of functionalism that was so central to the genesis of the EC/EU. It is sometimes observed that, unlike the nation-state, the EC/EU has failed to develop its own legitimating myths. They take issue with this view: with its fetishization of technology and progress, they argue, functionalism is itself already mythic. ‘A central aspect of modernist rationalization lies in its ability – its truly mythic ability – to present itself as homeless and timeless’ (1999: 241). The Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community was signed in 1951. A central feature of its institutional architecture was a High Authority tasked with the regulation of coal and steel production and trade across the six member states – France, West Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy. Monnet had pushed for a powerful, ‘supranational’ role for the High Authority. But intergovernmental negotiations around the creation of the ECSC saw the powers of the High Authority checked by the addition of a Council of Ministers and, to a lesser extent, an Assembly (Stirk 1996: 123–6). For a discussion of the problem of ‘anachronism’ in political theory, which certainly bears on what we are calling ‘presentism’, see Condren (1997). Similarly, what Hobson (2002) calls ‘tempocentrism’ has many of the same characteristics as presentism, not least the projection of the present back through time in a way that smoothes over and obscures difference. For example, see Ross who argues that ‘At its origins European integration was meant to resolve European regional problems, not to promote globalization. Yet its creation was strongly conditioned by processes of globalization at work long before the concept was used in popular discourse’ (Ross 1998: 179). For Ross, such processes include ‘the reconfiguration of great power politics into a bipolar planetary mode’ and ‘the success of American-style Fordist consumerism as a model for Europe and others to emulate’. These geopolitical and economic phenomena were certainly vital factors in the launching of the EC/EU. However, our concern is that by naming them ‘processes of globalization’ one imposes a developmental logic and a certain unity on them. The diverse and discontinuous logics and contingencies which made European integration possible are obscured. Bauman’s (1989) important study of the Holocaust reveals a high modernist element within the Nazi programme for social and racial purity allied to industrialism. Similarly there is a high modernism of the revolutionary left which finds expression in Lenin’s famous dictum about ‘Soviets plus electrification’. According to Deleuze, one of Foucault’s great accomplishments was to identify the diagram of discipline. As Rajchman puts it: ‘It was a diagram of something at work in many different institutions and situations, spread out in several countries, working in a manner not given in the map of social policies and prescriptions, planned as such by no one’ (Rajchman 1999: 47). Diagrams are thus not always transparent. Quite often we are unaware of their presence. We grasp them most clearly when the logics, techniques and assumptions they mobilize cease to function. One of the more intriguing asides within Monnet’s memoirs is his account of the setting of the CGP. Perhaps by force of circumstance it came to be located in a small private house on the rue de Martignac on the Parisian Left Bank. But Monnet saw a virtue in such necessity: these relatively humble dwellings were to contribute to the modest image Monnet wanted to project for his agency. In addition the cramped, labyrinthine interior of the building fostered a sense of intimacy and familiarity perhaps lacking in many large ministry buildings (Monnet 1978: 243). The very architecture of the headquarters was to function as a mechanism for team-building.

‘Seeing like a high authority?’ 8

9

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Researchers of the ECSC have observed that Monnet’s desire to run the High Authority on the basis of small, semi-formal teams was ultimately defeated. Within four years of its inception, the High Authority began to resemble a professional bureaucracy with the technocratic character of the French state (Featherstone 1994: 156). But it is important to recognize that ‘bureaucracy’ is not an inexorable process but itself a technology of government, embodying its own methods for the conduct of conduct, its own ‘ethos of office’ (Osborne 1994: 292). Was the bureaucratization of the High Authority inevitable? Perhaps it would be more fruitful to see its ‘interior’ a contested space, a field of competing schemes where the diagram of ‘the team’ lost out to that of ‘the bureau’. This paragraph draws substantially on the argument developed in Barry and Walters (2003).

3

The Common Market Governing Europe through freedom?

The basic law of the European Economic Community is liberal. Its guiding principle is to establish undistorted competition in an undivided market. Where rules are necessary to achieve this, they are rules to make freedom possible. For – to adopt a quotation from Kant – even freedom is ‘not the natural condition of man’. Consequently, such compulsion as may be necessary is directed first and foremost against those powers possessed by member-states which restrict the freedom of competition, and not against the citizens of Europe for whom this new freedom and the benefits that will flow from it are to be secured. (Hallstein 1972: 29)

INTRODUCTION One of the more interesting developments within recent political studies of the EU is surely the move to examine European integration as a space of competing ideas, ideologies, programmes and discourses. Increasingly, scholars are studying the political and institutional space of the EU in terms of political struggles between the political left and right. Hence, it is now possible to talk about the EU not just in the standard terms of integration – the intergovernmental versus the supranational, or the widening versus the deepening of integration – but in relation to competing political-ideological projects. A good example is recent work on ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘regulated capitalism’ as competing frameworks for the restructuring of the EU.1 This chapter contributes to this ongoing project of connecting EU studies to questions of political ideas, ideologies and discourses. Our specific focus is not a contemporary event or controversy but a particular text – the Treaty of Rome. We read the Treaty as a site of programmatic reflection concerning the possibility of European governance. What does the Treaty tell us about the dominant ways in which a practice of European government has been thought? In Chapter one we insisted that governing can be understood not just as a question of institutions or laws but the honing of specific arts, methods and techniques of ruling. What can the Treaty tell us about the arts of governing Europe?

The Common Market 43 We focus on the common market, a technology of power that occupies a central place within the Rome Treaty. The common market is usually treated as an institutional reality. It is regarded as a particular system of regional trade, investment and mobility, the very locus of the integration dynamic. But it may also be fruitful to see it in terms of a particular strategy or game, as a political technology embedded within a specific political rationality. In connection with this focus on the technique of common markets, we pay particular attention to the liberalism of the Rome Treaty. While the study of neoliberalism and its impact on contemporary European governance has become quite commonplace (e.g., Gill 2001), far less has been written about the relationship between liberalism and earlier moments within the history of European integration. When scholars have examined the liberalism of the Community, it has usually been from a perspective that relates liberalism to a particular set of ‘ideals’ (Weiler 1998). We are more interested in liberalism as a problematic than as a political philosophy, a particular political mentality that is preoccupied with the proper scope and economy of government. Hence, we are interested in the extent to which the Treaty proposes a liberal form of rule for Europe, a mode that governs through freedom. We explore how it envisages a political regime that administers populations in ways that both depend on and elicit the capacities of what are constructed as free individuals and collectivities (Rose 1999: 64). In the final part of the chapter we briefly consider the single market, the successor to the common market. This move enables us to reflect on transformations within the liberal mentality of government. However, texts are multiplicities. Our reading of the Treaty does not seek to reduce it to a monotonous liberalism which pervades its every aspect. On the contrary, we aim to show how the Treaty is invested by other rationalities and concerns as well. The important point is to understand how liberal games of governing through freedom are articulated with other games of security and order.

LIBERALISM, FREEDOM AND THE COMMON MARKET

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. (United States Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, 4 July 1776) His Majesty The King of the Belgians, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany [. . .], Resolved by thus pooling their resources to preserve and strengthen peace and liberty, and calling upon the other

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The Common Market peoples of Europe who share their ideal to join in their efforts [. . .], Have decided to create a European Economic Community. [ T]he activities of the Community shall include [. . .] the abolition, as between member states, of obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital. (Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, Rome, 25 March 1957, preamble and Article 3)

How do the rationalities and technologies of the Common Market present themselves when interrogated from the perspective of liberalism as an art of government? One way to answer this question is to specify the contexts within which the Treaty itself invokes ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’, to identify the means by which its meaning is fixed, and to highlight the consequences. A series of questions are relevant here, and we deal with each of them: What is its freedom? What is this freedom contrasted to? In which ways is it qualified and delimited? To which problematizations do these contrasts, qualifications and delimitations point?

Freedom as an instrument of government What is the freedom of the Rome Treaty? The proud, ‘self-evident’ truth in the opening sentences of the United States’ Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal and endowed with an unalienable right to liberty. Liberty has a transcendental source. And it is an individual possession that cannot be surrendered or transferred. Both the prominence and the meaning of liberty in the Declaration contrasts starkly with the constellation in the Treaty. The two passages quoted above contain the Treaty’s only mention of ‘liberty’ and its first mention of ‘freedom’. Not only is liberty clearly not very prominent, liberty and freedom have very different meanings for the founders of the United States. Transcendental sources of freedom have disappeared, and freedom has lost its relationship to individuality. ‘Liberty’ results from a ‘pooling of resources’ of member states and has a proximity to ‘peace’. It appears as a certain kind of good that can be provided by a pooling of resources, rather than as a right held by individuals. Or if it is a right held by individuals, it is only individuals in a certain, limited capacity. Freedom in the Rome Treaty serves an end. It does not constitute an end in itself. When the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, the effect is to constitute a foundation for political action. These ‘unalienable rights’ are the basis upon which the people of the United States founds its legitimacy and the strength to recast political authority, to assert its independence from the British crown. The status of these rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and their foundation in divinity marks them as ontologically given. They are ends which both authorize certain arguments, actions and institutions and

The Common Market 45 which authorities and institutions must respect and construct themselves around. They are the axis around which the political world is to revolve. Alternately, when the Treaty states in Article 3 that the Community shall include ‘the abolition, as between member states, of obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital’ it does so with explicit reference to a series of different ends. These ends are not in themselves elements of ‘freedom’: To ‘promote throughout the Community a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increase in stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living and closer relations between the States belonging to it’ (Article 2). Clearly, freedom has undergone a change from the Declaration of Independence to the Rome Treaty. Freedom has become a tool, a technology for the achievement of specific governmental objectives, such as stability, development, and rising standards of living. These objectives have replaced individual freedom as political imperatives: It is not liberty which defines the borders and forms of political authority and government. It is the objectives of harmonious economic development, balanced expansion, stability, raised living standards and ‘closer relations’ between the member states. The status of freedom as a tool of government is confirmed throughout the Treaty. For freedom is not articulated as a universal or abstract right. On the contrary it is contextualized and tied to various specific activities and practices. Freedom is ‘freedom of movement’ for persons, services and capital (Article 3), and for ‘workers’ (Articles 48, 135). It is ‘freedom of establishment for member state nationals’ (Articles 52 and 54), and the freedom to ‘provide services’ (Articles 59, 61, 62, 65). The classical liberalism of Adam Smith and other members of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ criticized and repudiated such political rationalities as raison d’état and ‘police’ because these doctrines sought to govern too much (Burchell 1991; Foucault 1991a). Crucial to their rejection of earlier forms of non-liberal rule was not just the identification of the individual as a bearer of rights and interests, but also the identification of a series of domains, quasi-natural spheres of processes located beyond the official sphere of the state and politics. These domains are understood as possessing their own immanent laws. Smith’s science of political economy was a knowledge of one such domain, ‘the economy’; Malthus’s political economy sought to grasp the laws of ‘population’; while Ferguson formulated ‘civil society’ as a realm possessing its own natural history. In this way classical liberalism took shape as a new art of government. It prescribed an economic form of government; economic because it would govern (in the name of) something called the economy. Unlike totalizing forms of rule which dream of a social world, organized in all its details by political authorities, liberalism is also economic because it seeks to govern in accordance with the natural, immanent laws of these domains. The proper context in which the freedoms of the Treaty are articulated is the identification of a comparable domain of economic processes. Now it is

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located not within the borders of the state, as it was for classical liberalism, but at an international-regional level. As Beeson and Jayasuriya have put it, ‘European integration is an attempt to extend these liberal modes of political rationality to the regional level . . . Central to this liberal process is the constitution of European regional economic space as an independent and autonomous arena of economic activity’ (Beeson and Jayasuriya 1998: 316). The freedoms of the Treaty thus rely on a knowledge space of the European economy as a governable entity. For the Treaty’s freedom is one that seeks to nurture economic processes, to establish the conditions for certain economic mechanisms to play themselves out. These are processes which require the possibility that workers can ‘move freely within the territory of the member states’, not because it is a fundamental human right vested in a free subject, but with more specific economic purposes: To ‘accept offers of employment actually made’ and to ‘stay in a member state for the purpose of employment’ (Article 48.3). Similarly, when the Treaty lays down a right of establishment, it is not as any individual, universal right, but as a specific, instrumental right: The ‘right to take up and pursue activities as self-employed persons and to set up and manage undertakings, in particular companies or firms’. The right of establishment is a right, which is to stimulate economic processes, a right which defines a certain room of possibility for economic mechanisms to carry out their workings and produce their effects.

The identification of European subjects Men are born and remain free and equal in rights . . . The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else [. . .] (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the National Assembly of France, 26 August 1789, Articles 1–4) Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community by the end of the transitional period at the latest. Such freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the member states as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment. (Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, Rome, 25 March 1957, Article 48)

The Common Market 47 Let us contrast the Rome Treaty to a second articulation of early liberalism: the French Revolution’s Declaration of Man and of the Citizen speaks of ‘Men’, born equal, with certain imprescriptible rights. This subject is free insofar as it has liberty, and liberty consists of the freedom to do everything which injures no one else. It expresses the early liberal conception of the subject as the bearer of rights and, as member of the collective of the people, the ultimate source of legitimate sovereignty. This is certainly a gendered subject: the Declaration speaks of men, not human beings; the French National Assembly simultaneously adopted a separate declaration on the Rights of Woman and Citizen. But the subject is also constructed as a citizen, that is: as the foundational member of a collectivity and the constitutive element of a political community. It is, of course, only quite recently that the idea of European Union citizenship has emerged as a site of explicit political discussion and institutional practice (Habermas 1992; Weiler 1999; Wiener 1997). Nowhere in the original Rome Treaty does the word ‘citizen’ appear. But there are frequent mentions of other subject categories. Article 193 on the establishment of an Economic and Social Committee summarizes many of the Treaty’s most important categories when it stipulates that ‘[the] Economic and Social Committee shall consist of representatives of the various categories of economic and social activity, in particular, representatives of producers, farmers, carriers, workers, dealers, craftsmen, professional occupations and representatives of the general public’. Subjects are thus defined in relation to categories of economic and social activity, by virtue of their function in the operation of economic processes and their role and contribution in a wider social fabric. And the rights or entitlements of subjects are intimately related to their participation in economic processes. Social security and benefit rights are, for instance, explicitly related to a freedom of movement for workers: The Council ‘shall adopt such measures in the field of social security as are necessary to provide freedom of movement for workers’ (Article 50). These are subjects who are subjectivized in a different sense than the individuals of inalienable rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance. In their capacity as contributors to economic processes they are objects of regulation. Their freedom of movement, for instance, is a relatively circumscribed, conditional freedom, a freedom which allows its subjects to move only in a purposeful direction. It is a right to seek employment. And it is a right which is valid only where it does not conflict with considerations of public health, security and policy, and only outside a domain of public service (Articles 48 and 49). Individuals of the Treaty are the object of governmental action. Rarely are they the political authors of such action. Apart from being the object of regulation in connection with freedom of movement, workers are the object of concerns for employment opportunities (Articles 3, 123) or of concerns for discrimination on the basis of nationality (Article 48.2). The young worker

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is an object of exchange programmes (Article 50), and the unemployed worker is the object of vocational retraining activities and resettlement allowances, of social security, payments of benefits and assistance programmes (Articles 51, 125). This somewhat pastoral conception of the subject is also found when ‘personal rights’ are mentioned in the Treaty. Following Article 220 ‘member states [. . .] shall enter into negotiations with each other with a view to securing for the benefit of their nationals [. . .] the protection of persons and the enjoyment of protection rights under the same conditions as those accorded by each state to its own nationals’. The formulation appears in the context of the Treaty’s overall concern for ‘free movement’, for securing conditions which do not hinder processes of movement across national borders. It points to a concern for ‘non-discrimination’, for ensuring that persons of foreign nationality should be entitled to the same ‘protection rights’ as nationals of a given state. However, it also constructs ‘protection rights’ as a governmental objective, and as an object for governmental processes of negotiation. ‘Protection rights’ is defined as a field upon which government must work, just as ‘persons’ in the process become objects of governmental action. Certain individuals, namely ‘their’ (the member states’) nationals, must be secured certain protection rights, namely the same as ‘the state’s own nationals’. Contrast this to a statement such as the French Revolution’s ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights – these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The men of the National Assembly are defined as the ultimate source of legitimacy and authority. The Persons of the Rome Treaty are more like the possession of states. Their protection rights are the object of processes of negotiation. And these rights are to be secured in order to obtain certain governmental objectives: protection rights serve the end of a specific freedom, a freedom of movement. The latter in turn serves yet another purpose, namely the stimulation of economic processes and ‘a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increase in stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living’.

MARKET ORDER? THE ORDOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE OF EUROPE We have stressed that, at the level of the Treaty of Rome, the common market is associated with a somewhat instrumental conception of freedom. It also reveals a relatively passive conception of the European subject. But what is the wider political and social context for these identities? One line of response has already been suggested in Chapter two. There we drew a series of connections and comparisons between the first European Community, that of Coal and Steel, and the discourse of high modernism.

The Common Market 49 This emphasized the extent to which the Community idea was invested with the aspiration that societies could be planned and growth could be engineered. It stressed the manner in which European integration was staked upon a pronounced confidence in the visions and capabilities of a certain genre of experts like Monnet. It should not be surprising, then, that a project with close associations to high modernism should advance these kinds of freedom and subjectivity. But there is a second line of investigation we want to pursue here. This is to consider the diagram of the common market and its specific art of government in terms of a mutation not within modernism but within liberalism itself. While liberalism and modernism are obviously intimately connected at the level of cultural formation, for analytical purposes it is possible to draw a distinction. One of the peculiar features of the common market is its artificiality, its manifestly constructed nature. The common market is identified within the Treaty, and within countless subsequent reports, regulations, and directives, as a reality that is not natural but artefactual. Its ‘free’ flow of goods, workers, capital and so on is seen to require constant governmental attention. As we will see, it requires the construction of an elaborate institutional framework and a timetable to bring it into existence through carefully described stages. For this reason, it might be useful to consider the common market in light of a particular form of twentieth century liberalism, namely ordo-liberalism.

What is ordoliberalism? Ordoliberalism represents a distinctive turn within liberal thought refracted through a concrete engagement with questions of the breakdown of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, and then by questions of the reconstruction of modern Germany following defeat in World War Two (Peacock and Willgerodt 1989; Peacock et al. 1989; Sally 1998; Tribe 1995: ch. 8). Rather like Keynesianism, the emergence of ordoliberalism might be considered a moment when liberal political-economic thought confronts the dysfunctions of a maturing capitalist economy. It is most closely associated with a group of economists and jurists who met in Freiburg in the 1930s.2 The yearbook ORDO and the publication of ‘The Ordo Manifesto of 1936’ (Tribe 1995: 209) constitute key locations for the intellectual rationalization of this particular mentality of rule. Ordoliberalism is perhaps most clearly distinguishable from other conceptions of liberalism in terms of its ‘radical anti-naturalistic conception of the market and of the principle of competition’ (Lemke 1997: 243; 2001: 193). As we noted above, for the classical liberalism of Smith and Ricardo the market is a natural economic reality. The market is a foundation for liberal governance which must govern through and around its processes. But for the ordoliberals the market does not possess the capacity for self-regulation which classical liberals accord to it. As such they reject the idea of a strict separation of politics and law from the economy.

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Central to the ordoliberal idea of the economy is the principle of order. The point is that economic activity always takes place within a particular social and institutional order, an order that does not evolve naturally. As Foucault sees it, ordoliberals ‘replace the conception of the economy as a domain of autonomous rules and laws by a concept of “economic order” . . . as an object of social intervention and political regulation’ (Lemke 2001: 194). From a political imagination in which the market is located as a domain of liberty beyond the state, ordoliberalism moves to an analysis conducted in terms of Wirtschaftsordnung. This is a view where political and legal intervention is seen not as a second order compared with the market, but constitutive of it. Law is ‘no longer a superstructural phenomenon, but itself becomes an essential part of the (economic-institutional) base’ (Lemke 2001: 196). The idea of the Rechtsstaat is transposed onto the economic domain. This is best appreciated in relation to the question of cartels and monopolies. Whereas classical liberalism is animated by the fear of excessive concentrations of political power, ordoliberalism recognizes that the capitalist economic order can itself become a site of power and domination exercised by industrial monopolies and cartels (Gerber 1998: 240). It is particularly haunted by the way in which industrial cartels were ‘coopted’ by the Nazi cause (Maher 2000: 163). For this reason it might be considered as the application of the logic of liberalism to the market itself. Whereas liberalism mobilizes the market against the state, ordoliberalism acknowledges that this can merely lead to the replacement of public with private monopolies. Hence it authorizes not the dream of a self-organizing market and society, but the imperative of permanent intervention – for instance, through competition policy – to unblock and avert these immanent tendencies.

Ordoliberalism and European economic governance It must be remembered that an economic order based on freedom can only exist in the world of today at the price of constant State intervention in economic life. Such intervention takes a twofold form: in the first place, the State sets up a framework of controls covering every branch of the economy as well as every adjacent field; secondly, it is constantly altering the factors called into play, through the innumerable adjustments involved in its day-to-day economic activity: in short, by pursuing a ‘policy’ in the proper sense of the term. (European Commission 1962b) Gerber has argued that many of the German representatives involved in the founding of the European Communities were ‘closely associated with ordoliberalism’ (Gerber 1998: 263). With its emphasis on the necessity of ‘constant State intervention’ covering ‘every branch of the economy’, the above quote certainly suggests the presence of ordoliberal thinking within the

The Common Market 51 Commission at this time. But our aim here is not the sociological one of following the lines by which ordoliberal ideas came to influence the shaping of the economic government of Europe. Instead, it is the more modest but nonetheless worthwhile project of asking how, as a conceptual lens, ordoliberalism might help us make sense of certain aspects of this regime. First, ordoliberalism suggests a different significance for the founding document of the Community, the Treaty of Rome – as the basis of an ‘economic constitution’ for Europe. Reflecting its anti-naturalistic and, we might say, political understanding of the economy, ordoliberalism holds that economies do not simply evolve under their own dynamics. Rather, they are ‘formed’ through key political and legal decisions. These fundamental decisions define a nation’s ‘economic constitution’. Böhm argues that just as a political constitution is supposed to reflect and enact the kind of polity which a society elects to live under, an economic constitution reflects a community’s basic decisions about the kind of economy it wants (Gerber 1998: 246). This perspective, it seems, proved important in mediating Germany’s relationship to the common market project. For ordoliberals ‘conceived of the freedoms guaranteed in the EEC treaty, of the opening of the national economies, the rules against discrimination and the commitments of competition policy, as a set of interdependent principles which established a market economic system based on the rule of law’ (Joerges 2001: 5; see also Sauter 1998). Second, ordoliberalism offers insights as to the political rationality investing certain Community policies. One of these is social policy. Foucault noted of ordoliberalism that it sees social policy not as an activity to redistribute income or compensate the anti-social effects of the market, but to ‘multiply and generalize entrepreneurial forms within the body social’ (Lemke 2001: 195). In other words, it departs from what we might call the welfarist view of social policy and moves toward a market rationality. From its inception the Community lacked extensive powers and competences within the social field. But in those places where the Treaty does discuss social policy (Articles 117–128) it is largely in ways that are to supplement and promote the workings of the common market. For example, the main task of the European Social Fund is to increase the ‘geographical and occupational mobility’ of workers within the Community, thereby contributing to improvements in the overall employment situation and standards of living. Similarly, social security is discussed largely in connection not with the promotion of, say, social justice, but with the facilitation of freedom of movement for workers (Articles 51 and 121). The economic rationalization of social policy one finds in the Treaty is quite consistent with ordoliberal principles. But another area where the imprint of ordoliberalism is quite evident is, of course, competition policy. Dinan notes that European competition policy drew heavily on the US experience of antitrust law, and that this influence is present from the beginning of the integration project, namely in

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the ‘robust antitrust measures’ embedded in the Coal and Steel Community. He also notes that Community competition policy goes beyond considerations of antitrust (Dinan 1999: 379–80). However, ordoliberalism helps to clarify precisely how the EC/EU version of competition policy is different. For one thing it ‘tolerates’ extremely large firms but requires them not to abuse their market position: they must behave ‘as if’ they were subject to market competition (Gerber 1998; Maher 2000: 164). In this way it governs in the name of an ideal market. There is also the tendency towards the juridification of competition policy, reflecting the ordoliberal concern to create independent regulatory authorities (Maher 2000: 164).

The organized temporality of European integration Our final point in connection with ordoliberalism and economic governance concerns the question of temporality. Ordoliberalism emphasizes that the market is not a natural order but something which must be created and sustained by political and legal intervention. We have already mentioned some of these interventions. They include competition policy and, to lesser extent, social policy. But there is another kind of intervention which deserves to be mentioned within this context: not another policy tool but a particular technique which traverses different policy domains. This concerns the particular way in which time is deployed as a technology of government. While scholars have recently become more interested in the spatiality of Europe and its governance (Jönsson et al. 2000; Sidaway 2002), far less attention has been devoted to the study of its temporality.3 Yet the game of governing Europe through the making of markets, the game we have associated with ordoliberalism, would be inconceivable as a practice without a series of initiatives which deploy time as both an instrument and an object-field. The common market shall be progressively established during a transitional period of twelve years. This transitional period shall be divided into three stages of four years each [. . .]. To each stage there shall be assigned a set of actions to be initiated and carried through concurrently. Transition from the first to the second stage shall be conditional upon a finding that the objectives specifically laid down in this Treaty for the first stage have in fact been attained in substance and that [. . .] obligations have been fulfilled. (Treaty Establishing the EEC, Rome, 25 March 1957, Article 8) This timetable for the creation of the common market occupies a prominent place within the Treaty. It presupposes a particular set of problems concerning the enforcement and implementation of the Treaty’s objectives. By elaborating in detail and with reference to time the flow of actions, and by deciding ‘in advance’ to set in motion these actions, the Treaty operates as a

The Common Market 53 tool of government. It sets out steps and actions that are to be taken by the signatories without the need for further rounds of political negotiation. In other words, it establishes a regime of ‘automaticity’.4 This is in large part about securing the future. The timetable anticipates and seeks to counter the risk that particular governments will fail to meet their commitments, or seek to exploit loopholes and grey areas. It is also, for this reason, a regime of political responsibilization. One of the peculiar features of the EC/EU is precisely its temporal and developmental identity. As the very concept of European integration suggests, this is an identity largely defined in terms of a process, a becoming. EC/EU identity is defined in terms of a past – of realpolitik, war, nationalism and genocide – which it seeks to escape (Waever 1996). But also in terms of a future yet to come. Europe is never quite there yet; it is forever in transition, on its way to completion (Walker 2000). In this technique of the timetable we find one of the technical correlates of this core aspect of the EC/EU’s identity. The technology of the timetable is interesting because it locates European government within a developmental process, a route which has for its sign-posts a series of specific dates and stages. This technology of temporality seems to have played a significant role in establishing the viability of the common market. It seems to have occupied a prominent place in the development of this game of governing Europe through constructing markets. Perhaps this helps to explain its recurrence within subsequent episodes in the history of European integration. For instance, it is evident in relation to the single market project, often described with explicit reference to its set deadline – ‘Europe 1992’ or simply ‘1992’. It is also present in the project of Economic and Monetary Union, as described in Article 109 of the Treaty of European Union. In a somewhat different form, the so-called ‘Lisbon process’ – with its objective of creating ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world by 2010’, and its specification both of particular ‘targets’ and techniques to attain them – involves this game of governing through time. To summarize our discussion, ordoliberalism is not the essence of the Treaty or the logic of the Community. But it is a concept which serves to sharpen our understanding of the form of liberalism that informs the Treaty of Rome, and related policies.

QUESTIONS OF SECURITY Thus far we have argued that it is possible to read the Treaty of Rome as a particular instance of liberal governmentality. To this end we have highlighted its ambition to govern Europe through the construction and mobilization of a particular domain of freedoms. The locus of this domain is the common market. But the promotion of particular kinds of freedom is, of course, not the sole concern of the Treaty and of the common market. It is

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articulated with, and in some places confronted by a problematization of security. How is the question of security framed within the Treaty? What relationship does security bear to freedom? A careful reading reveals that security does not appear as a singular objective within the Treaty. Instead, there are multiple ways in which questions of security are problematized, presumed and pursued. In what follows, we identify three problematizations of security: geopolitical security, the security of economic processes, and the security of public order.

Geopolitical security The relationship of the common market, and of European integration more generally, to discourses and practices of geopolitical security is probably the most commonplace and least contentious. Geopolitical concerns took several forms. Amongst those which Milward notes is the precariousness which Western European states experienced in the post-war period once they found themselves located uneasily between two superpowers (Milward 2000: 208, 214–5). Waever takes a somewhat different line. As he sees it, the Other of European identity, at least in the aftermath of World War Two, is not so much a threat from other countries or regions, as a return to Europe’s past (Waever 1996). Underpinning the quest for European integration is the trauma of a reawakening of the forces of national chauvinism, economic protectionism, and militarism which had produced such calamitous effects in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowhere is this overriding concern to pursue peace signalled more clearly than in the famous preamble to the Treaty which speaks of ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ and the wish to ‘strengthen peace and liberty’.

The security of economic processes It is not in this area of geopolitics but another where studies of governmentality offer to expand our understanding of questions of security, and their relationship to freedom. Here we need to recall the way in which Foucault defines governmentality as an historical form of power. It involves the exercise of a certain, non-totalizing conception of rule. Governmentality does not aspire to know and govern everything. Rather, it is economical. It governs with the grain of social, economic, cultural and other processes, utilizing and harnessing the self-regulating capacities of the market or the sphere of public intercourse that is civil society. When Foucault notes that we live in a ‘society of security’ (Gordon 1991: 35), he does not mean we are prisoners within a giant panopticon or a police state. Instead, he is referring to the prevalence of ‘apparatuses of security’ which govern by enframing social and economic processes. They govern by securing zones and spheres of liberties which are located beyond the official system of state power.

The Common Market 55 It is possible to read the Treaty of Rome from this perspective of ‘liberal security’. Besides its overall aim of encouraging peace amongst European nations, it is concerned with securing the proper working of the European market economy. The crucial point to note is that market processes are, from the perspective of the Treaty, never something which can be taken for granted. Instead, they can be characterized as a ‘transactional reality’: both real and already present, but also requiring ongoing acts of constitution (Gordon 1991: 23). Their existence and reproduction at a European level is problematic, and cannot be assumed. As such, they need to be secured. In Article 4, and the whole of Part 5 (Articles 137–209) the Treaty defines the specific institutional structure of the Community, and proceeds to distribute powers, competences and responsibilities across this structure. We can read this move as a concern with apparatuses of security. The issue is: how best to ensure the proper conditions for the free interplay of market forces? How to establish conditions in which individuals, ‘natural’ or ‘legal’ persons, can exercise certain economic liberties? All this is well-illustrated by the case of competition policy. We discussed competition policy above in terms of its relationship to ordoliberalism. But consider also how it stands with regard to liberal security. In several places the Treaty states the need to ensure that competition in the common market is not ‘distorted’. To this end, it specifically prohibits a range of practices such as the fixing of prices, the limitation of production, and the abuse of dominant market positions. It calls upon the Council to enact appropriate regulations and directives to give effect to these principles (Articles 85–87). And the resulting regulatory framework (European Commission 1962a) delegates far-reaching competences to the Commission which is to act, in this instance, as an independent regulatory body. It is important to note that security and liberty have a particular relationship in this formulation. It is not a zero-sum relationship where security necessarily detracts from liberty; or where liberty only exists beyond the sphere of security. Rather, it is a positive-sum game. In the case of competition, it goes hand in hand with the various freedoms of movement, establishment and so on. But these freedoms depend in turn on apparatuses of security: the scrutinizing gaze of an authoritative overseer, equipped with the powers necessary to prevent and punish irresponsible uses and abuses of freedom. There is, thus, a kind of circular relationship between security and liberty (Dean 1999b: 117).

Public order and biopolitics Other concerns about security are also reflected in the Treaty. A careful reading reveals concerns about public order and public security, but also anxieties regarding the biological life of the populations of the relevant European states. These concerns result in a qualification of and a limitation on the scope of economic freedoms. They establish proper limits for the

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common market. If European integration will be an experiment in exposing various domains and sectors of national life to European competition, it will be one that proceeds with caution. How is this the case? What are these qualifications and exemptions? They are found for instance in connection with the free movement of goods (see Article 36 quoted above). Provisions for the gradual elimination of quantitative restrictions on trade between the member states (Articles 30 to 34), shall not stand in the way of restrictions on trade for the purpose of ‘public morality, public policy or public security; nor of the protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants, national treasures or the protection of industrial and commercial property’ (Article 36). Or in connection with the freedom of movement of workers, which is a freedom ‘subject to limitations justified on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health’ (Articles 48, 135). Or when it comes to the right of establishment which allows for the possibility of special treatment of foreign nationals ‘on grounds of public policy, public security or public health’ (Article 56). At least two different types of concerns are at play here: a concern for the security of population, and a concern for order. There is a biopolitical problematization of economic government insofar as the Treaty’s qualifications and exemptions point to a concern that liberty will endanger the ‘health and life’ of humans, animals and plants. In this instance a biopolitical ambition concerning the management of population in the name of health and life confronts an economic rationality of government. Economic liberties are to be able to play themselves out, but only where this does not conflict with concerns for health and life of human and other populations. The concern for population overrides the concern for liberty. ‘Public morality, public policy or public security’ are concerns of a quite different type. There are certain ‘public’ matters that economic liberty cannot be allowed to endanger. No doubt these exemptions will be invoked by governments for short-term ‘political’ ends, such as the protection of a declining industry or region. Nevertheless, do we not, at the same time, find here an echo of earlier, pre-liberal forms of power and mentalities of rule? Can we not detect, for instance, the political rationality of ‘police’, a mentality and a practice which had been so influential in the governance of European cities following the demise of feudalism (Pasquino 1991; Neocleous 2000)? We discuss this form of governing at greater length in Chapter five. Let us simply note here that police is characterized by its obsession with regulation and order, for public cleanliness and security. It embodies a more pastoral approach to governing in which social order is produced by the observance of myriad laws and regulations, not by markets. At the same time there is a moral dimension to police, a dimension consisting of the entwinement of strictly governmental concerns with concerns over the regulation of human conduct and the intercourse between humans (Dean 1999b: 89–96).

The Common Market 57 The significance of this discussion is that the Treaty recognizes multiple forms of power and rationality. It recognizes and establishes the right and responsibility of the European institutions to promote economic freedoms, and to govern in the name of the common market. But it also acknowledges the right of states to exercise certain kinds of control. It recognizes their right to police borders and to regulate the in- and outflow of persons and goods in the name of morality and ‘public security’. As we will see in Chapter five where we discuss the advent of an insecure, Schengen Europe, this governance of issues of public security has now ceased to be the sole prerogative of states. In recent years, under the auspices of its programme of ‘justice and home affairs’, the EU has come to provide a framework for governing aspects of public or ‘internal’ security as well. If we have dwelt excessively on these questions of security, it is not without a reason. It is because we want to challenge the way security is frequently understood in academic discussions. This is the equation of security with a condition of existential threat, a situation of life and death. Even amongst practitioners of critical security studies – where debates about security have been broadened by interrogating it as a language game rather than an objective reality – we find debate gravitating towards this representation of security. For instance, Waever observes that ‘security concerns survival, it confronts an existential threat’ (Waever 1996: 106). We take up this issue at greater length in Chapter five. Here we simply want to observe that there are multiple practices of security at work; not all of which seem to concern survival or existential peril. The security of economic processes does not adequately fit this description. Neither do issues like ‘social security’ or ‘public security’ which the Treaty of Rome also addresses.

TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF THE SINGLE MARKET Thus far we have interrogated the common market in terms of its dominant forms of political reason as well as its principal arts of governing. But economic integration within Europe has moved on in significant ways from the moment of the common market. Most notably, there has been the project of the single market, and economic and monetary union. While a discussion of the latter is outside the scope of this chapter, in this final section we want to consider the discourse and practice of the single market in light of our preceding discussion. When the Commission produced its White Paper outlining a programme for the single market it gave it the name ‘Completing the Internal Market’ (European Commission 1985). Repeatedly it stressed its desire to fully realize and build on the Treaty of Rome’s original ambitions. In this way, it located itself within a developmental trope: the single market was to ‘complete’ what was an on-going process of construction. More accurately, it was to revive this process. Such matters as the common customs tariff were ‘a remarkable

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achievement’ which should stand as ‘inspiration for the future’. But, the document observes, ‘momentum was lost’ partly due to deteriorating world economic conditions but also ‘a lack of confidence and vision’ (1985: 6–7). Now was the time to revive this project and complete the internal market. From the White Paper it would thus appear as if the common market project is a single, coherent and unified project. Its linear progress is only interrupted occasionally, with the distractions of the onset of a recession, or with the loss of ‘confidence, commitment and vision’ among the EC’s political leadership. Yet this view is somewhat problematic. This notion of ‘completion’ is, of course, not innocent. Rather it serves to legitimate the single market by presenting it as continuous with the ‘original’ intentions of the Treaty. In this final section we want to consider the single market project in terms of its discontinuities, ruptures and mutations. This is not to deny that there are important continuities. But it is to resist the temptation to focus on these at the expense of tracing mutations in the forms of political and economic rationality investing the game of integration.

The political imagination of the single market We noted in Chapter one that it is useful to ask of any EU policy of programme: How is Europe being imagined here? What is the nature of the problem this policy must grapple with? What assumptions does it make about the nature of society, the economy, the individual, etc? We have seen that this exercise can be useful for the purposes of uncovering the forms of political reason within particular discourses. At the heart of the political imagination of the common market we find a largely positive view of the role of the nation-state in social and economic affairs. The common market project needs to be seen as one component within a larger international regime which Ruggie has called ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1983). This takes shape in Western Europe following World War Two as an attempt to find an accommodation between a relatively open, liberalizing international economy, and the pursuit of particular programmes of social welfare and economic modernization at the level of the state. Although it moves towards a liberalization of European trade, the common market does not constitute a political rejection of the need for various national policies of welfare, economic management, industrial relations and so on. On the contrary, as Milward has argued, the common market project was a way of institutionalizing and promoting foreign trade within Western Europe (with the re-emerging German economy as its pivot) in such a way that various aspirations for national development policy would be given a surer economic foundation.5 Underpinning this move was the fact that governments could be receptive to the campaign against trade barriers because they had at hand a range of national social policies to compensate and manage the consequences of enhanced market competition (Egan 2003: 30). Of course, with the common agricultural policy, the European

The Common Market 59 Community would make its own contribution to this politics of compensation as well. Far from signalling the demise of the nation-state, at least at its inception, the common market was largely seen to be compatible with its advancement as a container for social and political life, both normatively and in policy terms. While the common market was clearly an economic initiative it was nevertheless over-coded by geopolitical strategy and political-military concerns. By cementing Germany’s position at the heart of a Western European economic system, it was to avert the possibility of future German militarism. At the same time, the common market was integral to the viability of Western Europe as a bulwark against the threat of Communism. In several important ways, the single market project corresponds to a somewhat different political imagination than its predecessor. First, the single market will occupy a terrain where the geopolitical and the economic have become constituted as separate domains. If the common market inhabited a realm where geopolitics and economics were tightly interwoven, the debates surrounding the single market take place at a somewhat greater distance from geopolitical concerns. The discourse is more geo-economic than geopolitical. The discourse of the single market is one where Europe is imagined as an economic region located within a regionalized world economy. The problem is defined as one of ‘competitiveness’ and relative economic performance. Europe is seen to be falling behind its principal rivals, Japan and the United States. If Europe is insecure, it is an insecurity founded upon an inability ‘to adjust to the changed circumstances of international growth and competitiveness after the oil shock’ (Cecchini et al. 1988: 3). The task becomes one of repositioning and reviving a Europe that is now understood like a ship which must navigate the turbulent waters of an integrating world economy. If the single market project succeeds, ‘the EC’s citizens, businesses and governments will sail a competitive Europe in the midst of an economic expansion into the stormy world seas of the 1990’s’. But what is the cause of this problem of economic performance? Here we encounter our second difference. While committed to liberalization, the common market nevertheless presupposed a necessary and positive role for the state. As we saw with the ordoliberal rationalization of the common market, the market was affirmed, but only as a space organized and contained by political and legal systems. The discourse of the single market reveals something of a reversal in the figures of the state and the market. From being a necessary corrective or complement to the market, all manner of social and economic policies come to be seen as impediments to economic success. Keynesian demand management is implicated in rising inflation just as mechanisms of social security or collective wage bargaining will be blamed for making labour markets ‘rigid’ and ‘inflexible’. In the European context the talk is of ‘Eurosclerosis’. If the single market project was to ‘relaunch’ Europe, this would be by unleashing a market which was imagined as somehow thwarted and stifled by systems of

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national and European governance. At the same time it was to entail extending the market into new areas of social and economic life.

Extending the market: A neoliberal trajectory for Europe? An extensive literature has analysed the policies and programmes enacted in the name of the single market. It has examined both factors that might explain the adoption of this programme, and its content. It has highlighted, among other things, the move towards ‘mutual recognition’ as a new principle for market regulation, as well as reforms within the decision-making system itself, designed to speed up the process. It has also drawn attention to the ‘side deals’ that accompanied these pro-market reforms (Armstrong and Bulmer 1997; Egan 2001; Moravcsik 1998). Rather than rehearse these narratives, in this final section we want to make a point about the discursive construction of the single market. The single market is not just a question of implementing new policies, or reorganizing the Community’s decision-making system. It also implies a relatively new way of seeing and knowing Europe. This is quite evident when we begin to consider the central place which the concept of ‘barriers’ acquires within the single market programme. Reading the 1985 White Paper, it is clear that barriers are not objectively given. Instead, we should see the barrier as an epistemological device, an element within a particular knowledge of Europe. The 1957 Rome Treaty certainly does speak of ‘the barriers which divide Europe’ (preamble). Moreover, it recognizes various elements and practices which constitute restrictions or obstacles to the realization of the ‘four freedoms’. Yet, in several ways the 1985 White Paper entails an expansion of the scope of the meaning of ‘barriers’. In the barrier we encounter a concept that will bring a certain unity and equivalence to a disparate and heterogeneous range of problems and practices. For one thing, the conception of ‘physical barriers’ is new: It is the physical barriers at the customs posts, the immigration controls, the passports, the occasional search of personal baggage, which to the ordinary citizen are the obvious manifestations of the continued division of the Community [. . .] These barriers are equally important to trade and industry, commerce and business. They impose an unnecessary burden on industry flowing from the delays, formalities, transport and handling charges, thus adding to costs and damaging competitiveness. (European Commission 1985: 11) We noted how the Rome Treaty reveals a concern for public security, health and the safety of populations. To this end it allows that there are many situations where border controls and other interventions are proper and legitimate. With the White Paper we see how border controls and much else

The Common Market 61 besides are now represented not as positive or legitimate practices of social governance or state security, but as barriers to the single market, imposing costs on the corporate world, and a nuisance for European citizens.6 The objective of removing physical barriers therefore emerges as a logical conclusion. The neoliberal conception of well-being, where security is tied to competitiveness and economic performance, comes to encroach upon pastoral and biopolitical definitions of security. Second, the scope of ‘technical barriers’ is expanded. It comes to encompass a diverse and wide-ranging set of problems. In a 1962 action programme we find the Commission speaking of ‘administrative barriers’, ‘technical regulations’ and ‘national commercial monopolies’ as measures which could have effects ‘equivalent to quantitative restrictions to trade’ (European Commission 1962b: 809). But it did so in a more limited sense than in 1985. The ‘adjustment of national commercial monopolies’ so as to give consumers and suppliers in all member states access to the Market’ (European Commission 1962b: 813) gives way to a problematization of discriminatory practices in public procurement in general, and to ambitions of the improvement of the regulatory framework so as, among other things, to increase transparency; establish a system of prior information and notification of tendering and of the publication of the award of contracts and more; and to extend the requirements to public tendering into several new major sectors: energy, transport, water, telecommunications and public services (European Commission 1985: 23–4). Here we see how the problematization of technical barriers mediates the extension of market mechanisms into new fields. Activities previously conducted under the auspices of the public sector, and governed through bureaucratic mechanisms are now to be exposed to market rationality. The distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative integration’ is a common one within EU studies (e.g., Marks et al. 1996: 15). The single market project is sometimes viewed in terms of ‘negative integration’. This is because it abolishes barriers to trade, but also, constrains the power of states to positively manage economies. While this is certainly a valid interpretation, our point about the discursive construction of the barrier suggests a problem with this negative/positive dichotomy. From a Foucauldian perspective, power is operating in a positive sense – even in the context of ‘negative’ integration. For the construction of the single market entails a complex project of assembling this discursive space. All those reports, conferences, inquiries and statistics which will make the European economy knowable from the perspective of its barriers form it as a positivity. Whereas social security systems or border controls are affirmed within discourses of social welfare or immigration management, from the perspective of this discourse they become just more barriers. This discourse is not negative; it is a productive machinery, capable of constructing all manner of institutional practices – from public procurement procedures to national taxation regimes – as barriers to the market. Within this discourse barriers tend to multiply.

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This recodification whereby state practices like border controls or public management become reterritorialized within a liberal economic field and made knowable as barriers is just one example of how the single market works at a discursive level. The point is that a discursive space is opened up where the task becomes one of devising new forms of governance. Hence, if the border is an obstacle to the movement of citizens, this calls for the invention of new practices, ranging from standardized passports to European visas. If technical standards are an obstacle to the free circulation of goods then the challenge is to devise new forms of regulation. Tracing out these various lines of invention is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, we want to finish by making a point about counterdiscourses. We have argued that the single market discourse is flexible and dynamic. Barriers are not simply there. Instead, they are multiplied by discourse. Does this imply that ever more areas of social life are destined to be recoded within the market rationality of neoliberalism? Not at all. The process is politically contingent. In Chapter five we will examine a different discourse, the ‘governmenality of unease’ (Bigo 2002) and Schengenland. The discourse of the single market multiplies barriers, finds ever new ways to speed up the flow, reduce the cost, and improve the flexibility of the market. But the governmentality of unease, the epistemology of insecurity and terror is equally productive. Where barriers are removed it will find threats; where liberties extended it finds new vulnerabilities. Not barriers but threats. If the line that runs from the common to the single market and beyond governs Europe as a space of markets, this project of Schengenland will govern Europe as a space impinged upon by threats, something resembling a territory.

CONCLUSION Liberalism is clearly a central element within the EC/EU construction of Europe. Let us briefly summarize the understanding of liberalism that we have advanced in this chapter. First, we have argued that a perspective of governmentality offers a particular approach to liberalism. Certainly one can approach it, as a political or legal theorist might, as a set of ‘ideals’ (Weiler 1998). Here liberalism represents a body of principles and values, such as the affirmation of freedom, the importance of rights, respect for private property, and the need to limit the power of the state. We have approached liberalism not so much as a set of ideals but in terms of a particular mentality of government. Based on our reading of the Treaty of Rome we have shown how freedom operates not just as a value but as part of a technology of rule. To this end we have observed how the ‘freedom’ of the common market is a peculiarly instrumental freedom. Freedom may be seen as an inherent value, but within the Rome Treaty it becomes a tool of government, and it serves specific purposes beyond itself. It is contextualized and tied to various specific

The Common Market 63 activities or practices. It becomes, for instance, a ‘freedom of movement’. In relation to this, the subjects of the Rome Treaty are far from free subjects in the sense of being bearers of inalienable rights and the ultimate source of legitimate sovereignty. Rather, subjects are defined in relation to categories of economic and social activity, by virtue of their function in the operation of economic processes. Their rights are specific rights to perform functions in economic processes. ‘Workers rights’, for instance, becomes an object for governmental action, yet another sphere of governmental calculation and administration. Second, we have emphasized that it is useful to draw distinctions within liberalism. The classical liberalism, which first emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, saw the market as a natural order. It spoke in the name of the market and civil society, and against absolutism, mercantilism, police, and other forms of government, which it saw as obstacles to these emerging domains, and their promise of human progress. The liberalism of the EC/EU – whether it is the ordoliberalism which mediated West Germany’s relationship to the common market or the neoliberalism which underpinned the single market project – is different from classical liberalism in important ways. For one thing, as we have noted above, it takes a more instrumental view of freedom. For another, it takes as its objects and sites of criticism not the political world of absolutism but a sphere constituted by welfare states and state intervention. Finally, it is different in terms of its view of the market. For ordo- and neoliberalism the market is no longer a natural domain but something closer to a game of government. Markets are to be contrived, constructed, created and extended by particular political programmes. Following the ordoliberals, a common or a single market represents a conscious choice or decision to govern Europe in a particular way. Finally, we noted that liberalism may have been a central element within the EC/EU mentality of government, but it is not the only political rationality present. Reading the Rome Treaty we also find other rationalities and identities at work. For instance, there are considerations of public security and there are concerns about the biopolitical management of populations. In many cases these constituted domains where the Community’s game of governing through freedom would not apply. The matter of conducting physical controls at borders is a case in point. This observation suggests that a slightly different characterization of the single market is possible. The advent of the single market is a moment when the game of governing through markets and freedoms is extended; it is a moment when the relationship between these different political rationalities is rearticulated and the balance between them shifts. In Chapter five we will see that there is no predetermined path here. In a context of growing fears concerning terrorism and various other mobile risks, the rationalities of public security and biopolitics can be recharged and reactivated, and the question of how to balance governing through freedom and governing insecurity reopened.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

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This emphasis on a political-ideological dimension of European integration has emerged within several different research trajectories. It arises for Hix (1994) as a consequence of viewing the EU as a polity which, like the other objects studied by comparative politics, can be analysed along a left-right political spectrum. It arises within political economy in connection with investigations into different forms of capitalism, but especially the pervasive influence since the 1980s of ‘neoliberalism’ on national and international institutions (Hooghe and Marks 1997; Pollack 1998; van Apeldoorn 2002). And it arises within discourse analysis in the context of investigations into Europe’s identity as a ‘contested’ territory (Diez 2001). The most prominent names include the economists Walter Eucken, Hans Grossman-Doerth, and Wilhelm Röpke (who was based for most of the war in Switzerland) and the legal theorist Franz Böhm. But the economist Alfred Müller-Armack, who was to coin the extremely influential notion of a ‘social market economy’, is usually considered a sympathetic interlocutor. An important exception is the excellent study by Ekengren (2002). He reveals how European governance is organized within multiple temporalities. There is a cyclicality in European governmental activities, a repeated movement towards the deadline, the taking stock of achievements, a renewed or revised formulation of objectives, and perhaps the formulation of new objectives and new deadlines. There is also the rhythm implied by the semi-annual rotation of Presidency of the European Council. But such cycles are, in turn, embedded within a linear, developmental and ‘irreversible’ conception of time (90–125). The benefits of a detailed timetable with ‘automaticity’ in key actions in the establishment of the Customs Union was first recognized in the Beyen Plan, the Dutch proposal of 1953 for a customs union named after the then foreign minister of the Netherlands (Griffith and Milward 1986). As Milward sees it, the advent of the common market does not mark a transition from pre-war protectionism to classical free trade. Instead, he sees it as a ‘new form of mercantilism’. It underpins national programmes through a ‘more sophisticated mix of liberalism and protectionism’ which it makes ‘operative at the international level’ (Milward 2000: 130). It should be noted that as early as 1962 we find the Commission expressing its ambition to remove physical border controls (European Commission 1962b: 811). But as opposed to the proposals of the 1985 White Paper, the Council and the member states did not share this ambition at the time.

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Democratic institutions and the representatives of the people, at both national and European levels, can and must try to connect Europe with its citizens. This is the starting condition for more effective and relevant policies. (European Commission 2001a: 3)

INTRODUCTION The EU has a ‘democratic deficit’. For more than a decade now, this argument has been prominent in discussions about European integration. The tumultuous process of ratification for the Maastricht Treaty in 1992–1993 was widely seen as an expression of a certain ‘deficit of legitimacy’ for integration (Obradovic 1996: 192–3). Since then, separate referenda in Denmark, Ireland and Sweden have been taken as evidence of a widespread popular scepticism towards the project. The crisis of the European Commission under Jacques Santer, leading to the Commissioner’s resignation in early 1999 following intense criticism from the European Parliament, was also widely interpreted as highlighting problems of democratic control and legitimacy for the EU. These events have drawn a series of responses at the level of Union institutions. These include a succession of moves to render the policy-making process of the EU more transparent to the public; various attempts to prevent excessive centralism by emphasizing a principle of ‘subsidiarity’; the aspiration found in the Amsterdam Treaty to specify a set of values which define some ‘political identity’ for the EU; the formulation in 2000 by the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission of a ‘declaration of rights’ for EU citizens; and the Commission’s publication of a ‘White Paper on European Governance’ in 2001. And, of course, we should mention the ongoing project of finalizing a ‘Constitutional Treaty’, an initiative which at least in part appears motivated by the repeated criticisms of the EU’s democratic shortcomings. Following the breakdown of negotiations at the end of December 2003, intergovernmental talks have resumed, as of April 2004, with the aim of agreeing its content. At the same time, the prospect of a referendum in Britain concerning the Treaty raises the likelihood of further arguments concerning the il/legitimacy of the EU.

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However, the debate about a ‘legitimacy-deficit’ or a ‘democratic deficit’ in European integration has found expression in a virtual explosion of scholarly interest in this field. Democracy and legitimacy have been topical subjects in discussions about European integration, at the level of political elites, in public debates, and among scholars of European integration (e.g., Beetham and Lord, 1998; Habermas 1992, 1999; Newman 1996; Schmitter 2000; Warleigh 2003). In this chapter, we take up this debate about democracy in European integration. We do not, however, make a case for a particular version of democracy, nor for a particular diagnosis of the democratic shortcomings or benefits of the present arrangement of European institutions, the degree of centralization or the division of work between different ‘levels’ of government in contemporary Europe. There are already a number of studies along such lines, some of which we have mentioned above. Their valuable contribution notwithstanding, it is a common denominator of these studies that they tend to work with an explicit or implicit understanding of the meanings and workings of democracy. It is against such a background that the current situation in Europe is assessed and possible remedies are considered. In the context of European integration this work actually contributes to the ongoing reproduction of taken-for-granted meanings. What it does not always do is make the structures and properties of these meanings the object of analysis in themselves, and interrogate their political imaginaries. This is what we aim at. Let us suppose that the different arguments and debates concerning Europe and its troubled relationship to democracy can be said to make up a discursive field. Let us further suppose that this field can be given the name ‘un/democratic Europe’ as a means of capturing the fact that it both problematizes a certain democratic deficiency in Europe, and at the same time proposes a series of measures to promote European democracy. If this is the case, then our broad objective here is to subject this space of un/democratic Europe to an interrogation along certain lines suggested by Foucauldian studies of power and politics. In particular, we want to focus on the rationalities which are embedded in conceptualizations of ‘democratic government’. A Foucauldian perspective stands in a different tradition from those analyses which measure the current state of democracy in Europe according to some external, perhaps even universal normative yardstick, and articulate proposals for reform against this criterion. Foucault was perhaps at his most provocative when he asked: ‘In what does [philosophy today] consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naïve positivity’ (Foucault 1985: 9). As Foucault emphasizes, it is sometimes more

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important to interrogate limits rather than work within the boundaries which they offer to us. In the first section of this chapter we outline an inessential view of Europe and democracy. We purposefully bracket the question of the substance of democracy. Rather than elaborate our own theory about democracy, we are interested in the different discourses which have defined the space of un/democratic Europe. How do they imagine democracy? How do they find the EU wanting in this or that regard? What do they propose as the essence of a (more) democratically-governed Europe? How should it be achieved? Making this shift from democracy-in-itself to the field of problematizations of democracy enables us to develop a particular argument. It is that the EU can be characterized as a field of semi-crystallized democratic problematization. Not only is there no agreement on whether the EU is democratic or not, there is not even a commonly-agreed model by which its un/democracy might be judged. Instead, there is a condition where no particular discourse is hegemonic.1 But if there is no hegemonic discourse about democracy in the EU, this does not preclude analysis of some of the competing political and theoretical projects which are vying to suture the space of un/democratic Europe. In the second section we make a case for the investigation of this space at the level of certain technologies of power. This allows us to highlight the rarity of the discursive field of un/democratic Europe: democracy is never generic but always thought of in terms of particular practices and forms, practices which necessarily privilege this or that set of relations. In our final section we reflect in greater detail on one of the discourses that operate within the wider field we have already mentioned: democracy as rational government.

PROBLEMATICS OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE How might we think about European democracy at the level of its problematizations? At some level we might say that ‘democratic problematizations of government’ refers to a broad cluster of themes, practices or strategies which in one way or another addresses questions of popular sovereignty, legitimacy and political equality. At the same time, however, it is necessary to observe that the content of this field, and therefore the definition of democracy, is always historical. There is an analogy to be drawn here with liberal political rationalities. Foucault observes that if we consider liberalism as a rationality of government rather than a particular institutional configuration, then its status as a polymorphous instrument of critique becomes quite apparent (cf. Foucault 1989: 113; Dean 1999b: 49). Liberalism acquires its identity and content historically, in relation to other forms of governing which it critiques, distinguishes itself from, seeks to reform, or whose actualization it seeks to

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avert. The strategies and programmes associated with ‘neoliberalism’ are a good example. Neoliberalism is not simply a rehashing of classical principles or an assertion of the prerogatives of multinational capitalism. More specifically, it can be understood as a particular form of liberalism which emerges through a specific confrontation with regimes of welfare statism, producing a specific knowledge and critique of the latter’s dysfunctions (Hindess 1996). Something similar can be said regarding democracy. Democratic problematizations are always given shape in context, in encounters with opposing rationalities, such as, for instance, classical liberalism, state communism or technocracy. This point is even more valid when considering the contentious character of the space of un/democratic Europe. As regards the presence of ‘European democracy’, we cannot describe this as one, singular presence, as anything approaching an objectivity in Laclau’s sense, an uncontestable truth (Laclau 1990: 34). On the contrary, if the presence we analyse, the object we wish to describe is ‘European Union democracy’, this phenomenon is highly contested. Is there democracy at all in the EU? To what extent? How and why? Is it undemocratic? If so, is it so by nature? Is European democracy even a contradiction in terms? It is hard to identify a common – to say nothing of a hegemonic – understanding of the democratic character of European integration. Rather, the situation is one of a fluid and volatile mobility, a semi-crystallized field of recurring clashes between different discourses of democracy,2 different conceptions which are simultaneously clearly identifiable, changeable and permeable.3 Again and again the question is raised whether this is legitimate government; whether it is proper and democratically legitimate for the Commission to interfere in national public deficits, mergers or acquisitions, waste recycling schemes or something else; whether it is not undemocratic for European Union regulations to meddle with local economic development, planning or production. Or whether rulings of the European Court of Justice do not display a disrespect for national politics, national democracy and even national identity. We hear unrelenting complaints that national parliamentary control is weak, that the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ and the closed doors of the Council of Ministers undermine parliamentary sovereignty and public debate, that national parliaments are unable to oversee efficiently the EU policy process, or that the European Parliament has too few powers to be a real parliament. The sheer size of the European Union in terms of population and geography, and its diversity in terms of culture and history, is another line of argument, implying that proximity between people and representatives and a cultural homogeneity of the people are necessary elements in for a genuinely democratic system. On the other hand, European integration is on certain occasions presented precisely as a force for the defence of democracy and even as a particular new and better manifestation of democracy. The first position is found in the argument that European integration served to ‘rescue the

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nation-state’ (Milward 2000) in Western Europe, following its mid-twentieth century crisis; and that it has stabilized democratic institutions and a democratic political culture in existing and future member states (Solana 2001a). The second is encountered where the EU is seen to facilitate the democratic control of fields which would otherwise be shaped solely by anonymous market forces or where an absence of democratic, political control would manifest itself as environmental degradation, military conflict or other serious problems.4 The nature of ‘European democracy’ is thus highly contested – considerably more than with national democracies – and we therefore cannot describe this phenomenon in terms that are currently beyond essential contention. Nevertheless, these observations do allow us to paint a certain picture at a different level. This is the level where the character of democratic problematization is our object, rather than ‘European democracy’ itself. It is the field of problematizations which we can locate under the broad heading of ‘the European Union and democracy’. We have already touched upon some of the elements in this situation. We have talked of semi-crystallization, fluidity and mobility, of clashes between different discourses. But more systematically, how could we describe the field of democratic problematizations as it has emerged in particular during the 1990s and early 2000s? We will explore this field from two different directions. First, from the perspective of specific governmental practices and technologies of power that have been operative in producing ‘un/democratic Europe’. Then, from the perspective of different discourses of democracy within which the various governmental technologies are situated. TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER In an essay he describes as a ‘thought-experiment’, the eminent historian of the French revolution, Keith Michael Baker, asks: ‘what would a Foucauldian account of the French Revolution look like?’ (Baker 1994). In his answer he suggests that one of its chief characteristics would be to examine the ‘technologies of power’ which the Revolution has bequeathed to our modern political culture. It seems there are several. One of the most important is a ‘technology of dedifferentiation’ – a particular way of individualizing political subjects as citizens while universalizing their social relations within the political body of the nation. As Baker notes, dedifferentiation has ‘the virtue of suggesting a procedure that can be continued indefinitely through the production of new differences to be removed’ (Baker 1994: 190). For instance, by mobilizing the identity of human as a signifier of equivalence it becomes possible to expose relationships of domination based on status or gender as illegitimate differences, and to call for their elimination.5 But there are other technologies of power which Baker similarly associates with the Revolution. There is a technology of transparison, or making

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transparent, comprising such instruments as the press and popular societies whose purpose was to make social and political life transparent; and also a technology of politicization, whose principle is the subjectivization of politics or the constitution of each individual as a responsible political actor. Why are these technologies of power important? First, they are historically significant: their impact on democratic political culture has been profound. Consider, for example, the ‘tactics of denunciation’ invented by the Revolution (Baker 1994: 191). This is the practice of identifying particular individuals and groups as agents of corruption or immorality, and calling for their removal or elimination on the grounds that they obstruct the fulfilment of national purpose and citizenship. The scandalous treatment of those labelled ‘bogus asylum-seekers’ or ‘welfare cheats’ suggests that these tactics of denunciation remain firmly embedded in the repertoire of contemporary political practice. Second, thinking about democracy in terms of technologies of power is important for conceptual reasons. It enables a ‘disenchanted’ view of political moments and processes (Baker 1994: 190). That is, it draws attention to the mechanisms of power which underpin and operate within discourses of emancipation. In so doing, it acts as an antidote to developmental and progressivist narratives of change. In the case of the Revolution, for many people national citizenship may have heralded a form of liberation from the irrationalism and the servitude of the Old Regime. But the legacy of the Revolution was no less a ‘regime’: it spawned its own forms of power. Not the least of these was the proliferation of the disciplines, such as the national pedagogy of mass schooling and military service. Deleuze (1988: 35) calls this the ‘Napoleonic diagram’, where the disciplinary function merges with the sovereign function. Accordingly, whatever else we think about the freedoms of citizenship which begin to diffuse through the social body, these were certainly well-regulated liberties. Third, a focus on technologies of power when thinking about the field of democracy enables us to foreground practices.6 By thinking about democracy in terms of its practices we are able to do several things. One of these is to produce a more historicized knowledge: how is democracy being imagined here? What is being done that was not previously done? How is it being done? Thinking at the level of practices makes for a more reflexive account: it enables us to defamiliarize institutions and words that are otherwise easily treated as permanent features of the political landscape. But another benefit of a focus on practices is to reveal that democracy, like other social and human phenomena, is ‘rare’ (see Chapter one).7 At any given moment there is a relatively limited range of ways to practice and experience democracy. One could perhaps speak of a historical repertoire of democratic practices. Politics involves the expansion, but also the contraction of this repertoire, whether by borrowing practices from other fields, or inventing new ones.

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Europe, democracy and technologies of power The problematization of democracy in the EU is of course a vastly different situation from the French Revolution. Even the most superficial analysis would observe, for instance, that the French Revolution presents a situation where a political order is confronted by criticisms and social forces external to it; political change is brought to the regime from ‘outside’. It is not that there is an absence of democratic critique from outside the system of European government. We have already sketched some of its lines. However, these games of democratization are far from revolutionary in form or content. For the most part, the EU case resembles one where a political regime is seeking to stabilize itself through the gradual assimilation of democratic practices into its governmental apparatus.8 That said, there is no reason why we should not examine these attempts at democratic reform in terms of their specific technologies of power. Dedifferentation and European rights Why does Baker identify the French Revolution with a technology of dedifferentiation? It is because the Revolution set in motion a process in which subjects would be governed as individuals inhabiting a ‘universal’ political body of the nation, rather than as members of particular corporate groups. In other words, it brought a force of dedifferentiation to bear upon the social and political order of the Old Regime. A central feature of this project was the abolition of the existing legal apparatus and its replacement with successive new legal institutions which governed individuals as citizens. On first inspection we find a reverse move at work in the case of European integration. As we have seen in our analysis of European common markets, the Treaty of Rome established its subjects primarily as expressions of functional or economic categories, for instance as workers, farmers and producers. These are, then, subjectivizations which create rights and responsibilities as a reflection of corporate functions, as functions of each individual’s position in a socio-economic order. However, an element of dedifferentiation can be found in the Treaty’s prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of nationality. This is a universalistic element, a movement which establishes the possibility of certain rights as independent of the nationality of the subject in question. Thus, whereas dedifferentiation in the French Revolution involved a new legal code that eliminated distinctions between subjects on the basis of their position in a social order, an early element of dedifferentiation in European integration consists of the creation of a legal code which implies a lessening of legal distinctions between subjects on the basis of their position in an order of nationalities. It is important to note, however, that this element of dedifferentiation reflected not a democratic problematization, but rather – as we have seen – a concern for the security of economic processes against a background of a problematization of European stability.9

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A fuller conception of EU citizenship would, of course, appear with the Maastricht Treaty. The 1991 Treaty’s paragraphs on European citizenship constitute an extension of dedifferentiation: from a definition of supranational rights, but within the confines of functional or economic categories, to a definition of supranational rights with reference simply to citizenship. These rights include ‘the right to move and reside freely’ in the Union’s member states, and the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal and European Parliament elections if residing outside the country of national citizenship. But European citizenship remains coupled precisely to national citizenship, as it is also explicitly stated in Article 8: ‘Every person holding the nationality of a member state shall be a citizen of the Union’. The condition on which European rights are conferred upon individuals is national citizenship. Hence, the European citizenship of supranational rights in effect confirms the status of national citizenship. A movement towards universalism goes hand in hand with a parallel movement to confirm a specific particularism.10 To speak of a technology of dedifferentiation is not to suggest an instrument which can simply be wielded by particular groups. Instead, it is to imply the existence of a complex apparatus of norms, laws, concepts and practices, an assemblage that will function as an arena of possibilities. Once created it will allow for the identification, politicization, production and removal of further differences within the social body, but in ways that cannot always be predicted. Dedifferentiation does not proceed smoothly within this space, but through the agonistic struggles of individuals and groups who mobilize upon its terrain. This is precisely what we see in the European case. During the early years of the Common Market, member states were reluctant to treat other EC workers on the same basis as their own. A powerful force for change here turned out to be the European Court of Justice. Joppke notes how the European Court of Justice came to interpret the Treaty as though it were the constitution of a federal state. For instance, by broadening the concept of worker and the rights attached to it, or by narrowing the grounds on which a government could deport citizens from other member states, ‘ECJ activism . . . destroyed the capacity of sovereign nation-states to control the conditions of entry and residence of a large class of [EC] non-citizens’ (Joppke 2001: 51). In this way, the Court effected a dedifferentiation of the order of nationalities, and cleared a political space in which a future concept of European citizen could appear. Technologies of differentiation Acts and technologies of dedifferentiation open a political space for European democracy by producing new subjects. They do so by denaturalizing a political order which confined rights to nationals. Dedifferentiation occurs once it becomes possible for an Italian working in a car plant in Germany to claim similar rights to German workers; the order of nationalities is challenged. It is

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advanced whenever actors are able to connect with its apparatus and constitute the lines which constrain them as illegitimate and unnatural. However, it would be misleading to think of the production of new spaces and subjects of democracy only in terms of technologies of dedifferentiation. It would be more accurate to observe that the construction of un/democratic Europe involves technologies of differentiation as well. If the promise of technologies of dedifferentiation is a certain universalism, this potential is always checked and limited by the mobilization of these other technologies. Technologies of dedifferentiation produce differences like status, nationality or gender as unnatural, as obstacles to the realization of a democratic people. Technologies of differentiation produce difference as salient and as proper grounds for qualifying, limiting, or in other cases marginalizing or excluding individuals and groups from the polity. Why, for example, has EU citizenship not been extended to all residents of the EU? Why has the extension and deepening of EU citizenship been accompanied by a shadow category, the ‘third country national’, those millions of people living and working in EU countries whose rights of mobility and representation are quite secondary when compared with the privileges of EU nationals? (Balibar 2004; Bhabha 1999; Hansen 1998). No doubt this situation reflects, among other things, the derivative nature of EU citizenship, and the existence of different definitions of nationality across the member states. But at another level, we need to recognize that this restriction, this limitation of EU citizenship to EU nationals, is underpinned by the production of social difference. It is underwritten by all those discourses which produce the third-country national as ‘alien’, which mark them as ‘risks’ and ‘threats’. Seen from this angle, certain discourses of crime, immigration and xenophobia, what Bigo (2002) aptly calls the ‘governmentality of unease’, and the security measures they sanction, should be regarded as technologies of differentiation. Because they serve to police the borders of Europe’s political community, and to channel and limit its vectors of dedifferentiation, it is mistaken to confine their significance to security or Justice and Home Affairs policy. For they are also interventions upon a political terrain, regulating the nature of membership in Europe’s political community (Huysmans 2000a). We return to this line of inquiry in Chapter five when we discuss the in/secure Europe of Schengenland. Technologies of transparison In Baker’s account of the French Revolution, transparison is a precondition for dedifferentation: the individualization and universalization of the subject required that political and social life had to be rendered open to all (Baker 1994: 198–9). As with the emergence of the public sphere more generally, the advent of a popular press and popular societies constituted an apparatus through which politics and society could be rendered visible for the purposes of public criticism and improvement.

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In the EU, the proclamation of citizen rights as a way of ‘bringing the Union closer to its people’ has been closely paralleled by a search for ways to increase the transparency of the practices of EU institutions in various respects. The opacity of the decision-making processes of the Council of Ministers has been a long-standing issue. But the more general question of the openness of EU institutions was first placed on the agenda following the non-ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in Denmark in 1992. Transparency was in this connection explicitly related to a problematization of the EU’s democratic legitimacy, and it became an issue for the Commission and the European Councils in Birmingham and Edinburgh in that year. Hence, in the ‘Birmingham Declaration’ the Heads of State and Government declared that ‘as a community of democracies, we can only move forward with the support of our citizens’ in this connection emphasizing that ‘[w]e must [. . .] make the Community more open, to ensure a better informed public debate on its activities’ (European Council 1992a) The Edinburgh summit further approved a set of more elaborate measures to ‘increase transparency and openness in the decision making process of the Community’ (European Council 1992b) But these technologies of transparison, which have been employed or invoked on several occasions since then, for instance in the Commission’s 2001 White Paper on European Governance, are not limited to opening up the political decision-making process. The fashion for drafting charters, bills and declarations of European rights might also be considered in this way. For one aspect of these activities is to take rights which were previously dispersed across treaties and other bodies of law, and tabulate them in a graphic form that is readily grasped by the subject. With such documents rights are not just defined; they are gathered in one place. By enumerating and packaging rights in this way, a certain legibility and accessibility, a specific kind of transparency is conferred on them. They can be posted, advertised, circulated in a way that invites the subject to see her/himself as a user of rights. In short, there is a technical aspect to charters and bills, a question of making subjects aware of the rights they possess.11 The political effects of transparison are somewhat ambiguous. As with the various moves of dedifferentiation, transparison in the European context can serve to inject legitimacy into European integration. Furthermore, it can function as a basis for political challenges to European institutions, when, for instance, groups use openness provisions and access procedures to press for change. However, there is also an aura of paternalism which can attach to this technology. Consider the White Paper on Governance which observes how ‘providing more information and more effective communication is a precondition for generating a sense of belonging to Europe’ (European Commission 2001a: 11); ‘openness, accountability and responsibility’ for those involved should ‘help people to see how member states, by acting together within the Union, are able to tackle their concerns more effectively’

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(2001a: 3); and that ‘openness is of particular importance in order to improve the confidence in complex situations’ (2001a: 10). The presumption is that the public does not understand European affairs. Openness, transparency and information will help it understand. In this version, transparison is mobilized as a means for a regime to make its subjects approve of itself. It reflects a will from an ‘inside’ to persuade populations to understand, accept and support. Technologies of agency There is a tendency within the social sciences to view agency as a universal attribute of humans and their societies. Studies of governmentality are notable in that they query this trans-historical conception of agency. This is not a matter of rejecting the notion that humans act, but observing that ‘agency’ is a value and an effect of particular practices. It is valued at certain times and places and not in others. It is elicited within certain regimes of rule – for instance when we are governed as responsible citizens. But when a people is governed, for example, by a prince as a ‘human fauna populating his domain’ (Veyne 1997: 150), as a quasi-natural resource to be exploited, it is not governed as a locus of individual and collective agency. Dean has argued that one of the chief characteristics of the forms of rule currently identified as neoliberalism is the privileged role they accord to various ‘technologies of agency’. Diverse interventions and reforms can be placed under this heading. Technologies of agency are central to all those programmes and policies which seek to address poverty and homelessness by ‘empowering’ these subjects and enhancing their ‘self-esteem’ (Cruikshank 1999). Likewise, they are central to attempts to improve public policy-making wherever the emphasis is on creating spaces for the ‘voice’ and the ‘participation’ of ‘stakeholders’, ‘communities’ and other user-groups. What links these and other programmes is the way they attempt ‘to engage us as active and free citizens, as informed and responsible consumers, as members of selfmanaging communities and organizations, as actors in democratizing social movements, and as agents capable of taking control of our own risks’ (Dean 1999b: 168). The turn to technologies of agency is ubiquitous today. From local governments to research funding councils, wherever the authority of organizations has been questioned, and pressure exerted for greater accountability and participation, and in many cases where it has not, we tend to find these technologies of agency making their appearance. The EU is, in this sense, no different. Besides the technologies we have already mentioned, technologies of agency are certainly playing a role in attempts to enhance democracy at a European level. If the EU is faced with the question of how to become, or at least appear more democratic, technologies of agency present one solution. Whereas dedifferentiation and transparison may be seen to establish the European citizen and to open up certain fields to the scrutiny of this subject,

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technologies of agency seek to foster the active involvement of the European citizen in the shaping and conduct of government. Consider the case of the White Paper on European Governance. Here we find a great emphasis placed on openness and transparency. But in the same breath this document calls for a strengthening of involvement. Reforms are called for which will facilitate the participation of citizens, organizations of ‘civil society’, and local and regional governments in the processes of European policy formulation and implementation. These reforms include the provision of up-to-date, on-line information on the state of policies as they progress through different decision-making stages; the establishment and publication of minimum standards for consultation on EU policy; and the establishment of partnership arrangements going beyond these minimum standards in selected areas (European Commission 2001a: 4, 12–18). Another example where technologies of agency are prominent is with the creation in 1995 of a European Ombudsman. Like many institutional practices, the Ombudsman can be analysed under several of our headings. On the one hand it is expected to improve transparency (cf. Gregory and Giddings 2001). For it embodies the idea that governmental apparatuses should be subject to a continuous monitoring, that administrative practices must be scrutinized by the critical gaze of the public eye so that instances of maladministration can be reproached. Indeed, this power to make inquiries and formulate public criticism is the only formal power that the institution possesses. But it is a technology of agency as well insofar as it is to constitute a venue where citizen complaints can be registered and addressed. It is thus a mechanism which can actively assist each individual in becoming involved in European government in one specific capacity: that of the conscientious citizen insisting on her right to a certain form of treatment (and perhaps respect) by European institutions. Moreover, in seeking to make the process of lodging complaints less complicated, it is supposed to facilitate a greater sense of self-consciousness on the part of the citizen, and a capacity to insist on their rights. It thereby contributes towards the production of the notion of a European citizen who possesses a certain dignity and selfconsciousness, who is to be accorded a certain respect and who is always ready to take action over inappropriate practices.12 Technologies of proximity Technologies of proximity refer to all those discourses and practices which imagine democracy in terms of positive experiences of local engagement, participation and connection. Proximity is affirmed at the level of the citizen body: democratic life is seen to benefit from a certain closeness and connection between citizens. It is also affirmed between citizens and the formal institutions of political authority: people should feel ‘closer’ to government.

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Certain critiques of globalization invoke an ethos of proximity whenever they speak in the name of the specificity and situatedness of ‘the local’ in opposition to the abstract, universalizing tendencies of ‘the global’.13 But discourses of communitarianism and social capital (Putnam 1993) also mobilize a technology of proximity. They suggest that genuine, lasting and effective democratic experiences depend upon dense networks of social life, where individuals experience face to face interaction within affective spaces of community, as opposed to abstract and thin relations with their neighbours, and where they are embedded in bonds of mutual trust and reciprocity. It is important to note that democratic thought has not always privileged the local and the proximate. Rousseau certainly did when he observed that the kind of democracy he favoured was only forthcoming within small city-states like his native Geneva. But democratic thought bears an historically variable relationship to technologies of proximity, as it does to other practices. Indeed, in the aftermath of World War Two the dominant, and for many observers the preferred, image of liberal democracy did not reverberate with ideas of community action and popular participation. Rather, the dominant image was one that has since been associated with Joseph Schumpeter (1942) and labelled as a ‘realist theory’ of liberal democracy (cf. Connolly 1995). This is a relatively sober view of liberal democracy as a game in which an oligopoly of highly-professionalized parties compete to win the support of a relatively uninformed and disengaged electorate. In this image the citizen was imagined as a relatively passive consumer, who chooses between rival political packages as they would select between leading soap powders. Now some would no doubt suggest that, for better or worse, this relatively pessimistic image still captures the essence of liberal democracy. However, the prominence of such intellectual currents as communitarianism within political thought, the continuing appeal of political decentralization, and the flourishing of various kinds of social movements, among other things, suggests that there are powerful forces linking democracy to these spaces of proximity. If the EU has looked to technologies of transparison and agency in a bid to enhance its democratic profile it has also sought to utilize this technology of proximity. Perhaps more than any other, the trope which recurs throughout discussions of un/democratic Europe is one that upon characterizing European government as overly ‘remote’ calls for initiatives which move it ‘closer to its people’. Consider the example of subsidiarity. In the words of Article 3b of the Maastricht Treaty, the subsidiarity principle aims to prevent European institutions from trying to govern too much. ‘In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and

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can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community’ (Treaty on European Union Title II, B, Article 3b). In itself, the principle can be motivated by various concerns, such as a concern for ‘policy efficiency’ or the appeal of a federalism that, due to certain political sensitivities, dare not speak its name. However, in the conclusions from the Birmingham 1992 European Council, the principle of subsidiarity is articulated specifically as a response to a democratic problematization. The principle is posited as an instrument to avoid excessive centralism, with a view to fostering popular support for integration: ‘We affirm that decisions must be taken as closely as possible to the citizen. Greater unity can be achieved without excessive centralization’ [. . .] ‘Bringing to life this principle – “subsidiarity” or “nearness” – is essential if the Community is to develop with the support of its citizens’ (European Council 1992a: 5). While subsidiarity may be the most visible and in many ways the most symbolic technology of proximity at work within the space of un/democratic Europe, it is by no means the only one. There are other, more mundane attempts to configure experiences of connection and proximity. Consider, for example, the EU’s enthusiasm for technologies of interactivity. One of the least conspicuous features of the recent European Convention to draft a Constitutional Treaty was Futurum, its debate-forum.14 Here the public is invited via the internet to post comments concerning the Treaty’s contents. Similarly, there is the case of the European Ombudsman’s on-line ‘quick’ complaint form.15 Again, the internet seems to hold out the promise of a certain experience of involvement, connection and immediacy on the part of the citizen.

Technologies and symbolic practices Thus far we have given some examples of the technologies of power that underpin some of the different problematizations of un/democratic Europe. It should be noted that our discussion is not intended to be exhaustive so much as illustrative. One could certainly identify other technologies. For instance, we have said nothing about any technologies of representation. These would concern a space comprising national and European parties, party systems, elections, lobbies and interest groups. A fuller account than ours might consider some of the different academic and practical discourses which have looked to systems of political representation as mechanisms for enhancing European democracy. But notwithstanding such omissions, the point we wish to make is that thinking about questions of democracy at the level of these technologies of power is a useful exercise. It is useful for several reasons. First, it reveals that European democracy is not singular but polymorphous. What we find is a plethora of different technologies, each of which promises to make Europe more democratic in a particular way, according to a particular rationality and a particular practice.

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Second, this focus reveals that the space of un/democractic Europe is indeed ‘rare’. By this we mean that there is at any particular historical moment a specific repertoire of technologies which, for ethical, political or practical reasons, can be mobilized by actors. Not just anything goes. While the field of un/democratic Europe does not resemble that of national democracies, it is nevertheless traversed by many of the same rationalities and practices. For instance, technologies of agency like ‘civil society’ or technologies of proximity and deliberation like the ‘forum’ currently play a prominent role in attempts to imagine a more democratic Europe, just as they do within nation-states and other political spaces (e.g., within projects like the World Social Forum, which began in Porto Alegre and seeks to build democracy at a transnational level (see Pianta 2003)). But while thinking in terms of technologies of power can have certain benefits, it is not without its pitfalls. Perhaps it risks a certain naïvety, a theoretical position that almost takes these practices at their word. The point is this: how many people really believe that initiatives like internet forums, or even improved procedures of consultation in policy-making are going to significantly enhance European democracy? Is the EU’s emphasis on subsidiarity really transforming the landscape of European policy practices? After all, several studies suggest that the subsidiarity principle has failed to affect in any significant manner the scope for European legislative or regulatory initiatives (Bermann 1994; de Búrca 1999; Nedergaard 2000: 110–15). Perhaps we should not lose sight of the fact that besides an instrumental or practical logic, these technologies also inhabit a symbolic field. The analogy here is with policies such as workfare or criminal justice reforms which establish harsher prison sentences for certain types of offence (e.g., drugs) (Garland 1997). While these reforms are rationalized by policy claims that they will ‘solve’ social problems like welfare ‘dependency’ or violent crime, their purpose often lies elsewhere. In very visible ways they signal to the public that their government is ‘serious’ about ‘tackling’ crime and ‘fighting’ drugs. They give the impression of a government that is strong and authoritative. We suspect there is an element of this logic at work with some of these technologies of power: the symbolic production of European democracy.

DISCOURSES OF DEMOCRATIC EUROPE Thus far we have investigated some of the technologies of power at work within the field of un/democratic Europe. If democratic government is an art, a particular way of governing human affairs, then these technologies constitute some of the lines along which this art has been developed. But what of the specific discourses which describe and define the field of un/democratic Europe, and which attempt to fix the meaning of European

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democracy? We noted at the outset that this field is characterized by its unfixity and indeterminacy, that is, by the fact that there are multiple discourses, none of which has successfully established its authority across its area. But this does not mean we cannot analyse these competing discourses in greater depth. This is the task we now turn to. We can distinguish at least three different discourses in this context, three separate understandings of how European democracy is defined or should be constructed. We will introduce these three discourses in brief terms. One of them, democracy as rational government, will then be subjected to closer scrutiny. First, the field of un/democratic Europe would seem to be inhabited by a discourse of popular sovereignty. Wherever the democratic problem of European integration is seen to consist of too limited possibilities for a general, popular will to make itself influential in defining the contents of European government, such government is the object of this particular conception of democracy. In this discourse, the answer to questions of legitimacy and democracy is argued to be the enhancement of direct representation in the form of a strengthening of the European Parliament or even a ‘full parliamentarization’ of the Union, i.e. the installation of a European government elected by and fully accountable to the European Parliament. This call is frequently heard in the German political and scholarly debate (e.g., Fischer 2000) and has been made on repeated occasions by the European Parliament itself. But the discourse has also comprised calls for the introduction of a direct expression of a general, popular will in the form of the use of European-wide referenda on specific issues (Schmitter 2000: 36–7, 120–5). Second, claims to democratize the EU can also be located within a discourse of justice. Again, we find expressions of this discourse in the scholarly literature about European integration (e.g., Bellamy and Warleigh 2001; Marias 1994; Meehan 1993), just as we can identify it in certain governmental practices and technologies. For we can view the technology of dedifferentiation as a specific expression of a discourse of justice in which juridical constraints on government have increasingly come to consist of the articulation of individual rights. Originally, juridical constraints on the exercise of European government first of all consisted of the limits imposed on it by its founding treaties. As such, it may be seen to reflect a conception in which justice is legality, the adherence to law. Whereas this conception remains significant, the introduction of notions of European citizen rights, in the Maastricht Treaty and later Treaty revisions and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, entails a certain transformation and expansion of justice: Juridical constraints on European government may now also originate from citizens exercising their individual rights. There is a third attempt to found European government upon a democratic basis. This is a discourse of rationality. It is encountered wherever the answer to questions of legitimacy and democracy of European integration is

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held to be ‘better policies’ or ‘rational and efficient outcomes’. This discourse can be heard in the voices of the European institutions themselves, as in the aforementioned White Paper on European Governance (European Commission 2001a). It can also be detected in the scholarly literature, for instance where questions of legitimacy are framed as problems of ‘output’, of the ability of the EU to deliver results with a specific utilitarian value (e.g. Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998), or where the democratic legitimacy of integration is related to the character and significance of deliberation with a view to rational consensus and rational policy (e.g. Eriksen and Fossum 2000).16 In the following we subject this particular discourse to closer scrutiny. How is it specifically constructed? What kind of political imagination does it presuppose? In contrast to which opposing rationalities is it given shape?

Public rationality and expert rationality In Baker’s (1990) account of the French revolution one of the claims to rearticulate government was made in the name of reason. This discourse reflected the Enlightenment’s belief that rationality emerges from public reasoning. The source of truth was the free and equal reasoning of individuals in pursuit of a common understanding, and thus ultimately the sheer ‘force of the better argument’ (cf. also Habermas 1989). The challenge was seen as one of putting in place an administrative system which would provide the right conditions for the transformation of power through Enlightenment. In Turgot’s Mémoires sur les municipalités, made public in 1787, this consisted, alongside the creation of a national educational system, of the establishment of a hierarchy of representative assemblies. The purpose of these assemblies was not to alter the locus of legislative power, to replace one form of will with another, but rather to ensure the common reason and the rational expression of public interest, to have rationality replace will (Baker 1990: 120–3). Legitimate government as a reflection of reasoning and rationality is a conception which remains significant in the contemporary production of European democracy. It is a central element in the theory of deliberative democracy, as applied recently in scholarly analyses of the EU’s democratic characteristics (Eriksen and Fossum 2000). It manifests itself materially in the existence of a number of bodies in the EU which can serve as deliberative fora, as locations for the free and equal exchange of arguments with a view to achieving a consensual understanding (Eriksen 2000: 55–6; Haahr 2001: 265). The European Parliament, the Committee of Regions, and the Economic and Social Council can all be highlighted in this respect, as sites where possibilities are opened for the exchange of arguments and the pursuit of agreement through reasoning. The Council’s working groups and the expert committees of the Commission, playing important roles in the Union’s ‘comitology’ system of decision-making, also appear as deliberative fora (Beyers and Dierickx 1998; Joerges and Neyer 1997; Kerremans 1996).

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We can therefore view these institutions as expressions of a discourse of rationality. (In cases such as the parliament they can, of course, locate themselves within the discourse of popular sovereignty as well). But to the observation that there are a number of fora which reflect a deliberative rationality, a search for rationality through reasoning, we must add the observation that these fora differ. They differ in respect of their formal competences and informal significance and hence their overall importance in European government; but also, with respect to publicity, as to whether they are objects of a technology of transparison or not. It is thus important to note that the sites which are encompassed by transparison, where deliberation and argumentation is carried out in front of a public, also emerge as the sites which are in the weaker position. The Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee are transparent bodies, but they are also purely advisory bodies. And even if the range of formal competencies available to the European Parliament has gradually increased from the adoption of the Single European Act in 1986 onwards, it clearly remains the weaker element in the European legislative process. The content of European legislation is, to a large extent, determined in the interplay between Council and Commission, and not least in the opaque space of the comitology-system, with its numerous working groups and expert committees. Judged on the basis of its institutional manifestations, it would seem, therefore, that there is a tension within the discourse of rationality. For it appears that claims to shape and legitimize European government in the name of rationality are made from two different and not entirely compatible positions: from a position of public rationality and from a position of a rationality of expertise. Moreover, the rationality of expertise seemingly occupies a predominant place. The position of public rationality is reflected in the EU’s transparent deliberative bodies. It rests on the presupposition that a democratic legitimacy requires the pursuit of rational solutions in public, and assumes therefore that the central element in a legitimacy of rationality is the advance of arguments and ultimately the conviction of the public of citizens. It therefore also presupposes the existence of a European body of citizens, capable and willing to evaluate arguments, and indeed demanding to be convinced in argumentation. Alternately, the rationality of expertise posits that it is the content of solutions and policies, of laws and regulations, which is essential, not the process through which these are given shape. It is the availability of solutions, the provision of goods, the fulfilment of needs that is important, not the reasons that are advanced to justify these solutions. This position is reflected in the EUs opaque deliberative bodies, in the expert committees and specialized working groups where the objective of deliberation is the search for the superior solution, but where this search takes place within specific épistemes, inside the confines of narrow economic, technical or juridical rationalities and the restricted field of valid argumentation defined by these (cf. Gonzalez-Sanchez 1992).

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This expert rationality presupposes a subject of preferences, desires and wishes, for there are certainly a host of needs and concerns of citizens, producers or consumers that must be addressed by expertise. It is not, however, a subject who requires convincing, who has a desire to understand. The relation between expert rationality and the subjectifications established by it is therefore a paternalistic relation, a relation where expertise applies its capacities towards the fulfilment of certain needs which are presumed to be important for citizens, producers or consumers, but where these subjects are at the same time implicitly constructed as incapable of understanding, uninterested in knowing and with no real need to understand and know.

Expert rationality in the White Paper on European Governance In a number of respects, we find these observations confirmed when questioning the discourse of reason as it manifests itself on a different text: In documents of the European institutions, in particular the Commission’s White Paper on European Governance (European Commission 2001a). We have already mentioned how technologies of agency form an important element in the White Paper. Some of these technologies, such as the emphasis on increased consultation and strengthened involvement of citizens and organizations of ‘civil society’, indeed point to public rationality, to deliberative processes as a way to increase the Union’s democratic legitimacy. However, as we have already seen, the White Paper’s emphasis on involvement and consultation appears not as much as the result of a quest to establish a firmer basis of information and argumentation for policies, as of a desire to increase popular support and understanding for these policies. Involvement and consultation appear as educational initiatives rather than as instruments for the pursuit and testing of valid arguments. The point is that ‘[i]mproved participation is likely to create more confidence in the end result and in the institutions which deliver policy’ (European Commission 2001a: 10). It is not that improved participation will provide a more convincing and therefore a more rational basis for policy.17 In the White Paper, public rationality thus at least partially emerges in a paternalistic version, in a shape which is close to the rationality of expertise: Involvement is not first and foremost a vehicle for the achievement of rational agreement on the basis of the free and equal exchange of arguments oriented towards understanding. It is more a vehicle for persuasion, for rhetorical action in which the point is to convince the objects of rhetoric of certain given beliefs, preferences and identities (cf. Risse 2000). Moreover, in its discussion of the need for ‘better policies, regulation and delivery’, the White Paper highlights the importance of scientific and other experts. It admits the opacity of the Union’s system of expert committees and a lack of information about their workings, but it does so under the heading ‘confidence in expert advice’ (European Commission 2001a: 19) just as it explicitly states that the Union must ‘boost confidence in the way expert

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advice influences policy decisions’ (2001a: 5). The means to do this include increased transparency, but only in the sense that the advice provided by the various expert committees should be publicly available, not in the sense that the committees should deliberate in front of a public in order to open their reasoning to the public’s argumentative tests, and in search for a shared understanding. This rationality of expertise is found in other connections as well. In its section on ‘better and faster regulation’, the White Paper for instance states that the improvement of the quality, effectiveness and simplicity of regulatory acts depends on an ‘effective analysis’ of modes of intervention (European Commission 2001a: 20). Decisions on ways to regulate or not regulate here emerge as the result of a different expert rationality, namely that represented by the Commission itself. The White Paper also highlights increased use of independent regulatory agencies as a separate contribution to ‘better policies, regulation and delivery’ (European Commission 2001a: 24). Such agencies are a further institutional manifestation of a rationality of expertise, embodying the belief that optimal solutions can be identified in the application of a specialized ‘technical’ knowledge. In the context of European integration, the discourse of rationality hence appears as a discourse which primarily relies upon a rationality of expertise. A public rationality, a position according to which rational agreement must be pursued in public, is present too, but both as regards the institutional manifestations of the discourse of reason and as exemplified in the articulations of the European Commission, the rationality of expertise appears dominant. The Others of the discourse of rationality These points lead us to a separate observation about the underlying problematizations. For when the rationality of expertise points to the significance of results, in terms of policies, regulation and delivery, it does so against a specific background. The discourse of reason is an element in the field of democratic problematization of European integration. It constitutes one among several responses to concerns of popular support and democratic legitimacy in contemporary Europe, to ‘alienation’ and a ‘loss of popular confidence’ (European Commission 2001a: 3, 7). However, when we hear calls for ‘effectiveness’ and for ‘better policies, regulation and delivery’, it is also a response to risks, challenges and opportunities. ‘People [. . .] expect the Union to take the lead in seizing the opportunities of globalisation for economic and human development, and in responding to environmental challenges, unemployment, concerns over food safety, crime and regional conflicts’ (European Commission 2001a: 3), just as the Union ‘is required to apply the precautionary principle and play its role in risk assessment and risk management’ (European Commission 2001a: 19). Within the discourse of rationality, and specifically within its predominant logic of expertise, it thus seems that ‘efficient policies’ are presented as

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responses in a specific landscape, in a political imaginary defined both by a space of risk, and simultaneously one of opportunity. Risks and opportunities characterize the world in which the Union must deliver better results and more efficient policies. Opportunities and risks go hand in hand. The emphasis on opportunities implies a particular view of the world – a world in flux, a place where new possibilities are constantly emerging. Globalization appears as a key term here, where it is represented as an objective fact, a phenomenon located outside the Union and requiring the Union to react (cf. Hay and Rosamond 2002). But also an uncertain, risky world. The precautionary principle and the risk assessment, which must be undertaken by the Union, pertains to ‘potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal or plant health’ (European Commission 2000b). Against this particular background, the Union’s justification is one of control and management. Risks are to be managed, opportunities are to be seized, challenges are to be responded to. And agency rests with the Union. The rationality of expertise obtains its force through references to a world of risks and opportunities, of external challenges calling for the effective response of European institutions. This is thus an Other against which the European discourse of rationality defines itself. Not the monarch’s arbitrary exercise of will, his/her unpredictable decisions to order things in one way instead of another. But rather the anonymous and unpredictable forces of globalization, technology and economy, the absence of control in the troubled waters of a globalizing and technologizing world. As with the despotic voluntas, this Other stands in opposition to ratio. But it does so in a specific form: in the form of the absence of rational management of processes of economic, scientific and technological development. Rather than despotic government, it is the Other as ‘non-government’.

CONCLUSION: LIMITS OF POWER Today Europe exists as a subjective question, a matter of affections, connections, loyalties. What do Europeans ‘feel’ about Europe? How much do they ‘care’ about the future of Europe? Why don’t they feel ‘closer’ to the EU? This subjectification of Europe is bound up with its problematization as a democratic project. We have argued that this space of un/democratic Europe – the space in which it becomes possible to pose questions about the extent, quality, shape and desirability of European-level democracy – is not clearly signposted. Often discourses seem to be talking across one another, assuming quite different definitions of democracy. Democracy within nation-states is certainly not uncontested. Yet if our standard political science textbooks are anything to go by, we nevertheless possess a relatively settled understanding of what liberal democracy is supposed to look like. The same cannot be said

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for European democracy. It is, we have suggested, a semi-crystallized field in which no one conception of democracy is hegemonic. Rather than propose a particular model of democracy for the EU, or assume one and use it to assess the state of European democracy, we have pursued a somewhat different line. We have suggested that it is possible to address this topic at the level of democratic problematizations of Europe which together delimit the field of un/democratic Europe. Moreover, we have argued that this field can be analysed in terms of particular technologies of power as well as particular discourses which traverse it. Such investigations help us to grasp the polymorphousness of European democratic space. In conclusion we want to clarify one possible misunderstanding. If this field is marked by a certain instability, and the proliferation of new methods of democratization, this is not necessarily a sign of the power of these methods, so much as their limits. If the space of un/democratic Europe seems so uncertain, so variable, it is because it is continually unsettled by counterdiscourses and social forces which it cannot successfully assimilate or neutralize. Some signs are more salient than others, some voices are loud, others are murmurs. It would take a different study from this one to analyse these in any detail. However, we want to mention two. The first is a discourse of nationalism which takes the EU as its negative Other, coding it as a regime of bureaucratic domination and anti-citizenship. This is a language which can be found in the British tabloid press, and in some of its broadsheets, within significant sections of that country’s Conservative party, and amongst elements of the political right in Denmark, France and several other present and future EU states. These voices discursively relocate the EU’s various technologies as instruments of Euro-nation-building. Rather than being located within a programme of democracy, projects of dedifferentiation and European citizenship are recast as elements within a strategy of fostering an unwanted European state and a Euro-national identity. Initiatives like a European Constitutional Treaty become attempts to displace national constitutions and prerogatives and erode ‘national sovereignty’. As the popular UK tabloid The Sun warns its readers, Britain is ‘drifting ever closer towards being swallowed up by a European superstate’, meaning ‘the end of our nation’ (27 May, 2003). Nationalist discourse may or may not drape itself in concepts of democracy. It does so, for instance, when Europe’s democratic deficit is cast as the absence of a people whose will can be expressed through representative institutions. A national people that is, the homogeneous body of culture, history and language emphasized by the German Constitutional Court in its Maastricht Verdict (BVG 1993) as well as in the voices of Danish or Swedish Eurosceptics, a conflation of nation and state where accordingly a stronger European Parliament fails to be within the horizon of democratic meaning or even emerges as a further erosion of democracy (Haahr 2003; Weiler 1995).

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The second force which animates the space of un/democratic Europe is not an organized political movement but something more molecular and diffuse. It is tempting to call this the refusal of subjects to take up the positions that are offered to them, to assume the identities of European citizens. This is expressed in many ways. Some examples might include the ‘no’ vote concerning Sweden’s participation in the single currency; limited public interest in the work of the Convention drafting the Constitutional Treaty in 2002–2003; or the declining turn-out rates for European Parliament elections – 49.4 per cent on average in the 1999 elections compared to more than 60 per cent in the 1979 and 1984 elections. It is these and countless other little (non-)acts of ignorance and refusal – despite repeated attempts to make the EU more transparent, participatory, and proximate – that reveal the limits of the technologies of power we have discussed.18 Moreover, they ensure that further activity in these areas, striving to ‘reconnect’ the European ‘citizenry’, is more than likely. But if we assume for a moment that the EU does not successfully address its democratic deficit, fails to engage a European public, would this augur badly for the future of democracy? It could well pose some serious limitations for the future development of EU projects. But whether this is tantamount to a defeat for European democracy is not as certain. As we have emphasized at various points in this book, we should avoid the conflation which sees the EU as identical with Europe. In modern times the EU is certainly the most successful and well-institutionalized attempt to represent Europe and to speak in its name. But it does not exhaust the ways Europe can be represented or governed. Other sites exist where the question of European democracy is being raised. They may not receive the same level of attention as, say, the EU’s constitutional process, but they exist. To take just one example, since 2002 there is now an annual European Social Forum (ESF), a regional offshoot of the World Social Forum that began in Porto Alegre. ESF is a highly-decentralized convention of trade union groups, human rights organizations, peace activists, feminists and many other social movements. It points to the emergence of Europe as a space of democratic problematization not just within the official apparatuses of government but within the sprawling networks that are now identified with ‘global civil society’. Historically, democracy has as often as not come from outside the boundaries of the official political system. It has come from pressures brought to bear on the political order, seeking either to replace it, or force it in new directions. Why should European democracy take the form of a game which plays itself out within the EU framework, a movement progressing serenely along the official boulevards laid out for it by the European institutions? Perhaps it will come in unexpected ways, in part through contestations of the EU at its edges. Perhaps it will advance along crooked and unpredictable pathways, routes that are at present only vaguely mapped and comprehended.

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Notes 1

Hegemony is used in many ways within the social sciences. Our use of the term is informed by Laclau and Mouffe and the framework of discourse analysis they have inspired. ‘Hegemony is, quite simply, a political type of relation, a form . . . of politics; but not a determinable location within a topography of the social. In a given social formation, there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points.’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139). 2 Our chemical metaphor of ‘crystallization’ is informed by Mann’s argument about the polymorphous character of the modern state. ‘In chemistry’, he observes, ‘a polymorph is a substance that crystallizes in two or more different forms, usually belonging to different systems.’ (Mann 1993: 75). By analogy he sees states crystallizing as centres within different, irreducible power networks. Hence the state can crystallize as ‘capitalist’, ‘militarist’, ‘party democratic’ and in other ways simultaneously, depending on its networks. 3 For a detailed analysis of public debates and their discursive implications in a particular EU member state, Denmark, see Haahr (2003). 4 Here we have in mind certain arguments for cosmopolitan governance which sometimes take the EU as a vector for new, post-Westphalian formations of democracy, e.g., Linklater (1998). 5 See the discussion of ‘logics of equivalance’ and ‘difference’ in Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 127–34). 6 See Veyne (1997) who argues that Foucault ‘revolutionizes history’ by placing practices front and centre. His revolution consists not in discovering a new historical agent or object but in making ‘the effort to see people’s practices as they really are’ and ‘to speak about practice precisely, to describe its convoluted forms, instead of referring to it in vague and noble terms’ (1997: 156; original emphasis). 7 Veyne writes that the recognition of ‘rarity’, meaning exceptionality, is one of Foucault’s great intuitions. He observes that human phenomena are ‘exceptional’, ‘arbitrary’, meaning they cannot be taken for granted no matter how self-evident they may seem to contemporaries or even to historians, even to the point where they pass unnoticed (Veyne 1997: 147). 8 Inasmuch as schemes to democratize the EU are undertaken to counteract and neutralize public discontent, and to avert potentially destabilizing political processes, perhaps we can see elements of a ‘passive revolution’ (Gramsci 1971: 105–20). Gramsci used this term to theorize a particular process of sociopolitical transformation: one where states undertake leadership and modernization tasks whose overall function is to stabilize the socioeconomic order. Piedmont had this function within the Italian Risorgimento, while Gramsci describes France between 1789 and 1815 as the ‘Piedmont of Europe’ (1971: 105). 9 The same can be said of a different element of dedifferentiation: The Rome Treaty’s provisions in Article 119 that each member state ‘shall ensure and maintain the application of the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work’. Whereas this establishes an individual right that was subsequently confirmed by the European Court of Justice, the provision was originally a response to a French problematization of economic competitiveness. Maledominated French employer and employee organizations feared competition from low-wage female workers in other member states (Hagen 1990: 80–4). 10 The proclamation at the 2000 European Council in Nice of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Official Journal of the European

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Communities 2000), appears as a further step in the expansion of dedifferentiation, this time clearly as an element in a field of democratic problematizations of integration. Here we find a point at which EU citizens become the bearers of ‘fundamental rights’ which are deemed to rest upon universal values, namely ‘human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity’ (Preamble). A good example is air passengers’ rights. The Commission has published a poster for display in airports outlining the rights of passengers under Community law. These posters provide information concerning rights with regard to such matters as overbooking and information about flight options when making bookings. By informing passengers of their rights, the expectation is that this will generate and channel consumer pressure leading to an improvement in airline performance, and more satisfied consumer-citizens. See http://www.euireland.ie/LegalRights/ airpassengersrights.htm, accessed 22 April, 2004. See the Ombudsman’s ‘European code of good administrative behaviour’. This emphasizes that ‘the official shall be service-minded, correct, courteous and accessible in relations with the public’. (European Ombudsman 2002: 10). Further, ‘if an error occurs which negatively affects the rights or interests of a member of the public, the official shall apologise for it and endeavour to correct the negative effects [. . .].’ For an important critique of the global/local binary see Gibson-Graham (2002). See http://europa.eu.int/futurum/index_en.htm, accessed 10 August 2003. See http://www.euro-ombudsman.eu.int/home/en/default.htm, accessed 10 August 2003. Evidently, the conceptions of democratic legitimacy which we have termed discourses of justice, popular sovereignty and rationality find echoes in numerous sites. Baker (1990) identifies them in connection with the French Revolution in a slightly different form as discourses of will, justice and reason. Contemporary scholarly literature identifies them for instance as liberal, republican-communitarian, deliberative and utilitarian conceptions of political legitimacy (e.g., Friis 1999; Haahr 2001; Habermas 1996; Jachtenfuchs et al. 1998). Here we treat the deliberative and utilitarian as elements of one broader discourse, a discourse of rationality. This conflation can be questioned. However, even if we acknowledge and indeed analyse in some detail below the differences between deliberative notions of rationality and notions of a more utilitarian ‘output-oriented’ legitimacy, the reference to some ‘rationality’ as a foundation for popular legitimacy is a common denominator. The last concern is not entirely absent, however. Witness for instance the White Paper’s remarks on consultation, stating that participation ‘is about more effective policy shaping based on early consultation and past experience’ (European Commission 2001a: 15). What does it mean to speak of a public which is ‘ignorant’ of EU institutions, or a national media which ‘fails’ to contribute to the formation of a European public sphere? One should use such language with caution. There certainly are instances where individuals and groups consciously refuse or reject the EU, and we might regard these as political acts. But in many cases it is perhaps a question of individuals who have no more interest in the EU and its politics than they do the politics of Peru. The EU might as well be a distant country. Naming these as situations of ‘refusal’, ‘ignorance’ or ‘voter apathy’ is to use words and concepts that have a normative judgment embedded in them: the assumption that people should be interested and engaged in the EU. What follows from identifying a given situation as one of ‘ignorance’ if not certain measures to ‘educate’? Hence

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Of democratic deficits we prefer to speak of (non-)acts. This is to mark a space of ambiguity and cooption. There are many reasons why people might not vote in European elections. It might be a conscious decision, an act. It might be because they are preoccupied with other things, such as improving the governance of their local school, and therefore far from being politically ‘apathetic’. This would count as a non-act. But note how interpretive practices seek to turn non-acts into acts.

5

In/secure community Governing Schengenland

No one today . . . has the faintest idea of the boundless amount of theoretical writings on the building of fortifications, of the fantastic nature of the geometric, trigonometirc, and logistical calculations they record, of the inflated excesses of the professional vocabulary of fortification and siegecraft . . . (Sebald 2002: 15) For many years to come, we are going to be living in an age where there is going to be a heightened state of alert. (Alistair Darling, UK Transport Secretary, BBC News 2004)

INTRODUCTION One of the most striking aspects of European integration in recent years has been the development of the domain that now bears the composite title of ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ (JHA). Addressing questions of cooperation and interdependence between EU states in such areas as immigration, asylum, border control, police and judicial matters, JHA has quickly emerged as a dynamic and important arena of integration politics. As emphasized by the Amsterdam Treaty, the EU’s stated objective for JHA policy is nothing less than making Europe into an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (Article B) and thereby moving it ‘closer to the people’ (European Commission 1999: 2). Given the politically-sensitive nature of the policy areas covered by JHA, and the political aspirations invested in them, it is clear that JHA is not just another policy area that has been brought within the EU’s political orbit by the gravitational pull of functionalist spillover. It is much more than this because it raises some profound and difficult questions about security, citizenship, community and political identity. More specifically, under the rubric of JHA the EU finds itself taking a central position within the field of what is today called ‘internal security’. Consequently, the logics of security which the EU mobilizes, and in which it is implicated, are changing. How is this the case?

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In the past the EU was expected to address the insecurity of a divided continent haunted by the spectre of further cataclysmic wars. One of the primary aims of European integration as conceived by Monnet and others was to avert the possibility of armed conflict between European states and to ensure Western Europe’s geopolitical security. But as we noted in Chapter three, as a socio-economic initiative European integration was also expected to address the social insecurity Europe had experienced before and between both World Wars – the insecurity and social instability associated with mass poverty, unemployment and economic collapse. With JHA the EU is being asked to address new forms of insecurity. It is being called upon to respond to a relatively new ‘continuum’ (Bigo 1998: 155) of internal security threats which include terrorism, drugs-smuggling, mass asylum-seeking, people trafficking and transnational organized crime.1 The question posed by this chapter is how might we understand these new forms of risk and insecurity and their relationship to European integration? What implications does the EU’s turn towards internal security have for its construction as a space of democracy and citizenship? What forms of power are being exercised? What new conceptions of Europe are at stake, and what is their significance for our genealogy of European integration? Does the call for greater ‘internal security’ push the EU towards a Fortress-like mentality (Klein 2003) or is the figure of the Fortress inadequate for understanding transformations in the relationship between power, security and territory? There is now a sizeable body of work concerning the rise of JHA, this ‘third pillar’ of the EU. Particular attention has been paid to developments in the area of immigration and asylum. Given the novelty and complexities of policy-making in this area, it is perhaps not surprising that a great deal of research has focused on the political, legal and institutional dynamics of policy-making in this area.2 Much of this work has been quite critical of the political assumptions and policies of JHA, expressing concern about, among other things, its exclusionary character (especially its negative consequences for refugee rights), the opacity of its decision-making process, and its relatively narrow emphasis on control and security (Guiraudon 2003b; Huysmans 2000a, 2000b; Kostakopoulou 1998; Lavenex 2001; Monar 2000; Morris 1997). While we are sympathetic to the aims and findings of critical approaches to JHA, we think a perspective informed by governmentality has something additional to offer.3 Its value is that it allows us to situate key concepts within JHA – such as freedom, security and territory – within the much longer history of government and the wider analytical field of forms of power. It encourages us to ask: what kind of security is at stake here and through what technologies is it to be produced? It prompts us to see JHA not just as a policy domain but a site of invention where new political and administrative spaces are emerging. For instance: just what kind of space is an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’? What is its significance for the governmentalization of Europe?

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The chapter is organized in terms of two sections. First, we consider recent research within the tradition of critical security studies (CSS). While it draws more on social constructivism within international relations than on Foucauldian studies, we argue that CSS brings important insights to the study of internal security in the EU. Not the least of these is an emphasis on the discursive construction of security and a contribution to a genealogy of internal security. But perhaps because of its origins within academic international relations, CSS nonetheless retains a relatively restricted conception of security. Ultimately it understands security as a struggle (albeit a socially constructed struggle) for existential survival which is usually resolved into ideologically charged games of friend/enemy. In the second section we argue that a fuller appreciation of the security and identity questions connected with JHA is possible if we link it to the analytics of power and government. In particular, this move can bring out the changing forms of political reason embedded within discourses of security. If the invention of the European Community made possible a certain de-linking of state security from questions of territorial power, we argue that the pursuit of JHA is relinking security and territory, but now around post-Cold War logics.

Schengenland: A note on terminology But before we turn to the main part of the chapter a note on terminology is in order. As the title of the chapter hints, rather than speaking of JHA we prefer the word Schengenland. There are two reasons for this. The first has to do with historicizing particular regimes of power and governance, a task for which relevant place names are often well-suited. ‘Westphalia’ is frequently used to name a particular conception of state sovereignty and international order, just as ‘Bretton Woods’ serves to identify a specific way of organizing international economic relations.4 Similarly we use Schengenland to name a particular regime of in/security and power relations. In other words, it reminds us that the concepts and technologies of power that underpin JHA are historical. They are not eternal but invented at a particular time, under specific conditions. We find hints concerning the historicity of internal security in the work of those who have identified the Schengen process as a ‘laboratory’ where many of the core concepts and practices underpinning JHA were first given a systematic form (Monar 2001; Uçarer 2003). Schengen is the small border hamlet in Luxembourg where, in 1985, representatives of Germany (then West Germany), France, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg signed an agreement to lift border controls amongst themselves. The ensuing Schengen Implementation Convention, which did not take effect until 1996, set out a series of measures designed to ensure the ‘free movement’ of persons across their combined territories. These measures include enhanced cooperation in immigration policy (for example, a common list of nationalities requiring a visa to enter the resultant Schengen ‘area’); a major initiative to end

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‘multiple’ asylum applications (so-called ‘asylum shopping’) by having one state take responsibility for any given asylum application; and improvements in the areas of cross-border police and judicial cooperation. Membership of Schengen was soon expanded to include most other EU states (with the exception of the UK and Ireland who only participate within its structures on an issue-by-issue basis) as well as Iceland and Norway. Following the Treaty of Amsterdam, the body of legal and administrative norms (the acquis) established under Schengen have been incorporated into the EU. The implementation of these acquis has become a criterion of membership for countries now joining the EU (Lavenex and Uçarer 2003). What began as a set of security and mobility practices agreed amongst a small club of states outside the EU framework has now been generalized across the geographical and institutional space of the EU and beyond. But there is a second reason we prefer to speak of Schengenland. Like the idea of ‘homeland’ now prevalent within North American discourses of internal and national security, the notion of Schengenland invites us to explore the new ways in which security is becoming reconnected to a sense of place, to a particular geography. Here the emphasis is on Schengen-land. JHA powerfully constructs the EU as an endangered community, the site of a safe(r) domestic inside that is juxtaposed with a dangerous and sometimes chaotic outside, with EU frontiers as the dividing line between them (Monar 2000: 4). By speaking of Schengenland we want to emphasize that questions of internal security are also questions of political and even territorial identity. In this way we want to amplify a theme running throughout this book, namely the way in which European integration has been constitutive of different concepts of Europe. What kind of Europe is Schengenland? What forms of power does it authorize?

SCHENGENLAND AS ‘SECURITIZATION’ The past 10 years or so has seen the rise of a critical security studies (CSS) agenda within international relations (Buzan et al. 1998; Krause and Williams 1997; Lipschutz 1995; Williams 2003). While its contributors have come from diverse intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds, one thing they have shared is a dissatisfaction with the dominant view of security promoted by academic international relations. This is a view which sees security as an ontological imperative of states (and sometimes individuals), a given which states pursue through their foreign and other strategic policies. In different ways, CSS has urged us to comprehend security as a social construction. Waever exemplifies this move when he insists that instead of assuming that security is a fixed or stable referent, we understand it as a ‘speech act’. ‘In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more

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real; the utterance is the act’ (Waever 1995: 55). ‘Security is a practice, a specific way of framing an issue. Security discourse is characterized by dramatizing an issue as having absolute priority’ (Waever 1996: 106). This observation has led Waever and others to make what they call ‘securitization’ rather than security the focus of study. To study securitization(s) is to analyse the way in which particular issues – whether the environment, the economy, immigration, drugs or national culture – come to be framed as security issues; constructed as matters of survival for a particular community whose boundaries and identity are defined through acts of securitization. The great advantage of this move is that it denaturalizes security. Security is not given or eternal but something that is accomplished by acts of discursive framing. It reveals the quest for security to be a particular rather than a necessary way of governing an issue; there is always the possibility of governing otherwise.

Schengenland and the genealogy of security This theme of securitization makes it possible to think about the birth of Schengenland in more critical ways. Schengenland is not simply a reaction to a set of objective ‘problems’ such as rising levels of unwanted migration towards the West, the growth of transnational organized crime, and other forces unleashed by the break up of the USSR, the spread of globalization, etc. Rather, Schengenland can be seen as having certain acts of securitization as its conditions of possibility. In other words, it was made possible by actors who succeeded in representing issues in this way – as threats and risks – rather than that. Securitizing the single market The completion of the single market offers a good illustration of this point. One cannot understand the birth of Schengenland without appreciating the way in which there has been a securitization of the single market. ‘Its central element is the assumption that, after abolition of internal border controls, transnational flows of goods, capital, services and people will challenge public order and the rule of law. This link has been constructed so successfully that it has obtained the status of common sense’ (Huysmans 2000b: 758).5 In other words, the completion of the single market provided an opportunity where security experts were able to effect a certain reordering of political priorities. With some success they managed to identify this neoliberal economic initiative as a source and a cause of all sorts of potential insecurity. Hence, the logic of the Schengen agreement was one of introducing such measures as common visas and enhanced controls at what become constituted as the new ‘external frontier’, initiatives that were to ‘compensate’ for the ‘security deficit’ created by market-building.

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From state to societal security? But the theme of securitization is also suggestive of a longer-term narrative within which we might situate Schengenland and its particular practices of security. In keeping with his point that any aspect of social life can, in principle, be subject to securitization, Waever has argued that we are presently witnessing a growing concern with a phenomenon he calls ‘societal security’. Societal (in)security names a situation where threats are less likely to be associated with aggression from other states, with violations of state sovereignty, but instead with challenges to society, and in particular, social, cultural and national identity. It refers to ‘situations in which significant groups within a society feel threatened, feel their identity is endangered by immigration, integration, or cultural imperialism, and try to defend themselves’ (Waever 1995: 67). Societal (in)security is particularly prevalent, he argues, in situations where state power is constrained, or dispersed across multiple levels (as with European integration), and therefore less available as a defence mechanism for societies.6 One possible interpretation of the rise of societal security is as follows. This idea of ‘societal security’, this securitization of drugs, migrants, and organized crime underpinning Schengenland, has a specific historical and political context. It arises within the political and ideological space opened up by the waning of the paradigm that dominated security debates during the Cold War. In other words, societal security takes over some of the political and identity ‘work’ that was previously performed by discourses of international security. Amongst other things, it provides political life with new enemies, new ways of defining ‘us’ versus ‘them’, just as it offers security actors a new raison d’etre. But whereas it was the geopolitical and ideological ambitions of other states, blocs and alliances which were the threat to ‘our’ security in the past, the danger is now posed by an array of non-state actors and shadowy networks, including people traffickers, drug smugglers and terrorists. The ‘fight’ against illegal immigration But this suggestion of some sort of shift from a regime predicated on (inter)state security to one of societal security needs to be approached with some caution. It is important to see this shift as a tendency, but not in terms which set up a polarity or false opposition between state and societal security. Let us consider the nature of the EU’s policy in one specific area – regarding the matter of ‘illegal’ immigration and ‘unauthorized entry’ into the EU area. The nature of the fight against illegal immigration is outlined in a 2002 proposal adopted by the JHA Council – ‘Proposal for a Comprehensive Plan to Combat Illegal Immigration and Trafficking of Human Beings in the European Union’. Observing that the ‘prevention of and fight against illegal immigration are essential parts of the common asylum and immigration

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policy of the European Union’ (European Commission 2002: 24), the document proceeds to recommend a set of appropriate actions. These include improving the security of the system of issuing visas; encouraging states to impose harsh penalties on those who traffic and smuggle human beings; better management of external borders, especially sea borders that are entry routes for irregular migrants; and taking steps to win the cooperation and commitment of ‘transit’ countries’ and ‘countries of origin’ so that illegal immigration can be tackled at its roots, well before its subjects reach the borders of the EU. In passing, it is worth noting how the very title and language of this proposal contributes in its own way to the securitization of immigration. The programme is consistently referred to as a ‘fight’ against, or a ‘combat’ with illegal immigration. Such terms are, of course, far from neutral. No one ever describes the reform of the EU’s agricultural policy as a ‘combat’ with the forces of ‘organized farming’! As with terrorism or drugs, we are invited to locate ourselves and our political authorities in a kind of ‘war’ with dangerous and sometimes unscrupulous adversaries. A space is named where the problem is not something to be regulated but defeated. Represented in these terms we can only assume it poses a mortal threat to ‘our’ existence. Perhaps it is worth noting, then, that it is not only in the inflammatory language of populist politicians and xenophobic social movements that the figure of the immigrant is dramatized, but also in these more subtle mechanisms embedded within seemingly technical policy documents. But for the purposes of our discussion of the idea of societal security, what we find particularly interesting about the ‘fight’ against illegal immigration are its proposals regarding those regimes it identifies as ‘transit countries’ and ‘countries of origin’. For this speaks tellingly to the complex relationship between what Waever calls state and societal security. Transit countries are identified as weak points in the ‘migration chain’ which fail to adequately police irregular mobility destined for the EU. ‘Some transit countries show a certain reluctance to deal with irregular migration flows properly due to their interest in not becoming a country of destination. It is necessary, therefore, to enter into a dialogue with transit countries in order to support their effort to deal with the problem’ (European Commission 2002: 25). As regards ‘countries of origin’, they are extensively discussed in terms of ‘readmissions and returns policy’. Here the plan envisages using the EU’s political and financial muscle to strengthen ‘the obligation under international law to readmit own nationals’ and ‘to encouarge third countries which show a certain reluctance to fulfil their readmission obligations’ (European Commission 2002: 31). This move to ‘externalize’ the EU’s immigration policy (Lavenex and Uçarer 2003) indicates that we should be careful about how we juxtapose state with societal security. We should certainly avoid the position which sees any kind of linear shift from the former to the latter. The birth of Schengenland does not signal the displacement of a political order where

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insecurity is imagined in terms of interstate conflict by one where it is narrated in terms of nebulous, non-state and deterritorialized threats to society. Something more complex is at stake: if illegal immigration is imagined as a new kind of threat, one that is heightened by the removal of the EU’s ‘internal’ borders, this is nevertheless still mapped onto the modern world of states. ‘Transnational threats are specified, but layered upon a state-centric and territorially delimited “national security” problematic’ (Ó Tuathail 1999: 19). An important element of the EU’s response to illegal immigration is to ‘encourage’ ‘third countries’ to become more effective in policing their borders, regulating and readmitting their ‘own’ citizens, penalizing migration-related crimes (e.g., document fraud) appropriately, and so on. The EU is sometimes equated with the demise of modern statehood. But here it is encouraging third countries to become not less, but in key respects more statelike. To summarize, the perspective of CSS can help us map the shifting focus of security practices. The study of JHA often places it within a narrative about the widening and deepening of the project of European integration. But the concept of securitization enables us to situate the moment of Schengenland within a wider historical movement. This is a movement in which interstate relations and geopolitical discourse is no longer monopolized by questions of military conflict but is opened up to societal problems as well.

Schengenland and the construction of EU identity We have noted how securitization involves discursive acts that represent social processes in particular ways. For example, constructing international mobility as a security issue can obscure the fact that it might be, or indeed should be, governed in other ways. For it can also be governed as an economic question (migration as human capital), or a human rights issue (our ethical and legal responsibilities to others), to name just two. These and other discourses combine to make the social construction of immigration a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. But securitization is not just about constructing ‘threats’. There is also the question of how the identities of those who seek to govern, and those whom they seek to govern get constructed. In the case of Europe, securitization positions the EU in a particular way, just as it casts the European subject in a certain light. Let us explore this matter in terms of a particular example: the way in which ‘crime’ is addressed within the discourse of Schengenland. Here we take as our focus the EU’s plans, following the agreement of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), to remake Europe as an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’. These plans were given a sort of ‘road map’ at a special European Council summit held at Tampere, Finland, in October 1999. In what follows we refer explicitly to the Presidency Conclusions of the Tampere summit (European Council 1999).

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Governing through crime Beginning sometime in the 1970s the question of crime moved into the centre of political and policy debates in many Western democracies. It went from being one amongst many ‘problems’ which modern governments were expected to ‘fix’ (and the general view was that under the welfare state crime would become eminently manageable) to being a highly charged symbolic figure, capable of expressing all manner of social, cultural, and often highly racialized fears (Cohen 1996; Garland 1996; Simon 1997). Neoconservative governments in the United States and Britain were the first to fully exploit, and entrench this obsession with crime within politics. Speaking a language of ‘law and order’ which expressly appealed to popular prejudices, they promised to ‘get tough’ on law-breakers through a whole raft of policies, including stiffer sentencing, more police on the streets, and less tolerance for the socially marginalized. Stuart Hall coined the term ‘authoritarian populism’ to name this tactic of selling the strong state to ‘the people’ (Hall 1988). But if authoritarian populism was invented by British and American neoconservatives, it is no longer confined to such regimes. It is notable that today one finds elements of this ‘penal “common sense” ’ within the programmes of many of Europe’s parties and governments of the social-democratic left as well (Wacquant 1999). It is quite striking that discussions of JHA have taken up this language of crime. The EU is not in a position to become a new ‘penal state’. Obviously it is not equipped to promise ‘tougher sentencing laws’, ‘more prisons’, or to ‘put more police on the beat’. Its initiatives are limited to providing a framework of cooperation within which national policies might become more effective – a point we return to below in our discussion of the tactics of transnational liberal policing. But this has not stopped it from appropriating the language and tropes of crime. Hence it is stated that ‘People have a right to expect the Union to address the threat to their freedom and legal rights posed by serious crime’ (European Council 1999: 2). Moreover, this is to make the EU more relevant to the everyday fears and concerns that are imputed to the public. The EU’s engagement with crime is intended to ‘tackle an area of major public concern and thus bring the European Union closer to the people’ (European Commission 1999: 2). What is perhaps most striking, and least observed about this discourse of crime, is the particular way in which it understands crime. Here the observations of certain critical criminologists are helpful. Like any social question, understandings of, and responses to crime are historical and mutable. The dominant paradigm under the welfare state was a ‘welfarist criminology’. This ‘depicted the offender as disadvantaged or poorly socialized and made it the state’s responsibility – in social and penal policy – to take positive steps of a remedial kind’ (Garland 1996: 462). Crime, in sum, had a social context and called for social strategies; improved public housing, education and job opportunities rather than harsher punishments were considered the appropriate response.

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It is not the welfarist understanding of crime which predominates within most national or EU policies today. In the discourse which rationalizes JHA, it seems we are closer to what Garland calls a ‘criminology of the other’. Within this discourse the perpetrators of crime are not like ‘us’. Instead, they are bad people, wrong-doers. There is certainly a recognition that impoverished states may provide the breeding grounds for transnational organized gangs and people-traffickers, and that in the bigger picture, social and economic development would do much to mitigate the conditions which give rise to mass migration. But the overwhelming emphasis of policy is placed elsewhere: on detecting, apprehending, and punishing these wrongdoers and repelling the unwanted ‘flows’ of migration they facilitate. In a sense they become the cause as well as the symptom of crime; stopping them is the solution. How is the EU positioned within the discourse of crime? In domestic contexts this discourse is utilized to produce political impressions of strong, effective and relevant governance (Garland 1996: 461). Clearly the EU is using the language of crime to represent itself as resolute and relevant to an otherwise disaffected public. It even speaks the tough language of the anticrime campaigners. There will be ‘no hiding place’ for criminals or their proceedings within Europe’s emerging judicial area (European Council 1999: 2). It is not a question of reducing crime but fighting it. If, the EU is currently troubled by a lack of popular legitimacy – a theme we explored in the previous chapter – then with Schengenland we see one possible response. This is to adopt the role of the ‘protective Union’ (Kostakopoulou 2000), a guardian to citizens as they face the perils of a globalizing world. But as Huysmans has noted, ‘Security policy is a specific policy of mediating belonging’ (Huysmans 2000b: 757). Particular identities are constructed for the subjects of power as well as political authorities. What is the form of this belonging; what kind of community is imagined? The EU is to be a guardian to citizens who are positioned not as they are in discourses of the common/single market, that is, as active, mobile or enterprising subjects, nor as participants within games of democratic governance, as they are within the narratives of un/democratic Europe. Instead, they are addressed as ‘lawabiding citizens’ (European Commission 1999: 4). This is an identity that, like that of the ‘working family’, employs a technology of differentiation. Subtly, it gestures towards the presence of other problematic subjects who do not obey laws or work. But the principal subjects of the discourse of crime are also hailed in other ways: as ‘victims of crime’ who merit certain minimal standards of justice across the EU (European Council 1999: 8). It is worth noting how this tactic of distinguishing the good people from the bad is extended beyond EU citizens to those quasi-citizens and denizens of the EU, the ‘third country nationals’. The Tampere Presidency Conclusions generally speak positively about third country nationals, identifying them as subjects who deserve ‘fair treatment’ and certain European rights.

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But it is noticeable that such mentions are generally qualified: it is third country nationals ‘who reside legally on the territory’ of member states who are to be treated justly (European Council 1999: 5). It is not the case that all ‘foreigners’ are a problem; just the ‘illegals’.

The limits of critical security studies? We have discussed two ways in which themes taken from CSS can help us theorize Schengenland, though there are doubtless others. CSS is relevant to the genealogy of Schengenland. It also clarifies how the identity of the EU and its subjects is refigured through acts of securitization. But as an approach to the study of security, CSS is not without its problems. The one that concerns us here is the rather singular emphasis placed on dramatization and existential threat. This is a point we raised in Chapter three that we want to expand here. Waever grants that there can be considerable variation in the meaning of security. In principle, any aspect of social life can be the site of securitization – the state, but also society, the environment, culture, etc. But at the same time, he insists, security retains a ‘distinct meaning’ across these different sites. ‘Security means survival, it means “this is an existential threat with a point of no return”’ (Waever 1996: 108). Similarly Huysmans emphasizes that with security discourse ‘selves and others are constructed in a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion and in which this dialectic appears as a struggle for survival’ (Huysmans 1995: 63). To be clear, these authors are not suggesting that security is objectively about existential survival. Instead, they are making the point that when social and discursive processes construct something as securitized, they cast it as a matter of ‘our’ survival. But are discourses of security necessarily about life and death? Are they always structured by concerns about individual or social survival? Do they always stage an existential drama played out between a ‘we’ and its ‘other’? This may be so. But emphasizing the existential aspect of security discourse tends to overlook the considerable historical variation in rationalities and logics of security. This variation is not adequately captured by the notion of securitization which tends to cast the production of security as a somewhat undifferentiated process. A benefit of studies in governmentality is their sensitivity towards the historical mutability of security.

SCHENGENLAND AS GOVERNMENTALITY One of the more valuable, but perhaps under-explored aspects of Foucault’s writing on government is precisely the attention it pays to what we might call the historicity of security. Foucault’s remarks on security are presented mostly in his lectures on governmentality (Foucault 1991a, 1997; Gordon 1991). Nevertheless, while never elaborated systematically in the form of a

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book, these thoughts do offer us some conceptual pointers for further investigations into the logics of security investing Schengenland. Let us briefly consider Foucault’s contribution to a history of security before we turn to its relevance for understanding Schengenland.

Liberalism, police and security A key aspect of this history of security can be sketched in its broadest terms through a comparison of two particular forms of power – police and liberalism. Today we usually associate police with a body of officers whose purpose is the detection and prevention of crime. But before the nineteenth century it has a much broader meaning (Dean 1999b: 89). In recovering its archaic meaning, particularly during the early-modern period in Europe, Foucault shows how police encapsulates a mentality of government, embodying a particular conception of security. Within this discourse of police the question of security is inseparable from the dream of an allseeing, all-knowing eye of the ‘geometer king’ and his agents. Security is imagined in terms of the organization of ‘the whole royal territory like one great city’ (Gordon 1991: 20). Under this dispensation security is linked to the dream of a fully transparent and ordered realm. From the perspective of police, social order is not something natural or spontaneous. Rather, it must be fabricated by the meticulous interventions of the authorities. As Patrick Colquhoun puts it, the police exists for the ‘well ordering and comfort of Civil Society’ (Neocleous 2000: 11) so its interventions must extend across a very broad swathe of social life. Accordingly, police ‘consists in the most general processes and institutions of public regulation, including street-lighting, bridge-building, the pricing of daily necessities, public health and, most significantly, the poor law’ (Neocleous 2000: 11). Central to Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state is the displacement of police with liberal forms of power. Gordon reminds us how Foucault saw liberalism not as a total break with this rationality – for like the security of police, it is concerned with questions of prosperity, order, and, particularly, with making the state ‘hold out’ into an indefinite future. However, as Foucault observes, liberal governance does mark a significant mutation in this method of security. ‘Liberalism discards the police conception of order as a visible grid of communication; it affirms instead the necessarily opaque, dense, autonomous character of the processes of population. It remains, at the same time, preoccupied with the vulnerability of these same processes, with the need to enframe them in “mechanisms of security” ’ (Gordon 1991: 20). For police, social order had to be fabricated by political, legal and administrative interventions. But from the liberal point of view, society possesses its own, immanent forms of order. These can become the objects of knowledges like political economy and demography, knowledges which can henceforth guide a more economic form of government on the part of

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the state. Liberal security seeks to intervene in ‘ongoing processes’; it seeks ‘to guide disorder’ (Agamben 2002). Police and European integration This discussion, however brief and schematic, suggests that the moment of Schengenland is not fully grasped as the securitization of European integration – as though European integration previously took place outside security discourses and considerations. Rather, what is at stake is the combination of different forms of power and security. Here we need to recall the argument we made in Chapter three. There we observed that the trajectory which runs from the common to the single market is quite consistent with the liberal game of security which Foucault associates with the modern state. European economic integration has not been a project of ordering Europe from the top-down but instead a project of liberal governance. For it has sought to govern by stimulating, nurturing and securing ‘autonomous processes of population’. The common/single market operates as a locus of social and economic freedoms – of goods, people, services and capital – which are to be secured through such ‘apparatuses of security’ as supranational law, competition policy, regional assistance and the generalization of the practice of European rights. Within this formula we find a positive-sum conception of the relationship between security and freedom. By securing the competitive interplay of the freedoms – freedoms they help to define – the European institutions encourage a dynamic European economy which is to underpin the well-being of the wider European community. But what happens when we turn to Schengenland? Let us briefly reflect on the idea of an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (AFSJ), the aspiration of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in many respects the EU’s philosophical rationalization of its programme of JHA. The Treaty of Amsterdam . . . opens the way to giving ‘freedom’ a meaning beyond the free movement of people across internal borders. It is also freedom to live in a law-abiding environment in the knowledge that public authorities are using everything in their individual and collective power . . . to combat and constrain those who seek to deny or abuse that freedom. (European Commission 1999: 3) Something interesting and significant happens to the relationship between security and freedom. In the figure of AFSJ the extension of freedom now becomes a source of vulnerability. The very act of removing border controls, the programme of assembling extended social and economic spaces of free movement, renders Europe vulnerable to ‘those who seek to deny or abuse that freedom’. Freedom now doubles up as a cause of insecurity, and a

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fragile state of affairs which must be defended at all costs. This condition is personified in the lonely figure of the endangered citizen, menaced on all sides by crime. If freedom is an energy that must be both unleashed and channelled in the common market, here it is more like an endangered species calling for the protection of watchful, paternal authorities. From the perspective of the history of European integration, the birth of Schengenland signals a mutation in the EC/EU logic of security. The liberal game of security which was at the heart of the European integration project is now combined uneasily and not without conflicts and tensions with another game. This second game finds its image of order and security not in the figure of the self-regulating or spontaneous order of the market but in the power of policing and security practices to intercept, repress and expel risks. Schengenland as transnational liberal policing In certain respects the political ambition, and discursive territory of Schengenland does echo the dream of the ‘geometer king’ – Europe as a vast city in which the movements of dangerous persons, materials, exchanges might be rendered visible through ever-widening and encompassing networks of surveillance and intervention. However, it would be unwise to push this analogy too far. For one thing, the methods of modern policing have long since abandoned the aspiration of any kind of Orwellian scheme of total policing. To take just one example, the centrality of risk analysis within national and increasingly European policing practices signals not the ambition of perfect visibility but what Valverde and Mopas have called the more strategic scheme of ‘targeted governance’ (Valverde and Mopas 2004). If early modern police dreamt of total surveillance, this was in the context of a largely localized world in which the spaces of surveillance were more likely to be cities rather than nations. Total surveillance at a European level is neither politically nor technically feasible. Instead, Schengenland security employs ‘modern control techniques’ such as ‘risk-profiling’ and ‘risktesting’. These allow for ‘different degrees of intensity of checks depending on the criteria fulfilled by certain categories of persons and border areas’ (House of Lords 2000a: para. 13).7 However, a more serious objection to the equation of Schengenland with an omnipotent police state is that it completely mistakes the political rationality of security and policing at play here. Within the EU’s notion of ‘area of freedom, security and justice’, the term ‘area’ has a particular significance: The agreed aim of the [Amsterdam] Treaty is not to create a European security area in the sense of a common territory where uniform detection and investigation procedures would be applicable to all law enforcement agencies in Europe in the handling of security matters. Nor do the new

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provisions affect the exercise of the responsibilities encumbent on member states to maintain law and order and safeguard internal security. (European Commission 1999: 3) The political space of Schengenland is not one where policing and security takes the form of a European superstate. It is not a figure in which the lines of control radiate out from a fixed European centre across the Schengen area. Instead, it is a model of networks and of transnational liberal policing. It is transnational because it emphasizes direct linkages which connect experts and security agencies across borders. ‘So the policeman [sic] can phone his counterpart across the border and say “we have this situation and can you do this?” which was totally new in continental Europe when Schengen was originally introduced’ (House of Lords 2000b: Q. 244). This is transnational liberal policing because it sees the networking of existing agencies as a more economical and lighter form of governing than the consolidation of security functions by the mechanism of extensive new European bureaucracies. The consolidation of state power over national territories was a long, drawn-out historical accomplishment (Torpey 1999). At least in the more centralized nation-states it involved subordinating local and regional authorities to the national centre, and the creation of powerful, hierarchical bureaucracies capable of policing health, immigration, customs, etc., across national and imperial spaces (Barry 1996; Walters 2002a). Schengenland security does not repeat this process of state formation. Instead, the basic logic is one of governing through the agency and expertise of existing national systems. New European agencies may be created, but they are usually intended to coordinate not replace national systems. A case in point is the recent decision to create a ‘European agency for the management of operational cooperation at the external borders’ – not a European border guard so much as an attempt to harmonize standards and practices across national border guards.8 Instead of becoming a centralized policing superstate, Schengenland invents other ways to distribute, network and circulate authority. This is done partly through the use of databases like the Schengen Information System and Eurodac which promote information exchange across Schengenland,9 but also the adoption of common practices like visas, and the harmonization of standards such as external border management. But an equally interesting aspect of transnational policing is how it constitutes proxy-‘European’ authorities. By this we mean a practice which authorizes particular states, through their representatives and agents, to take certain actions on behalf of the wider European community. One diagram for this mode of governance is found in the original Schengen agreement and in the Dublin Convention, both of which formalize arrangements for the policing of refugees seeking asylum. The key issue here is the ‘first host country’ or ‘safe third country’ rule. The basic principle is that it should be the signatory state which facilitated the entry of the asylum-seeker – either

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intentionally or not – which takes single responsibility for addressing his/her claim. Italy is to process the applications of refugees who first entered the EU area through Italy, and so on. To ‘combat’ the problem of ‘multiple applications’, or ‘asylum shopping’, once an applicant is rejected in one signatory state, they are not, in principle, allowed to lodge applications for asylum in other member states.10 In this way, each state is to take responsibility for Schengenlands’ collective security; ‘from now on, on “its” border’, Balibar observes, ‘each member state is becoming the representative of the others’ (2002: 78). Governing the interstices With these observations in mind we can specify more precisely the kind of insecurity which haunts the architects of Schengenland. It is not the fear of crime, drugs, illegal immigrants or terrorists per se. More specifically, it is the concern that these threats – understood as ‘flows’ or as ‘transnational networks’ which operate across the smooth, borderless spaces of the new Europe – will take advantage of, and prosper from the gaps, discontinuities, incompatibilities and miscommunications between its various police and security agencies. It is the problem of a Europe of cracks and fissures, a leaking Europe in which streams of potential risks, hazards and threats seep through the governmental body, dragging it towards chaos and disorder. ‘Criminals must find no way of exploiting differences in the judicial systems of member states’ (European Council 1999: 2). A secure Europe is one whose policing and judicial ‘area’ allows them and their proceeds ‘no hiding place’ (European Council 1999: 2). Similarly, a common refugee and asylum policy is called for in large part to counter the possibility that asylumseekers might ‘shop’ for the best package, moving around Europe in search of the best prospect of refuge. As we noted when discussing securitization as a speech act, the discourse of Schengenland security is one of ‘gaps’ or ‘deficits’ which must be ‘compensated’ through action at a European level. New security measures such as police cooperation, information exchange and external border control are rationalized as ‘compensating measures’. As Sheptycki notes: ‘our current discourses reveal a concern about interstitial spaces between governed territories’ (1995: 630). The governmental task is not to replace the national agencies but to provide a framework which minimizes the risk of incoherence, miscommunication or disjuncture; to suture these agencies into a more seamless space of order. The political dream of Schengenland is of securing a smooth, seamless social and economic space which traverses national regimes. It is a space where transnational policing, operating at strategic sites like the airport or the coastline, but also ‘within’ the territory, is to promote greater mobility for the legal while channelling the mobility of the unwanted into the passages marked ‘returns’ and ‘readmissions’. As Torpey has shown in writing his

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history of the passport, nation-states created unified national territories within borders (Torpey 1999). By the time of World War One they began to take on the appearance of ‘containers’ of population and resources. Our sense is that whatever its value as a polemic, the idea of ‘Fortress’ Europe is somewhat misleading. Schengenland is not the return of the container-state but now on a regional scale. With Schengenland the border is no longer the line where the control of one regime ends and the next one begins. Even the external borders are no longer ‘edges’ (Bigo 2000). Instead, the border becomes a special zone of transnational and inter-agency collaboration where the ethos of the ‘joint task’ is to prevail (House of Lords 2000b: Q. 262).11 No longer the place where states face each other as potential enemies, the border is to become a strategic node within a wider network of control, opposing itself to the networks of crime and terror.

Schengenland: relinking security and territory Thus far we have argued that a Foucauldian approach is fruitful because it draws attention to the political rationality of Schengenland security. It allows us to move beyond observations about a somewhat generic practice of securitization and inquire into the particular forms of security at stake in this new field of European integration. But a second benefit of this approach is to raise questions about the territoriality of Schengenland security and its significance for the spatial identity of the EU. The argument we wish to make is that the advent of the European Community marked a moment in the 1950s where security and territory were progressively delinked. As a project of constructing extra-territorial markets, the EC made possible the pursuit of security along a socio-economic trajectory. The rise of Schengenland marks if not a reversal then a significant shift within this process. For it heralds one important way in which security is becoming conceptualized in terms of the defence of territorial space. Schengenland relinks security and territory, albeit in new ways. Under the auspices of Schengenland, we argue, the EU is becoming territorial. ‘Security, territory, and population’ This was the title Foucault gave to a series of lectures he delivered in 1978 (Gordon 1991: 1). We noted above how Foucault helps us think the historicity of security. One way he does this is to dispense with the idea that security, territory and population have fixed or immutable relationships. Instead, he insists that their relationship has varied over time. In his genealogy of the modern state Foucault argues that by the end of the nineteenth century in Western Europe it is possible to speak of a de-privileging of territory. The acquisition and defence of territory was central to the identity of the early modern state. But with the rise of governmentality ‘what will appear important is the knowledge and development of the state’s forces’. Indeed, the

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emergence of the word ‘policy’ is first linked to this preoccupation to ‘make the forces of the state increase from within’ (Foucault 1997: 69). States will certainly continue to fight the most bloody wars over the control of territory in the twentieth century. But the size and defence of territory is no longer the privileged index of state power. Equally, if not more important within calculations of political power are questions concerning the condition of the population: its wealth, vitality, mortality, morale and so on. Hence, by the twentieth century we see the mapping of non-territorial spaces – of labour markets, public health, income distribution, and so on. Their prominence testifies that, as Barry has put it, ‘the notion of “territory” [is] only one of a number of ways in which local, national and transnational spaces have been imagined, organized and acted upon’ (Barry 1993: 317). Foucault describes a long-term shift of emphasis within regimes of political power – from territory to population. John Agnew proposes something similar from the perspective of what we might call geo-political economy. Agnew rejects ‘a transhistorical understanding of political power in which power is exercised territorially by ontologically superordinate states containing and channelling the circulation of people, goods, money, and weapons’ (Agnew 1999: 499). Instead, he argues for the need to map ‘the historically changing character and spatial structure of power’ (Agnew 1999: 499). To this end he proposes four different ‘historical spatialities of political power’. The two which are relevant to our discussion are the model of power as a ‘field of forces’ and as a ‘hierarchical network’. The former is ‘the geopolitical model of states as rigidly defined territorial units in which each state can gain power only at the expense of others’ (Agnew 1999: 504). It is the world of balance of power where states stand in an exterior relationship to one another, somewhat like billiard balls. The hierarchical network model is one of greater interconnection, where the world economy is the dominant frame of reference, and where cores, peripheries, states and cities are linked together by flows of goods, people and investment. Power is less linked to the control over territory and more to the position any given locale occupies within the hierarchical network. Importantly, Agnew insists these are models intended to capture historical movements. They are not realities in their own right. In what sense did the EC, as it took shape in the 1950s and 1960s, contribute to a delinking of security from territory? NATO and other military alliances were certainly concerned with the territorial integrity and defence of Western Europe. In the final analysis they were about defending borders and strategic theatres from Soviet tanks. Had European integration advanced within the framework of a European Defence Community (EDC), as Monnet for one had wished, then it is conceivable the European Community would have become associated with a similar kind of power over and through territory as well. But for various reasons the EDC did not materialize (Stirk 1996: 129–33). Unfolding instead along an economic trajectory, the aim of the European Community was to provide a different

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kind of security which we have already discussed at length in this book. It was to promote the kinds of markets, relays and interconnections which Agnew associates with the model of the hierarchical network. It was to secure states and regions by gradually (re)opening them and inserting them into transnational flows of people, goods and investment. States and their military–security alliances were still concerned with the question of territory in the post-war period. But territory, at least in this military and geopolitical sense, was not central to the kind of government practised within the framework of the EC/EU. Instead, the logic was to secure Western Europe by creating and governing new, ‘extra-territorial’ spaces – the most significant of which was the common market.12 To paraphrase Foucault, it sought to secure Western Europe not by protecting borders but by making its social and economic forces ‘increase from within’. This lead to a certain displacement of borders. As O’Dowd and Wilson (1996: 9) note, ‘the rationality of economic principles was precisely the means employed by the founders of the EU to desacralise the historically volatile pattern of European national borders’. Seen in this context, the moment of Schengenland appears in a somewhat new light. For we can see Schengenland not just as an instance of the securitization of erstwhile societal issues like immigration. It also, and at the same time points to one important path by which the EU finds itself implicated in decidedly territorial practices of security; it points to the relinking of security and territory. To illustrate this point let us return to the theme of the EU’s ‘fight against illegal immigration’. As it becomes involved in the fight against illegal immigration, the EU also becomes preoccupied with the defence of territory – not against invading armies but flows of illicit people and materials. Some of the most visible symbols of the Cold War and the East/West divide have been dismantled. Gone are the great walls and barbed-wire fences, the watchtowers and their garrisons that marked the space of the ‘iron curtain’. Checkpoint Charlie used to symbolize the Eastern Bloc. Now it belongs to the tourism– industrial complex. But good management practice at the EU’s external frontier, and at the frontiers of many of its future or potential members, now dictates the need for new walls, watchtowers, refugee detention centres, human scanners and so on, focused on the mobilities of the refugee and the undocumented worker. Similarly, we note the emergence of the sea border as a problematic zone. ‘The statistics show that the number of illegal immigrants arriving by sea has increased over recent years . . . . The situation shows the need for the adoption of appropriate legislative and/or operational initiatives at European level aimed at improving sea border controls’ (European Commission 2002: 30). In these and many other ways we can see that if Schengenland is to address the problem of an in/secure Europe, then repelling enemies at the border – or, in the case of visa policy and carrier sanctions, long before they reach the border (Guiraudon 2003a) – has become a central feature of its response.

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Does this argument about the EU’s emerging practice of territory not contradict our earlier point about transnational liberal policing? Is there not a tension between this image of the EU as a space of territories (the idea of the ‘area’) that must be defended against flows of risks on the one hand, and the image of the EU as a space of networks – including networks of policing – on the other? This contradiction is resolved once we recognize that the very character of borders has changed. Schengenland has moved away from the idea of the border as a contiguous space, a skin or enclosure of the state. But it does not dispense with material sites of control or gateways. Space is not sublimated into a post-territorial, informationalized ether. Consider the case of international airports which are accorded special attention within the Schengen acquis.13 With the rise of air travel, airports have become strategic gateways into national and EU spaces (Knippenberg and Markusse 1999: 11; Virilio 1986: 15–6). Schengen has required airports to be redesigned, and in some cases partially rebuilt so as to separate flows of travellers between those that are ‘domestic’ to the EU, and those from outside. In this respect, the external border of the state and of the EU region is increasingly located in the interior, not at the geographical ‘edges’ of the state. In other words, a disjuncture has occurred between the space of border controls and the political-territorial borders of the polity. They no longer neatly coincide. The space of border control is now partly configured around a network of airports. In the calculated and controlled space of the international airport we encounter both a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization of government. Far from being transcended, physical space is reorganized and redeployed within new control strategies. Indeed, we can observe that the space of the airport becomes a key site in practical searches for procedures capable of mediating between the twin imperative of Schengenland, namely the principles of greater security and freedom of movement.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The development of JHA as a new field of European government represents much more than just the spread of European integration into one more policy arena. From the perspective of the governmentalization of Europe it deserves to be seen as an event, a space where new understandings of Europe, new technologies and configurations of power, new objectivities and subjectivities are brought into existence. To mark the singularity of this event we have given it the name of Schengenland. Let us briefly summarize what we see as the significance of Schengenland for the governmentalization of Europe. First, Schengenland implicates the EU in new practices of security. We saw that the concept of securitization is helpful in understanding the discursive

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and political character of security, and its construction of the EU. However, our sense is that securitization does not fully capture the diverse and historical forms that security practice can take. As an event Schengenland is not just a question of the securitization of immigration or crime. Rather, one needs to recognize that different practices of security are at stake. Since its inception the EU has been expected to provide a framework for geopolitical and economic security. With Schengenland we see new forms of security being layered upon these existing practices. These new forms of security are linked not to the securing of market processes, but practices of policing. Having proudly built a framework to promote the mobility of goods, investment, tourists, workers and students, the EU is now transfixed with other mobilities, the mobilities of the refugee, the undocumented worker, the people trafficker and the terrorist. The consequence is a Europe where, once again, the frontier and territory matters. Europe is traversed by many forms of insecurity. Schengenland gives us the Europe where insecurity is manifested in the figure of vulnerable coastlines, permeable land borders, and poorly managed airports, where networked policing is sought to seal the cracks through which the malign flows and illicit mobilities circulate. Whereas the common/single market provides a form of security by enframing and mobilizing the freedoms of the producer and the consumer, the security of Schengenland is one that echoes the concerns of ‘police’. Within practices of policing, order is not a natural state of affairs, not something that is provided by markets. Instead, it is the outcome of surveillance, interception, penalization, and other ways of removing nuisance from the social body. From the perspective of Schengenland, market freedoms and open societies become a source of vulnerability, a weakness that risky persons will exploit. The proliferation of policing practices flanks the line traced by the unfolding of these freedoms. Second, Schengenland is a worksite of new subjectivities. On the one hand it casts the subject of government as a threatened and vulnerable individual. On the other it allows the EU to position itself as a protector, a source of justice and social defence. As we saw in Chapter four, European citizenship is constructed by competing and heterogeneous discourses about democracy and participation. The birth of Schengenland opens up a space parallel to that of democracy where citizenship is constructed not as a participatory practice but as a right to protection from alien threats. Finally, there is a new spatialization of Europe – as a space of territories, a space to be defended against various malign transnational mobilities. For the first time in its history the EU finds itself responsible for managing borders and repelling dangers. Western Europe was certainly spatialized as a territorial entity within the practice of the Cold War. ‘A strong Western Europe was needed as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, on the central front of a worldwide battle against communist subversion . . .’ (Anderson 1997: 60–1). The EC/EU played its role here by securing Western Europe at

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an economic level. In the form of Schengenland its relationship to the border has become much more immediate. Security must now operate not just on the deep interior of the European economic space, but on a horizontal plane, the space of mobile flows.

Notes 1

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Bigo emphasizes that this continuum is not a natural domain. For instance, asylum-seeking has no natural affinity with terrorism. Rather, one needs to recognize that the links between them are the effect of security knowledges, practices and institutions which make them all knowable as ‘threats’ and ‘risks’. There is, as he puts it, a ‘governmentality of unease’ at work (Bigo 2002). Within the EU, asylum-seeking has been institutionalized in the same policy domain as issues like transnational crime. But it can, of course, be governed otherwise, for instance as a question of human rights, or international development. Founded under the Treaty of European Union as a ‘third pillar’ of the European Union, JHA was initially organized largely as an intergovernmental decisionmaking system. Community institutions – especially the Commission – were relatively marginal to its activities. This was to change in 1999 with the Treaty of Amsterdam: key aspects of JHA – like cooperation in refugee policy, the management of ‘external’ borders, and rules concerning visas for ‘third-country’ citizens – were moved from the ‘third’ to the ‘first pillar’ of the EU. They were, in effect, ‘communitarized’, that is, made subject to supranational norms and decision-making processes in which the European Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice would have an enhanced role. On the evolution of JHA see, inter alia, Geddes (1999), Geddes (2003), Stetter (2000), Uçarer (2003). Here we follow the lead of Bigo and the recent work of Huysmans where Foucauldian insights about power/knowledeges are combined with a sociology of security systems (Bigo 1994, 2000, 2002; Huysmans 2002). In 1944 this resort in New Hampshire, USA, was the site of a multilateral conference held by Britain and the United States to determine the future shape of international monetary relations. Amongst its major initiatives were the decision to create a new system of fixed exchange rates, and an organization, the International Monetary Fund, to monitor it. Our argument in Chapter three suggests a qualification is in order. Inasmuch as the single market was supposed to enhance the stability and well-being of Europe, and emerged within a line of security which can be traced back to the common market, it was already ‘securitized’. To be more specific what is at stake is the insertion of the internal market into a new security logic. While Waever does not see societal security replacing state security, he does speculate about the context for the ‘emerging duality’ between them. Its deeper cause ‘may well be a tendency toward the dissolution of the modern state system, as political authority is dispersed across multiple levels. This process begins to undermine the exclusive, sovereign, territorial state, as overlapping authorities begin to emerge’ (Waever 1996: 67). To give one example of differing degrees of intensity of control, consider the following description of one part of the external frontier between Finland and Russia, given by an official within Finland’s Ministry of the Interior. ‘There is a fence but you can jump over it, it is more for animals than people . . . There is no electricity in the fence, of course, and it is not impossible or even difficult to . . . just jump over the fence. It is maybe three feet high. It is not an obstacle, as such’ (House of Lords 2000b: Q. 253). The official goes on to stress that there is

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electronic surveillance so the authorities are aware if persons do cross the fence though they cannot intercept them there and then. For details see the helpful information dossier at http://europa.eu.int/comm/ justice_home/news/information_dossiers/external_border/index_en.htm, accessed May 7, 2004. The Schengen Information System (SIS) links national police databases and includes files on stolen goods and various categories of risk person, such as immigration ‘offenders’ and fugitives. There are plans to replace it with an expanded technology, SIS II. Eurodac allows for the storage and exchange of the fingerprints of asylum-seekers and forms a part of the EU’s common asylum policy. The complexities of these rules are discussed in (Lavenex 1999). Asylum can be sought in countries other than the first point of entry when the asylum-seeker has close family members who have been granted asylum in other member countries (Lavenex 1999: 40). In the words of Pekka Järviö, a border expert within the Finnish state, ‘the idea is to build an atmosphere of a joint task, although performed separately, of keeping the border secure’. For Järviö, the military approach which once dominated the control of borders, is outmoded, although it is still in evidence in many countries bordering the EU. The future, as he sees it, calls for a new kind of knowledge and practice of ‘border management’ (House of Lords 2000b: Q. 262). See Ruggie (1993) for an extended discussion of the ‘extra-territoriality’ of the common market. This paragraph draws on Walters (2004).

6

Benchmarking Europe Advanced liberalism and the open method of coordination

The Union has today set itself a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion . . . . Implementing this strategy will be achieved by improving the existing processes, introducing a new open method of coordination at all levels . . . . (European Council 2000a; original emphasis)

It was at the Lisbon European Council in 2000 that a practice called the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC) was first identified as a way of enhancing integration amongst Europe’s member states and pursuing EU objectives. Recent years have seen OMC emerge as a decentralized mode of decisionmaking which complements the more traditional Community or Monnet method. As we noted in Chapter two, the Monnet/Community method refers to the idea of a mode of governing Europe in which the European Commission functions as the ‘motor’ of integration, proposing legislation and implementing policy, while the other European institutions play their respective political, judicial and legitimatory roles. OMC can be seen as significant departure from this model. As such it seems to belong to a wider current of developments such as the move away from the programme of harmonization and uniform policies, standards and regulation, and towards such practices as mutual recognition, and framework directives. This chapter focuses on methods of open coordination, on the nature of these methods as a technology for shaping the conduct of European government, and on the governmental rationalities underlying these practices. ELEMENTS OF THE OPEN METHOD OF COORDINATION Four elements seem particularly important in the EU’s open method of coordination. First, the formulation of objectives at a central level. At European Councils and Council meetings and following the preparatory work of the Commission, a set of overall, strategic objectives is defined, often in conjunction with time schedules for their achievement. Second,

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measurability. Where relevant, a process of quantification takes places, both as regards the objectives and the present state of affairs. For instance, this can take the form of the establishing indicators so that movement towards the objective can be measured and systematic comparisons drawn (e.g., between EU member states). Third, decentralized implementation. Objectives are to be realized at a member state level or lower levels. Detailed specification of the tools to be applied in achieving the objectives is not a concern for European Union institutions. The objective is frequently stated as a convergence in terms of results, not in terms of methods. Juridically binding acts, such as directives and regulations, are not central, giving rise to the term ‘soft law’ for describing the system’s instruments. Finally, systematic monitoring. This takes the form of periodic reporting and evaluation of progress. It is also sought in terms of systematic comparisons across member states, for instance in the form of ‘best practice’ exercises and peer review. The latter is a process in which member states systematically submit themselves to analysis and critique from other member states or the European Commission. It is from Lisbon onwards that policy-makers and commentators begin to speak of the open method of coordination, suggesting that a new mode or style of governing is at stake. But many of the methods and practices that now go under this title have been in use for some time (Hodson and Maher 2001). Certain elements of practices of open coordination were introduced into the EU with the Maastricht Treaty. Maastricht identified a set of procedures intended to monitor the member states concerning macroeconomic requirements for entry into the currency union, and to encourage dialogue between them. A further element was established at the 1994 Essen European Council where a ‘European employment strategy’ was first formulated. A part of this strategy is continuous monitoring at the EU-level of the employment situation and of the member states’ progress with respect to labour market reforms. At the 1997 Luxembourg summit this system of monitoring was expanded under the label ‘the Luxembourg process’. The two most recent elements concern further ‘processes’: The Cardiff-process, adopted in 1998, relates to the functioning of markets for goods, services and capital. The Cologne-process, dating to 1999, concerns coordination and dialogue on macroeconomic policies. It is, however, the ‘Lisbon Conclusions’ of the European Council in Lisbon in 2000 that are most frequently associated with the open method of coordination. At this summit, it was decided to apply the method of coordination to a new range of fields just as it was associated closely with a new set of ambitions. The summit thus adopted an ambitious objective for the European Union: to become within 10 years ‘the most competitive, dynamic and knowledge-based economy in the world’. The open method of coordination is to be a new, supplementary instrument with respect to the informationalization of the economy, the development of the member

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states’ research and development policies and the creation of an environment facilitative of entrepreneurship. As regards ‘the modernization of the European social model’, the method is to assist in preventing social marginalization and heightening the level of education in the EU (European Council 2000). In the years following the Lisbon summit, the range of fields in which open methods of coordination are applied has been extended still further. Following the conclusions of the European summits in June 2000 and March 2001, policies on small and medium-sized enterprises, educational policy and pensions have been placed within its domain. At the June 2001 summit in Gothenburg, strategic objectives for environmental protection and sustainable development were added.

THEORIZING THE OMC How might we make sense of this new emphasis on policy coordination, this move to institutionalize mechanisms of dialogue, mutual learning, target setting and peer review amongst EU members? One answer points to the decentralized and voluntary character of the OMC, and considers the way in which it responds to the political interests of the major political actors. Here the OMC can be seen as negotiating between two impulses or imperatives. On the one hand it reflects a desire amongst key states to have an expanded range of policy issues addressed at a European and not just a national level. But at the same time there is the political concern to limit the EU’s formal scope of competencies in these new areas, not least because of persistent popular antagonism towards it in many countries. As a ‘soft’ form of governance, which ‘interferes’ less directly in the affairs of the member states than the traditional community method, the OMC reconciles these twin concerns (cf. Ardy and Begg 2001; Ekengren and Jacobsson 2000; Trubeck and Mosher 2001).1 The particular instruments of the OMC are not, on the other hand, interrogated with much critical reflection. Wallace notes, somewhat in passing, that the approach of coordination is ‘strengthened by the contemporary fashion for “benchmarking” ’ (2000: 33). But it would seem to us that this observation opens up the possibility for new ways of historicizing and particularizing European integration. We saw in Chapter two how Monnet drew upon a series of practices from the social milieu of modernist planning in his bid to formulate a particular form of government for Europe in the 1950s. With the OMC, do we not see the importation of the ethos and techniques of a very contemporary kind, namely of business and ‘new public’ management? Do we not find another event where developments within the wider field of government open up the possibility for posing solutions to Europe’s problems in new ways? This, at any rate, is a question we will return to shortly.

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Governance A second type of answer, one that is by no means incompatible with the first, does indeed seek to situate the turn towards OMC in terms of wider developments beyond EU politics. This is the answer which comes from those who use ‘governance’ not just as a new word for government, but as a concept to analyse the emergence of new forms of rule. There is now a sizeable literature on governance, emphasizing the decentring of political power. Weber defined the modern state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber 1958: 78). But from the perspective of governance the contemporary state is identified more as ‘a mediating actor’, and a ‘structure of assumptions about the activities and intentions of others’ (Cerny 1990: 98–9). Previously government was understood as a political process involving the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Easton 1979). It embodied the notion of a unified state, comprising a single locus of power. But theories of governance see power differently today. They emphasize the spread of ‘processes of steering and coordination’ and ‘coordination through networks’. Political power is understood to be dispersed across a series of formal and informal institutional domains (Rhodes 1996; Stoker 1998). In studies of the European Union, the application of the concept of governance has taken several forms. The EU has been understood as an instance of ‘multi-level’ or ‘multi-tier governance’ (e.g. Marks 1993; Kohler-Koch 1996; Risse-Kappen 1996; Christiansen 1997), and more recently also as a site of ‘network governance’ (Eising and Kohler-Koch 1999). The open method of coordination is also frequently analysed in terms of ‘governance’, as a ‘new form of governance’ (Trubek and Mosher 2001) and a potential source of effects on ‘governance patterns’ in the EU. (Borrás and Jacobsson 2004) The great benefit of framing OMC as an instance of governance is that it draws attention to the wider field of power relations, such as the prevalence of themes of heterarchy, networks and partnership within all manner of policy spaces. But while the narrative of governance makes important connections with such structural changes at the level of rule, often it does so by juxtaposing the world of governance against a relatively recent past when social and economic life was governed in the image of powerful, centralized, bureaucratic states. In other words, new modes of governance are defined through their conceptual opposition to state-centric power relations. While there are many ways in which the juxtaposition of decentralized governance and hierarchical bureaucratic methods does indeed make sense, this move does tend to obscure something important. Namely, the various ways in which governance under the welfare state, even though it may have been bureaucratic and technocratic, was still, in important respects, liberal

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governance (Walters 2004b). Even the most centralized welfare state still sought to govern ‘at a distance’, finding ways to improve economic and social life through public programmes, but equally by shaping the ways in which all manner of private and non-state actors – from the family to the firm – would govern themselves (Rose and Miller 1992). As our discussion of the common/single market revealed (Chapters two and three), government at a distance – whether taking ordo- or neoliberal forms – has been a central feature throughout the life of the EC/EU, and not just recently. Perhaps what the OMC represents is the advent of government at an even greater distance.

Advanced liberalism In order to analyse OMC in a way that both captures its novel aspects but also certain continuities with earlier forms of rule, we want to consider its relationship to some very contemporary forms of governmentality. More specifically, we want to situate it in relation to the field of programmes, technologies and subjectivities of ‘advanced liberal’ government. The concept of advanced liberalism has been used to analyse transformations in the logic and the means of political power in Western democracies over the last 20 years or so. Rose contrasts it with the social liberal and social democratic rationalities that were dominant under the welfare state. Although strategies of welfare sought to govern through society, ‘advanced’ liberal strategies of rule ask whether it is possible to govern without society, that is to say, to govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents – citizens, consumers, parents, employers, managers, investors – and to govern through intensifying their allegiance to particular ‘communities’. (Rose 1996: 61) This is not a matter of declaring the death of society, and its displacement by a culture of individualism but something much more complex. It is a matter of carefully recognizing the changing place which society occupies within strategies of rule. This change is nicely captured by Donzelot who speaks of advanced or neoliberal governance as ‘the mobilization of society’. Under these forms of rule we see ‘a pluralization of the centre, enabling the problems of the state to rebound back on society, so that society is implicated in the task of resolving them, where previously the state was expected to hand down an answer for society’s needs’ (Donzelot 1991: 178). This mobilization of society is not just a matter of exhorting the public to take more responsibility for their own health and wealth. Nor is it just a case of off-loading public responsibilities and functions onto the private and voluntary sectors. For this mobilization has as its correlate the proliferation of various technologies of power – including mechanisms of partnership,

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techniques of empowerment, procedures of benchmarking and methods of best practice. There has been a multiplication of these ‘little regulatory instances’ (Rose 1996: 61) not just within the state but also across the social space. Advanced liberalism is more than ideological; it has a technical basis which embeds it in the fabric of everyday life. Advanced liberalism is all about governing in ways which seek to elicit agency, enhance performance, celebrate excellence, promote enterprise, foster competition and harness its energies. From the schoolroom to the boardroom and the ministries and departments of government, it strives to recode the organization of all manner of institutional spaces according to its logics of performance and enterprise. It fragments the state or the firm into countless autonomous agencies and cost centres, then reassembles them through the mechanisms of markets, contractualism, consultation and partnership. It governs in the name of, and through the mobilization of the freedoms, choices, and desires of its subjects. But it is a form of power as well. The world of partnership frameworks, benchmarking, league tables, best practice standards, and performance contracts is one that subtly constrains and shapes us, enjoining us to exercise our freedoms and liberties in particular ways, and towards particular ends (Larner and Le Heron 2004; Power 1994). We are obliged to be individual and collective subjects who consult, partner, perform and excel. These are the duties of the advanced liberal citizen. The governmentality of advanced liberalism entails a significantly changed conception of society, the economy, the public, and their relationship to the state. Society is no longer a domain of needs, or a nationally integrated system to be engineered by the benign interventions of the planner and the bureaucrat. Instead, it becomes a field of energies which must be tapped; a space of overlapping communities and sectors capable of generating its own ‘solutions’ to social and ethical problems.

PRODUCING AGENCY AND PERFORMANCE THROUGH THE OMC What light can this discussion of advanced liberalism shed on OMC? To what extent have its ‘little regulatory instances’ come to refigure the territory of European government? What kind of arts and technologies of government are embodied in OMC?

The mobilization of Europe The first point we want to make concerns the shift in the locus of governmental interventions which we find with the OMC. Programmes and plans to create the common market resembled the governmental strategies of the national welfare state in at least one important respect. They governed in

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relation to a space of economic and social processes that was imagined to be external to the apparatus of rule. Whether it was the national economy or the common market, these were integrated spaces possessing their own dynamism, their own economic laws. The task of governing was thus understood in broadly liberal terms. It was not a case of interfering directly to orchestrate production in all its details. Rather, the task is understood as one of enframing these spaces and their processes within apparatuses of security: creating the conditions under which social and economic processes can play themselves out, and actors govern themselves. As we saw in Chapter three, the Treaty of Rome addresses the problem of how to ensure the proper conditions for the free play of market forces, how to secure the conditions under which individuals, ‘natural’ or ‘legal’ persons can exercise certain economic liberties. The OMC has not relinquished the aim of governing an economy which is located beyond the formal apparatus of rule. Its ambition is nothing less than making the EU into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledgebased economy in the world’. It is still broadly within the field of liberal governance. But the approach is different. The emphasis has shifted away from the project of establishing certain conditions for market forces to play themselves out, through legal interventions such as harmonization and the establishment of a body of European law defining what ordoliberalism saw as a European economic constitution. With the OMC the emphasis is placed much more on generating a set of methods for acting upon government itself. Rather than governing through the manipulation of processes, and with respect for the autonomy of these processes, the open method of coordination seeks to govern through the manipulation of other governmental techniques and mechanisms. The logic is more one of ‘government of government’ rather than ‘government through processes’ (cf. Dean 1999b: 149). With the OMC we see the deployment of technologies which seek to promote the economy by fostering agency within and across the space of the governmental apparatus of local, national and European institutions. We see a move to implicate other agencies, bureaucracies, organizations and enterprises within a logic of self-improvement and the self-driven but carefully regulated optimization of performance. Thus, instead of an objective of ‘progressively establishing the common market during a transitional period of twelve years’, including the creation of a body of law ensuring freedoms of movement for goods, services, labour and capital, the objective in the Lisbon European Council conclusions is formulated as one of ‘helping Member States to progressively develop their own policies’. Likewise, the method is elsewhere described as ‘a fully decentralised approach in line with the principle of subsidiarity’; a method in which ‘the Union, the Member States, the regional and local levels, as well as the social partners and civil society, will be actively involved, using variable forms of partnership’.

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In this last formulation we can identify the notion of society as a pool of resources – a field of energies that are to be catalyzed and harnessed through the use of partnerships. Rather than being an entity upon which government must act in order to provide security, a domain of needs calling for regulation and insurance, society is articulated as a space of actors and levels which can form partnerships and become actively involved. A similar notion can be found in the statement that ‘a method of benchmarking best practices on managing change will be devised by the European Commission networking with different providers and users, namely the social partners, companies and NGOs’. It can also be found in the idea that the achievement of the Union’s strategic goals ‘will rely primarily on the private sector, as well as on public-private partnerships’ where the Union’s role will be ‘to act as a catalyst in this process, by establishing an effective framework for mobilising all available resources for the transition to the knowledge-based economy’ (European Council 2000). Social partners, companies and NGOs, the private sector and public-private partnerships all represent potential resources. The objective of government is to harness these resources and to mobilize them for a specific governmental purpose: that of securing a successful transition to a knowledge-based economy.

Technologies of agency To speak of technologies of agency is to denaturalize what is a generic category within the social sciences. It is to see agency not as a natural attribute of all humans, but as the correlate of particular socio-technical regimes. Technologies of agency have acquired a particularly prominent and central element within contemporary strategies of advanced liberal rule, configuring governance at a whole host of scales and sites. We introduced the idea of technologies of agency in Chapter four. There we argued that these technologies have come to occupy a central place in diagnoses and remedies for Europe’s ‘democratic deficit’. Here we want to examine the way in which such technologies also operate within the space of OMC. Dean identifies (1999b: 167) two kinds of technology of agency – a ‘new contractualism’ (Yeatman 1998), and various ‘technologies of citizenship’ (Cruikshank 1993, 1994). The notion of a new contractualism identifies the proliferation of extra-juridical and quasi-juridical forms of contracts within liberal-democratic societies. These regulatory devices are found for instance in the trend to contract out public services to private companies or community agencies; in performance agreements or development contracts agreed between central government agencies and more decentralized providers of public services; and between the public employment services and the unemployed; between schools and pupils, in teaching/learning situations, as an element of personal or organizational development processes, etc. Contractualism does not take on an explicitly juridical form in the system of open coordination. Nevertheless, its ethos is evident in a number of

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respects. When the Lisbon summit commits the EU to ‘a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’, this objective is coupled with a set of specific requirements in a range of areas, addressed to a range of actors. Indeed, the entire document presenting the Lisbon Presidency Conclusions appears as a quasi-contract, a text which at one and the same time specifies the results (albeit in vague terms) which are to be delivered at the end of the contract period (2010) and the requirements this imposes on the various involved parties. In agreeing to the conclusions of the Lisbon summit, the Heads of State and Government thus subject themselves to ‘an overall strategic requirement’ consisting of a need to adopt ‘better policies for the information society and research and development’, a requirement to step up ‘processes of structural reform for competitiveness and innovation’, and requirements to ‘modernise the European social model’ and apply ‘an appropriate macro-economic policy mix’. These strategic requirements in turn define a set of necessary steps that are to be taken, by the EU Council and the European Parliament, by other European institutions, and at the level of the member states. These steps range from legislative initiatives at the level of the Union to calls for investment provided by the European Investment Bank and the member states in the introduction of high-speed internet networks, the development of mechanisms for networking research programmes, and the introduction of benchmarking exercises on issues such as barriers to the establishment of new enterprises and progress towards life-long learning. These steps are, moreover, frequently coupled with quantified targets that are to be achieved at the end of the ‘contract period’. An ethos of contractualism can also be found when looking at other specific elements of the open method of coordination, for instance, in the labour market field where the Employment Guidelines are central. These guidelines are adopted on a yearly basis by the Council, on the Commission’s proposal and following the European Council’s adoption of overall objectives for the employment field. The contractual element consists of the formulation of objectives which are contained in these guidelines and in the obligations that are specified in conjunction with the intention to attain these objectives. The Employment Guidelines thus stipulates in writing a set of mutual commitments, at the same time as it is left to the committed parties to decide on the measures required to live up to these commitments. The 2001 Employment Guidelines for instance stipulated that member states should develop comprehensive and coherent strategies for ‘lifelong learning’, that member states should ensure that every unemployed person is offered a ‘new start’ (job, training or work practice) before six months of unemployment for young people and twelve months of unemployment for adults and that they must fix a target for ‘active measures’ involving education, training or similar measures offered to unemployed (European Council 2001). In adopting a set of guidelines, the member states in the Council formulate a quasi-contract,

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an agreement among themselves that serves to subject the members of the Council to the same type of mutual obligations within the framework of a common time schedule. One of the more subtle effects of this logic of contractualization is that once its ethos is accepted, then all criticism becomes simply a means to renovating and expanding the logic of the contract. Contractualization may thus be said to rest upon an ethos of ‘negotiated intersubjectivity’ (cf. Dean 1999b: 168). The contract constructs its signatories as partners of negotiation and its contents as the outcome of negotiation. Once the contract is signed, this constellation is fixed. It becomes the taken-for-granted starting point that the field in question can be governed by contract and that the contents of this government is created in negotiation between parties to the contract. The contract thus lends itself to the solution of problems associated with the actual government by contract. And indeed, in the course of the development of open methods of coordination in the labour market field, there has been a proliferation of guidelines, objectives and targets. The answer to dissatisfaction with the quasi-contract on the part of one or more of the member states has been not the rejection of the system and its rationality but the expansion of the quasi-contract, the inclusion of ever more detailed provisions, goals and measuring points. What, then, of technologies of citizenship, and their language of ‘voice’ and ‘representation’ (Yeatman 1994: 110)? These are technologies which seek to mobilize and harness the agency and activity of the governed, seeing such mobilization – whether cast as ‘empowerment’ or ‘participation’ – as instrumental in solving all manner of social and political problems. They are a field of practices by which the claims of groups can enter into a process of negotiation over needs and requirements, in contexts as diverse as community development, health promotion, teaching, community policing, the combating of dependency etc. Through the employment of these technologies, agency is produced and circulated within a specific system of purpose. We have already encountered certain technologies of citizenship in our investigation of the problem space of un/democratic Europe. In the context of the OMC, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of ‘technologies of involvement’ than ‘technologies of citizenship’. For as soon as we change our perspective from the focus on citizens and state, individuals and authority, to a focus on forms of governance transcending nation-state boundaries, subjects more frequently appear as collective subjects – as associations, agencies or institutions – rather than as individual citizens. Yet, regardless of whether the situation is one of the active involvement of citizens in community development or of the engagement of ministerial bureaucracies or ‘social partners’ from different states in common processes of deliberation, the technologies employed share certain characteristics: The presupposition that government is the employment of techniques for the release of resources found in a domain outside government itself. And just as ‘technologies of citizenship’ actively construct individuals as active citizens,

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conscientious consumers, or members of self-managing communities and organizations, the ‘technologies of involvement’ of the OMC construct the involved parties as active participants in common projects, as co-constructors of ‘the European economy’. The OMC’s most prominent technology of involvement in this respect is perhaps its systematization of the creation and exchange of knowledges, the comprehensive possibilities it establishes for deliberation, consultation and negotiation, both within each member state and between states. The OMC relies heavily in this connection upon cyclical reporting. Involvement thus consists not only of the involvement of member state representatives in European Councils and Council meetings where objectives and guidelines are specified. More than this it is based on the engagement of civil servants and representatives of social partners in the collection of information required to establish the status of the national economy in specified fields and render it comparable to those of the other member states, and on the involvement of these civil servants in a systematized exchange of opinions, regarding the character of the situation in other member states or progress towards specified objectives. In conjunction with the broad objectives and the wide range of fields which are by now covered by procedures of open coordination, this systematization of information gathering and debate has thus implied the active involvement of whole new groups of primarily civil servants at a national level in processes of European ‘opinion formation’, individuals who have otherwise only rarely formed an active part in decision processes with a European dimension (cf. Jacobsson 2001: 8).2

Technologies of performance In this manner, the technologies of agency in the OMC rely upon and affirm the existence of collective subjects who are governed as active participants, capable of and responsible for shaping the future course of ‘the European economy’. However, the freedom exercised by such subjects is a contingent one, for in conjunction with the various technologies of agency we find an equally important set of technologies of performance. In the national context, these technologies of performance have been prominent as interventions designed to penetrate the substantive domains of expertise fostered under the welfare state – domains which have been negatively characterized as ‘closed’, ‘unresponsive’ and insufficiently ‘accountable’ by neoliberal discourses. The domains and professions of the welfare state – the world of the nurse, the doctor, the teacher, the social worker etc. – have been confronted with a relatively new kind of financial and managerial scrutiny (Rose and Miller 1992). The spread of an ‘audit culture’ (Power 1994), the devolution of budgets, benchmarking exercises, best practice examples and the setting of performance indicators demonstrate the aspiration to connect personal and institutional conduct to the optimization of performance. These technologies of performance are, then, utilized as an

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indirect means of regulation, of ensuring performance in the form of efficiency, effectiveness or quality, measured in terms of production, productivity or satisfaction. Professionals, in turn, are transformed into ‘calculating individuals’ within ‘calculable spaces’, subject to particular ‘calculative regimes’ (Miller 1992). It would be mistaken to view the OMC as merely reproducing these technologies of performance, but now within a European space. However, they are arguably there at the very core of its method. The constitution of new deliberative spaces cutting across traditional boundaries and the establishment in this manner of new possibilities of involvement and, possibly concerted action is one significant element. But equally important is the systematics of peer review, the systematization of comparisons and evaluation, and the repeated call for performance indicators, for the quantification of objectives and hence for the establishment of their measurability. In the formulations of the Lisbon summit (European Council 2000), the implementation of the strategic goal of competitiveness and dynamism is thus to be ensured by fixing guidelines for the Union combined with specific timetables for achieving short, medium and long-term goals; by establishing quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks against the best in the world as a means of comparing best practice; and by periodic monitoring, evaluation and peer review. The summit calls specifically for benchmarking and performance indicators concerning national research and development policies, innovation, the development of human resources, barriers for the establishment of companies and attracting capital, for life-long learning practices and flexible management of working time and job rotation, and for childcare provision. Whether it is the halving of the number of 18–24-yearolds with only a lower-level secondary education, or the increasing of the average rate of employment from 61 per cent to as close as possible to 70 per cent by 2010, we see how a variety of objectives are given expressly quantifiable form. And perhaps the parallel to the problematic of opening up the welfare state is more pervasive than it appears at first sight: Are we not seeing a system of indirect ‘government at a distance’ being established with the OMC? A system whose aim is not one of penetrating the expert domains of traditional welfare state professionals, but, instead, the knowledge domains and the national frame of reference of member state bureaucracies. A system which aims to transform its participants into ‘calculative individuals’ within a specific ‘calculative space’, namely the notion of a European economy.

POWER AND VISIBILITY IN THE OMC At various points in this book we have drawn attention to the connection between power and visibility. Modern regimes of government typically

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require that the things they seek to govern can first of all be seen. The exercise of power goes hand in hand with practices of visibilization, often in the form of numbers. This is no less the case for European governance, though studies of the EU have paid surprisingly little attention to the changing ways it has been graphed and inscribed (Walters 2002b). In Chapter two we explored the common market as a technology of transparency while in Chapter four we noted how programmes to enhance the transparency of European governance have become a sort of a priori of plans to democratize Europe. Here we want to note some of the ways in which the advanced liberal governance of the OMC depends for its effects upon particular practices of visibility. The OMC’s field of visibility establishes a domain which makes possible development, exchange of experience and cooperation. This is done through tables and graphs, like Table 6.1, which display and compare information across member states. The social sciences generally regard presentational devices like the table as relatively unremarkable. They are simply concise ways of graphically organizing and displaying information. But these devices are never entirely innocent. For one thing they are necessarily selective: they identify particular variables (for instance, ‘public finances’ but not ‘income equality’). But more generally, they are themselves elements within a technology of performance, embodying a will to rank, compare, evaluate, and a desire to shape the conduct of the objects and subjects they make visible. The grid of visibilities that has unfolded with the Lisbon-process has become increasingly dense. As the objectives of Lisbon Presidency conclusions have been translated into quantitative indicators and targets and as the number of targets involved in the Lisbon-process has multiplied, so the instruments and technologies for measuring or visualizing progress towards them have increased in numbers as well. The 2003 ‘Spring Report’ staff working paper of the Commission, which assesses the progress of the member states towards the stated objectives, contains more than 100 pages of graphs, most of them organized according to a similar principle: That of comparing the performance of each member state to that of the others, and notably also to the performances of the United States and Japan. Where the Lisbon process has resulted in the specification of a certain target, the performance or progress of each state is also compared graphically to this target (European Commission 2003a).3

Strategy and visibility Strategy has become such as buzzword within policy circles that we often take it for granted. However, on closer inspection it reveals itself to be linked to a particular style of, and assumption about governing. The OMC’s grid of visibilities and the mentality in which the member states are embedded privileges a particular view of government: as a strategic activity. Likewise, it

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Table 6.1 Summary of assessments of member state progress (European Commission 2003b: 31) Public finances

Labour markets

Product markets

Belgium

some

some

some

Denmark

good

some

good

Germany

limited

limited

some

Greece

some

some

some

Spain

some

some

some

France

limited

some

some

Ireland

some

some

some

Italy

limited

some

some

Luxembourg

some

some

limited

Netherlands

some

some

some

Austria

limited

limited

some

Portugal

some

some

some

Finland

some

some

limited

Sweden

good

good

some

United Kingdom

some

some

good

Summary of the Commission’s assessment of progress made in relation to the countries specific recommendations within the 2002 Broad Economic Policy Guidelines

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constructs member states as agents who are capable of devising strategies and achieving objectives. The government of the state is to be styled in certain respects like the government of a business. This imperative to act strategically is a key element in the Lisbon Presidency conclusions themselves, and it can be found throughout the documents of the Lisbon process. It is an element which is particularly clearly illustrated in the example in Table 6.2. When member states’ positions on developing lifelong learning strategies are deemed adequate, partial or insufficient, as regards the comprehensiveness and coherence of strategies, the presupposition is the need for a comprehensive and coherent strategy, and for government to be a strategically oriented and coherent activity. States are confronted with an obligation to govern strategically. Good governing, from the perspective of the OMC, therefore consists of an ability to develop and implement effective strategies. Government is purposeful and intentional management, being directed by a number of overall, long-term objectives. It is not, for instance, an activity predominately guided by a concern for the protection of rights, for freedom or for justice or security. Concerns such as those may form part of the long-term objectives which government or EU strategies are targeting, of the utopian element of government, which we discuss further below. What emerges from the OMC’s grid of visibilities is the salience of strategy as a specific governmental style, and the intimate relation between strategy and performance.

An ethos of self-improvement Seen from this perspective, the mentality of the Lisbon process is inscribed within a different and more-encompassing narrative, a narrative of selfimprovement via purposeful self-control and conscious self-management. It is a reflection at a level of national and international agencies and bureaucracies of a predominant construction in contemporary societies of subjects as responsible, rational and self-controlling entities, responsible also in the sense of having responsibility for their own destinies and being both able and obliged to turn themselves into ‘successful’ achievements. The dynamic, knowledge-based economy, the most competitive in the world, is the strategic objective of the Lisbon-process. This is the image of success to which the Union will be devoting itself, the image of self-improvement towards which it will strive. The Union must take charge of its own destiny, manage itself appropriately, define objectives and strategies for itself, reinvent itself as a ‘winner’ in a competitive game, much along the lines found in the countless shelves of contemporary self-help books problematizing the ‘success’ of the individual in a competitive society; and, even more along the lines of contemporary management myth: the heroic narratives of corporate executives and the significance of managing change and optimizing performance through strategic objectives (cf. Dean 1999b: 195).

B E

D K

P

P

P

P

P

Compulsory education

Formal adult education/training

Workplace/other non-formal recognized priori learning

Focus on disadvantaged groups

Overall investment/ funding schemes

A

P

A

A

A

Comprehensiveness of strategies

Characteristics

P

P

A

P

A

D E

I

A

P

P

P

E L

P

I

P

P

P

E S

P

P

A

P

A

F R

P

P

P

A

P

P

I

P

P

A

IR IT L T

P

P

I

P

P

L U

A

P

P

A

A

N L

P

P

P

P

P

A U

P

P

P

P

P

P T

P

A

A

A

A

FI N

Table 6.2 Member states’ positions on developing lifelong learning strategies (European Commission 2001b)

A

A

A

A

A

S W

P

P

A

A

A

U K

P

P

Partnership working (social partners, public authorities, learning providers, civil society)

Cross-cutting aspects (advice/guidance services, education/ training mobility)

A

P

A

P

A

P

P

I

P

P

P

P

A

P

A

P

A

P

P

P

I

P

P

P

P

P

A

I

P

P

I

P

P

A

P

A

P

A

A

A

A

P

Notes A = Adequate. ‘Adequate’ denotes that a particular criterion is given appropriate priority within both the member state’s strategy and concrete action. P = Partial. ‘Partial’ indicates that some attention is given to the criterion in both the strategy and actions or that it is given appropriate priority in one or the other. I = Insufficient. ‘Insufficient’ refers to when the particular criterion is absent from both the strategy and the actions or is given some attention in one or the other.

P

System development (policy needs, planning, targets, implementation, monitoring)

Coherence of strategies

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The Union as a ‘community of destiny’ The above tables are examples of the construction of a set of identities which are continuously reproduced in the framework of the Lisbon process: the European Commission as an institution capable of legitimately and authoritatively assigning grades to member states, thereby establishing their relative forwardness or backwardness in terms of their performance. And member states as entities engaged in a process of competitive self-improvement. All are located in a process, a game of attaining particular targets and objectives. At the same time, the tables in themselves and the assessments upon which they often rely lend themselves to comparisons and rankings. Indeed the Commission itself actively promotes this competitive mentality in various instances, for example by highlighting the frequency with which various member states are placed among the top or bottom three performers in respect of the ‘structural indicators’ of the Lisbon process (European Commission 2003b: 30). The grid of visibilities, the existence of various underlying structural indicators, and the constant and systematic comparison of member states’ performance in relation to them, serve to reproduce and reinforce one further particular identity. This is the notion of Europe as a positivity, something that can be calculated. As we have seen throughout this book, this is a notion which is found in many EC/EU publications from different contexts and earlier periods. The point about the OMC, however, is that it presupposes a very broad notion of a European identity. Thus, the structural indicators of the Lisbon process now encompass a comprehensive range of ‘measuring points’: There are indicators on the member states’ ‘general economic background’ (e.g., GDP per capita, unit labour costs growth) and on particular employment trends (e.g., employment rates for men and women, gender pay gaps), on innovation and research (e.g., gross domestic expenditure on R&D, levels of internet access) and on ‘economic reform’ (e.g., relative price levels, different costs of electricity). A fifth set of indicators pertain to ‘social cohesion’ (e.g., the measurement of ‘at-persistent-risk-of-poverty’ rates), and a final set to the environment (which includes comparisons of greenhouse gas emissions and urban air quality (European Commission 2003a). All these indicators contribute to the establishment of a specific European identity. For their significance is to construct ‘the economy’, ‘economic reform’, ‘social cohesion’ and ‘the environment’ as a space of specifically European problems, or more precisely: European Union problems. They all presuppose that it is meaningful and natural to conceive of these problems as common EU problems and their solutions as common solutions. It is not implied that solutions must be found through conventional tools such as common EU legislation. But it is implied that solutions are to be developed in a European framework, drawing upon experiences and knowledges of other EU member states and their representatives, or of European institutions such as the Commission.

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The idea of the EU as a kind of ‘community of destiny’ is thereby confirmed in novel ways; as an entity within which it is natural and almost self-evident to conceive of a new range of problems and possibilities as common, European problems and possibilities, and to seek solutions in a common process. When it becomes both legitimate and natural to speak of an EU benchmark with respect to the female employment rate or the youth unemployment ratio, for instance, or with respect to the share of early school leavers, to take another example, it is implied that these figures are meaningful as European figures: that the level of female or youth employment or the share of early school leavers is indeed a common European concern. The self-evidence of a broad European identity is contestable. Why is it that female employment is specifically and necessarily a concern in an EU-context? Could a good case not be made for the argument that a problem of early exit from the educational system is a national or even a local concern, much more than a European one? More generally, systems of open coordination could meaningfully be applied in many other contexts than specifically within the European Union. But even if it is possible to identify examples of open coordination in other settings, e.g. the Baltic Sea area (Arbejdsministeriet 1999), the method remains largely a matter of the European Union. This is a strong indication of the existence of notions of a broad and comprehensive European identity, as a notion of a community among states for whom it is particularly relevant and natural to exchange experiences, encourage each other, compare with each other, etc. It may be that a notion of a European identity has not gained a foothold among the European populations at large. At the level of European Union policy development, the OMC serves to illustrate its significance (cf. Hueglin 1999: 264).

The utopian element We have emphasized what one might call the technology of the OMC, paying particular attention to its practices of inscription. This is because we want to stress that its emphasis on performance and (self-) improvement is not merely rhetorical but in fact operates at the level of the construction of knowledge and forms of action. But besides having this technical dimension there is also a moral, or perhaps a ‘utopian’ element to the OMC as there is to all government (Dean 1999b: 33). For governing is more than just exercising authority. It is also to believe that it is possible to achieve certain desired ends through government, to reform human beings and make things better. Hence, one needs to ask: what is the political dream embedded in particular policies, programmes and strategies? Towards what ultimate ends do they work? What kind of society, economy, or people do they hope to realize? To ask these questions is to interrogate the telos of government (Dean 1999b: 33).

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As far as OMC is concerned, clues to the nature of this utopian element are to be found in the two exemplary tables we have used. Table 6.1 suggests that virtuous and responsible conduct is related to a certain functioning of specific domains of the economy: public finances, labour markets and product markets. Table 6.2 similarly affirms the perception of populations as a resource to be nurtured and a field of ‘investment’. This is the rationality underlying the emphasis on lifelong learning strategies: Lifelong learning is enunciated as a form of ‘investment in human resources’ and as a movement towards a ‘knowledge based economy’. This economy is in turn defined as one of ‘sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (European Council 2000; European Commission 2001b: 9, 15). This last phrasing, which can be found throughout the official documents of the OMC, points to a further utopian element embodied in the OMC: The mobilization of society towards cohesion and inclusion. Inclusion and cohesion are, however, in this context given specific meanings as being closely related to the labour market (European Commission 2001b: 6, 25, 47). The utopian vision is thus of a particular notion of society as an economy of employed or self-employed individuals (cf. Threlfall 2002). Populations as a site of investment and as human resources form the terrain upon which government is to approach its moral end. In general, the total body of structural indicators of the OMC, the checklist against which member states progress is continuously to be measured, may be seen as a compilation of answers which at one and the same time point to a number of underlying problematizations and characteristics of a good society: society as an economically wealthy society (indicators on GDP and GDP growth) specifically relying on the establishment of wellfunctioning markets to achieve this wealth (indicators on economic reform); society as an innovative and constantly evolving system of technologies and technological production (cf. also Barry 2001: 37–61); society as the space of a certain geographical homogeneity (indicators on the dispersion of regional unemployment rates) and of low risk, in relation to population exposure to poverty and pollution and also in relation to the external environment and the protection of natural resources (indicators on risk of poverty, population exposure to pollution, greenhouse gas emission, waste collection and protection of natural resources). In its underlying rationality, the open method of coordination therefore represents a very ambitious and far-reaching programme of government. In this framework, government is a strategic activity directed towards the creation of a situation in which the whole of the population is actively and continuously involved in the production of wealth, in which these activities take place within a framework of markets, where competitiveness vis-à-vis an external world is crucial, and in which investment, in populations and in research and in technological innovation, forms a key element.

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The OMC thus embodies a vision of society as a machinery of performance. It is an economic machine, insofar as an economic rationality and economic notions of efficiency, wealth and competitiveness predominate. But it is also a biopolitical machine, as the active management of populations, of their education, their entry into and exit from markets of labour, their full inclusion into a society of flexible and efficient labour markets, occupies an equally important place. Further, it is an advanced liberal machine, an apparatus which seeks to work mainly through freedom, through establishing and securing mechanisms which can effectively unleash the energies of society. In applying technologies of agency and performance, as a set of visibilities which constructs member state economies as elements in a European economy with its own specific destiny, a domain is established of possible development, exchange of experience and cooperation between free (collective) subjects and representatives interacting on a voluntary basis. At the same time, however, a domain of calculation is also created, a field in which the shaping of conduct is locked into the optimization of performance. This is a field in which various indicators and measurements are brought to bear in an exercise of scrutiny, where agencies, bureaucracies and civil servants subject themselves to a critical assessment of their progress in achieving particular ends: dynamism, competitiveness, the optimization of the performance of society in continuous processes of self-improvement guided by a common set of strategic objectives.

CONCLUSION There are good grounds for the view that the OMC represents the emergence of ‘new forms of governance’ (Trubeck and Mosher 2001). Its decentralized approach, its encouragement for spaces and networks of peer review and mutual learning, its preference for heterarchy over hierarchy – these and other aspects seem consistent with narratives which see a general shift from state-centric to network and multi-level forms of governance, both in the EU context but also the wider political world as well. However, we have ventured a slightly different perspective. It can be summarized in terms of two points. First, we have drawn attention to changing objects and scales of government. In previous chapters we traced the emergence and transformation of strategies and technologies of the common/single market. These programmes sought to create a space, which they codified as ‘economic’, located beyond the formal apparatus of rule and for which they simultaneously provided a framework of regulation. The OMC is still concerned with the governance of what it calls ‘the European economy’. However, it seems to act at a greater distance from this economy, through a series of interventions that are,

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compared with those of the community method, even less direct. For the task of OMC is to place institutional conduct in a transparent and competitive framework so that institutional performance is optimized in ways that tap the energies of its agents. Instead of ‘pulling the levers’ of macro-economic policy, economic governance increasingly becomes concerned to reform the conduct of individuals and institutions in all sectors to make them more competitive and efficient. While older forms of governance within the EU persist, as far as OMC is concerned the government of economic processes gives way to the government of governmental mechanisms. Economic security becomes less a matter of the security of economic processes, and more a matter of the security of systems and styles of public management and of the implementation of microeconomic reform. Security becomes a matter of securing the right implementation of the right type of reforms aiming at the right kind of strategic objectives. And as we have seen in connection with the open method of coordination, the right type of reforms often appear to be the contriving and constructing of market systems of allocation where they had not previously been (fully) in operation. Second, we have emphasized the advanced liberal character of the OMC. By this we mean its ethos of rule and the kinds of subjectivity it seeks to elicit. OMC is quite unlike the ethos of high modernism which we discussed in Chapter two. High modernism tended to see society as a rather inert field that was to be engineered in the name of the superior rationality of experts and planners. OMC affirms the agency of the governed. It perceives Europe as a multi-levelled space of autonomous agencies, a domain of individual and institutional energies which it seeks to catalyze, coordinate and harness. The prominence of technologies of agency and performance in the OMC can be seen in light of these two points. For the pervasiveness of notions of involvement and consultation in technologies of agency points to a form of government which aspires to govern through existing or potential mechanisms of government. The appeal to freedom, and in the context of the European Union also to concepts such as subsidiarity and decentralization, is made because this new mentality depends on the constitution of individuals, professionals, organizations, agencies and indeed central government bureaucracies as sites for the exercise of ‘responsible autonomy’ that can be indirectly regulated through technologies of performance (cf. Dean 1999b: 196).

Notes 1

These accounts concern the Luxembourg-process and the European Employment Strategy. Concerning soft economic policy-coordination in relation to the EMU, other or additional explanatory factors may be emphasized (e.g., Hodson and Maher 2001).

136 2

3

Benchmarking Europe In the relatively small Danish central administration, the Open Method of Coordination involves civil servants from seven ministries (Foreign, Finance, Employment, Education, Science, Economics and Social). It is estimated that in these ministries a total of perhaps between 130 and 140 persons are involved in the process at various stages. For the predominant part of this group, the OMC signals their first involvement in European government, and apart from the OMC, EU questions do not form significant elements of their daily tasks. Interviews, senior officials within the Danish Ministry of Employment, July 2002 and May 2004. In late 2003, 8 ‘key indicators’ were identified by the Commission in order to reduce information overload in the context of the Spring European Councils.

Conclusion On the governmentalization of Europe

A new term has recently crept into the language of EU studies – Europeanization. Like so many other process-words this term has come to mean different things in different hands (Olsen 2003). In some accounts it refers to the territorial expansion of the EU system, that is, to ‘enlargement’. In others, it names the thickening of governance capacities and institutions at a European level, as well as the Europeanization of norms and decisionmaking processes at national and sub-national levels (Risse-Kappen et al. 2001). And it is also used to capture normative and identity shifts, such as the acquisition on the part of elites and their publics of a sense of European citizenship and community.

THE GOVERNMENTALIZATION OF EUROPE As we stated in our introduction (theme 4) a central concern of this book has been not the Europeanization of governance but the governmentalization of Europe. We have proposed this somewhat inelegant sobriquet as an overarching theme for the chapters gathered in this book. Governmentality refers to a particular form of power. Foucault described the apparatus of ‘police’, one of the earliest historical expressions of governmentality, as that of ‘the set of means necessary to make the forces of the state increase from within’ (Foucault 1997: 69). This captures rather nicely the heart of the matter. Whereas sovereign power was concerned to strengthen the state externally and sustain its authority over its territory, governmentality seeks to open up and develop the ‘inside’ of the state. Governmentality exerts its power by constituting interior spaces of social, economic and political forces as knowable domains, and utilizing technologies to manipulate these spaces and their processes. Through its relationship with such major discourse-fields as life and labour (Foucault 1973), governmentality produces a certain depth and interiority within the state. Beginning sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, the governmentalization of Europe proceeds along similar lines. In this book we have attempted to provide some guidelines and examples of how one might begin

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to understand this governmentalization of Europe. In conclusion we want to emphasize that it can be understood at a number of levels. We will focus on two here – the level of mentalities, knowledges and problematics, and the level of technologies of power.

Problematics of European integration The governmentalization of Europe is bound up with the production of knowledges about Europe’s interior or transnational spaces and processes – its markets, citizens, borders, etc. The formation of this order of objects, more than the structure and dynamics of the political institutions of the EC/EU, has been central to our study. Focusing on these, we have advanced an inessential view of Europe and the EU. Rather than proposing and testing our own definition of the nature of Europe we have attended to the processes and practices by which political authorities have sought to know Europe. Playing these off against one another has made it clear that the definition of Europe is internal to, and an effect of its governmentalization. We have looked at the production and the emergence of different Europes within regimes of knowledge. This has brought out something of the diversity and heterogeneity of Europe, as well as the fact that there are different styles to this knowing of Europe. We saw that for Monnet and the other architects of the Coal and Steel Community, Europe was something that could, in the final analysis, become the object of a balance sheet, a question of stock-keeping. It was a space of industrial processes, forces and sectors. Within Monnet’s vision of planning and modernization, the production of knowledge about Europe was styled as a cooperative exercise, a game in which former adversaries were brought together in the spirit of a common endeavour. Producing knowledge of Europe became the object and site of a collective enterprise which was, in its own right, to be a contribution to ensuring peace within Western Europe. Knowing Europe and governing it were already intimately connected for Monnet. Compare this Europe with some of the other productions of Europe we encountered in later chapters. In Cecchini’s famous report and, more generally, the debates surrounding the single market, Europe emerges as a sort of economic region, located in a globalizing economy and embroiled in a condition of permanent competition with other world-regions. Its security and its well-being becomes framed within a language of competitiveness and enterprise. From its inception the EC/EU project had been underpinned by a sense of rivalry with the two superpowers. But here the game becomes more singularly economic. Europe is made knowable as an economic machine; knowledge identifies barriers and impediments which impede its performance. These range from the decision-making process within the European institutions of governance to the technical barriers which obstruct the performance of its corporations. Or consider the identity of the Europe that emerges within the practices of the Open Method. Here the game of competitiveness and enterprise is

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intensified and generalized across policy domains like unemployment and education that were previously ‘outside’ ‘Europe’. Within the Lisbon process these new spheres are identified as salient to European progress and its quest for improved economic performance. Europe is made knowable within matrices of benchmarking and performativity, disaggregated along a plethora of axes. From the proportion of early school leavers in the population, to levels of internet access, or to the relative costs of electricity – once the task of government is defined as making Europe the world’s most successful economy, it seems an almost infinite array of variables must be entered into the European calculus. The analytical line, which takes us from the Coal and Steel Community to the Lisbon process, reveals successive iterations of an economic Europe, and a field of government which focuses on identifying and mobilizing factors that will contribute to its socio-economic success. However, one thing we have established is that governmentalization is not a singular or homogenous process. It proceeds along multiple pathways taking unpredicted routes. For example, Chapter five revealed the unfolding of a quite different trajectory of governmentalization. Within the discourse that we called Schengenland, Europe appears as a certain place, a kind of home, a space of community that is now threatened by outsiders, as well as certain suspects already on the inside. Europe as a home that must be protected from those who don’t live in it, who may enter as guests, but should have no claim to stay there permanently. Europe as a home that must be secured against those who would violate its order. Economic considerations are not absent from this image and the knowledges which regulate it, but they have a new significance: the social and economic freedoms that were previously the centrepiece of the integration project now double up as its achilles heel. Open borders become unlocked backdoors. If European cooperation was legitimated by the project of ceaseless economic competition and betterment, in Schengenland it is sanctioned in the name of societal defence. The governmentalization of Europe should not be confused with Europeanization. Governmentalization certainly does entail the construction of political and administrative structures at a European level (what we might call, after Foucault, its ‘apparatuses of security’). And it does involve the dissemination of certain norms and procedures – from regulations and norms concerning the conduct of national monetary policies to the specification of appropriate standards for policing territorial borders. But the notion of Europeanization implies there is a substance or a core to Europe – a relatively coherent set of values, norms or perhaps institutions. In speaking of the governmentalization of Europe we call attention to the production of a plurality of Europes within discontinuous regimes and practices of knowledge. Not Europe but Europes. We have seen that it is at the level of organized knowledges and mentalities of government that we encounter the specification of the means and ends of European integration. It is at this level that European integration is

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invested with particular political aspirations – the promotion of geopolitical security, the accomplishment of a deeper experience of democracy, the achievement of societal security, etc. As we have seen, these means and ends are far from being self-evident. Rather, they are constituted under specific circumstances. Moreover, they are prone to subtle mutations and variations which only become apparent when studied in the kind of longerterm perspective we have advocated here. In short, the means and ends of European integration have a history which is a key strand within the governmentalization of Europe.

Technologies of power Our study has emphasized that European integration has been accorded a variety of political objectives, expectations and ends. This raises the question: by what means have authorities sought to effect these ends? Put differently, if the EC/EU has been expected to provide a framework for solving Europe’s problems, through what technologies, what apparatuses and practices have these solutions been sought? With this in mind, we have also argued that the governmentalization of Europe should be analysed at the level of technologies of power. When Foucault observed that it is not the ‘étatisation of society’ that is interesting about our time but rather the ‘governmentalization of the state’ (Foucault 1991a: 103), he was taking issue with an influential position within critical thought in the 1970s. This was the view, echoing a theme from Jürgen Habermas, that under modernity the state and other systems of power were colonizing the social lifeworld. It is a view which vests power in the state and assumes this power is constantly forcing itself outwards and into the pores of social and cultural life. The governmentalization of the state implies something different: if the state has a central role in our lives, it is not to be explained in terms of a singular logic, or a will on the part of the state to control society. Rather, an explanation has to be sought in the genesis and spread of technologies of power in spaces and circumstances that are frequently situated beyond the state and which only later become linked to its formal apparatus. The governmentalization of the state is the story of how social practices as diverse as actuarialism (Defert 1991) and bureaucracy (Osborne 1994) on the one hand and campaigns to improve the self-esteem of the poor on the other (Cruikshank 1999), practices that were invented under specific, historical circumstances, came to provide mechanisms which allowed the state to function as a centre of governance. One thing that becomes apparent when we follow the governmentalization of Europe at the level of its technologies of power is this: in order to function as a framework for European government, the EC/EU depends upon, appropriates, colonizes and adapts technologies from elsewhere. Scholars of the EU often note that the EU is a ‘composite polity (Tarrow), a

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sui generis political phenomenon’ (Sbragia 2000: 219). They make this point to emphasize that the EU is not a state but a novel form of rule. The point is well made. But we insist that the EU is like a state in at least one important respect: both are dependent upon technologies of power – apparatuses that are frequently borrowed – in order to function as a centre of governance. In other words, while the EU is not a state by most accepted definitions, it is no less amenable to analysis as a hybrid or a composite of technologies of power. With this in mind we have shown how the analysis of technologies of power, understood in their broadest sense, offers important insights about the conditions of possibility of European government. Put differently, we have suggested that the governmentalization of Europe can be narrated in terms of specific moments of political invention and discovery when the appropriation of certain technologies opens up the possibility of new ways of governing Europe. This is in turn connected to an aspiration we highlighted in our introduction: to produce an understanding of European integration which emphasizes its exceptionality and historicity. Let us briefly illustrate this point with two examples. In Chapter two we saw how a practice of modernization and planning, devised specifically to address the post-war situation in France, offered Monnet a way to imagine the possibility of governing Europe. Monnet’s vision of planning was far from fully implemented at a European level. But it did provide a formula to think and act at a European level. For instance, the French situation prompted Monnet to devise forms of governance that worked not by the creation of new superministries – a political impossibility – but with and around existing centres of power such as the ministry of finance and the major firms. In this way French planning provided a laboratory for certain techniques that would be salient for transnational governance in Europe. Compare this with the situation we described in Chapter six where we encountered the set of measures known collectively as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The OMC is sometimes described in terms of ‘soft governance’ and heterarchy. Compared to the established methods of governing within the EU, it employs such techniques as systematic comparison and mutual learning which ‘interfere’ less directly in the internal affairs of national governments. While this is a valid point, for our purposes the OMC is interesting not just because it represents a shift in the style of European government. As an event, it is interesting because it reveals how European government is a thoroughly hybrid, eclectic and, in a certain sense, pragmatic exercise. Governing Europe can be likened to what Levi-Strauss called ‘bricolage’ (Levi-Strauss 1966): regimes of governance take shape on the basis of acts of borrowing and transposition. It is a matter of using whatever appropriate materials are at hand rather than inventing something from scratch. Whereas Monnet drew on the social milieu of France’s ‘unbureaucratic bureaucrats’, the elements of high modernism, and the practices of French

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modernization, with OMC we witness the point at which various idioms and practices of contemporary management are imported into the space of European government. Under the auspices of OMC, it is not enough that the EU makes its people happier or more secure: it must strive for ‘excellence’. Europe must aim ‘to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’. Europe becomes an entity which must identify ‘partners’, each of which is to think its activities in the form of ‘strategies’. The benchmark and the best practice emerge as privileged instruments to catalyse the space of European government, to implicate its partners in games of mutual learning and solidaristic rivalry, and to ensure they remain committed to the task of maximizing performance. Our focus on technologies of power challenges received conventional images of European integration. European integration implies a process, something which accelerates and decelerates, widens and deepens. Moreover, it implies an end point, a moment when the process culminates in a Europe that is whole. The task which theorists of integration assume is to explain this process, and to this end they study interplays of ideas, interests and institutions; social and economic pressures like globalization, political phenomena like the collapse of Soviet Communism, and much else besides. While this undoubtedly produces important insights, it casts integration as a somewhat homogenous thing. A something which moves like a train along tracks. Our theme of technologies makes visible the unspoken terms or presuppositions of European integration: the things that are taken for granted. If Europe is to be integrated, what discursive and practical materials were used to accomplish this end? Where are they to be found? It becomes possible to see European integration as discontinuous, and contingent. One can certainly model European policy outcomes in terms of bargains struck between member states, or a process of spillover. But we insist that European integration is discontinuous and contingent because – as the examples of French modernization and OMC reveal – the technologies that are used to make Europe governable are always the products of other events and discoveries made in domains that have no immediate or necessary connection to European integration. It is a matter of understanding how the space of European government is traversed by discourses and practices which are never reducible to or entirely contained within its institutional space. Like the governmentalization of the state, the governmentalization of Europe is not a linear process. It is better understood as the tangled outcome of multiple trajectories, each with their own complex temporality.

EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: FROM IDEALS TO PRACTICES Our study has suggested that European integration can be reframed in terms of the governmentalization of Europe, and proposed some ways to think

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about mentalities and technologies within this governmentalization. But a second finding has concerned the status of key political terms. Concepts like freedom, democracy, justice, security and citizenship feature prominently within the discourse of European integration. Yet with certain exceptions (e.g., Weiler 1998), their history is only infrequently subjected to sustained analysis. We have sought to analyse these concepts less in terms of their status as ideals, but rather insofar as they function as instruments and elements within strategies of government.

Towards a history of freedom The governmental character of freedom has become particularly apparent in the course of our research. Freedom has been problematized and operationalized in a number of ways within the EC/EU’s governmentalization of Europe. For instance, we saw that Monnet’s liberal high modernism was preoccupied with the problem of how to govern others in ways that presupposed their freedom and autonomy. Planning, for Monnet, was not a matter of imposing order from above, but the enactment of games of concertation and cooption, games in which Europe was to be governed through the agency of others, be they representatives of member states, business or labour. These moves are certainly echoed in the OMC where even less direct mechanisms are utilized to coordinate a considerably wider and more diverse field of actors. In our reading of the Treaty of Rome we observed how freedom acquires an expressly instrumental character. Less a gift bestowed upon humans, or an ontological foundation for politics, it becomes a technical principle which is to be mobilized in certain forms – for example, freedom of movement – to achieve the ends of a more dynamic and productive economy. Indeed, within the ordoliberal image of Europe, freedom is not a natural state of affairs but something which must be contrived by governmental interventions like competition policy. Europe is governed through freedom. Questions of freedom are also implicit in ongoing debates which circulate within the discursive field of un/democratic Europe. Here the freedom of Europe’s subjects poses a challenge for European authorities. Through their (non-)acts of rejection, ignorance and disinterest, a public that is expected to become Europe’s citizenry refuses to assume the subject-positions presented to it by the project of EU democracy. Democratic innovation at the European level is characterized by a restless search for ways to win the commitment and identification of these subjects.

On the history of European security But if the governmental and mutable character of freedom has become apparent, equally so have the multiple instantiations of security within European integration. In certain respects one could narrate the path of

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European integration as a history of security. What would such a history look like? At various points in this study we have cited the literature on securitization (Waever 1995), noting the important insights it offers concerning the manufactured character of security. Reflecting on the birth of the EC, one could certainly observe that there was a securitization of Europe’s industrial life. Coal and steel became central issues within debates about war and peace between European nations. But perhaps more interesting, from our perspective, is to note a certain economization of security. To what else does the original common market aspire if not the sublimation of the clash of nations, and the territorial rivalries implied by the balance of power, into a joint enterprise and dialogue focused on the promotion of economic growth? In other words, we can note that the common market sought to effect a domestication of the charged space of European interstate relations; it provided a space where the ‘difficulties that Europeans still encounter every day in their relations with each other’ could become like ‘internal problems, similar to those which we normally solve within our countries’ (Monnet 1978: 390). The common market stands not for an end to political conflict or national rivalry, but their relocation on a new terrain. The end result of the economization of security is to link the EC/EU to a form of security previously confined to the ‘inside’ of nation-states: not the security of the warfare state but something closer to the social security associated with planned markets, workers’ rights, social dialogue, and so on. Put differently, the governmentalization of Europe also involves a certain domestication of Europe. As a trajectory, the economization of security has far from played itself out. Today it is perhaps most clearly manifested in the geopolitical calculations of ‘enlargement’. This is confirmed by the EU’s own High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy: ‘enlargement widens the pole of security which was founded more than fifty years ago on the basis of Franco-German reconciliation. It is both a political and an economic undertaking. But both are interconnected. Increased prosperity brought about through the Single Market is itself a strong factor in support of stability. Prosperity and Stability are two sides of the same coin’ (Solana 2001b: para. 16). The objective here is to generate a ‘wider zone of stability’ which gradually clusters the many troubled regimes neighbouring the EU around its ‘pole of security’. Having transposed a socio-economic form of security from the welfare state onto the interstate level to settle their own mid-century European civil war, the states of the EU now seek to generalize this model to the wider regional context. But we have seen that other forms and understandings of security are also at stake, no more so than with the birth of Schengenland. If the common market heralded the economization of (interstate) security, then Schengenland inverts this formula. For it emerges out of the ‘securitization of the single market’ (Huysmans 2000) – in other words, the securitization of the economic. Juxtaposing these two games of security offers some revealing

Conclusion: On the governmentalization of Europe

145

insights regarding the specificities of security. For instance, adopting a term from Donzelot (1988), we can observe that the common/single market trajectory effected a ‘de-dramatization’ of security. If Europe was threatened within this discourse, these threats took an abstract and highly technical form, for example, low productivity, persistent unemployment, technical barriers to trade, etc. Within the discourse of Schengenland, security has become dramatic and personal. Or more accurately, it has come to be personified in particular menacing and morally-suspect characters (the organized criminal, the people traffickers) and problematic flows (unwanted refugees). These categories become the bearers of risk and danger. The solution to this insecurity lies neither with a military response, nor with improved economic management, but the proliferation of transnational policing practices and networks. NATO may have protected Europe from a dangerous outside, but the EC/EU did not. However, with Schengenland this is precisely what happens: the EU finds itself implicated in practices of security which cast the EU as a violated property. Europe does not acquire the identity of a homeland, at least not in the sense implied by the American idea of ‘homeland security’. For homeland summons up all sorts of patriotic forces, effects that may be present at the national level in Europe but not above it. However, like homeland security, Schengenland casts the EU in the form of a safe inside which is troubled by a world of chaos beyond it. It constitutes a new kind of security/territory nexus. A history of freedom, a history of security – these are just two of the lines that might be drawn through our studies, two ways of assembling their findings in a form that is different from the conventional narratives of European integration. But there are of course many other histories and spaces that might profitably be explored from the perspective of genealogy and governmentality. For instance, questions of sovereignty are often posed within EU studies in a language of quantity and commodity: states are described as ‘transferring’ their sovereignty to, or ‘pooling’ it in the EU. What new understandings of European integration might be possible if we consider it from the perspective of a genealogy of sovereignty (Bartelson 1995), or, relatedly, in terms of its place within the decentred networks of ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2000)? On a related note, if the EU becomes increasingly involved in the practice of foreign and security policy, deploying armed forces in exercises of peacekeeping and stabilization, then future studies will surely find it useful to explore the complex ways in which the EU is becoming a nexus of sovereignty and police (see, for example, Agamben’s (2000: 103–8) discussion of ‘sovereign police’). Similarly, there is the whole dimension of biopolitics which we have barely scratched here. Some very fruitful studies could be made in this area. Foucauldian scholars have researched the biopolitics of the modern state at great length. Investigations of the EU’s practices in areas as different as

146 Conclusion: On the governmentalization of Europe biotechnology, the environment, or anti-human trafficking campaigns would break new ground by charting the internationalization of biopolitics. These are just two possible clusters for future research. The point is, as we emphasized in introducing this project, that the genealogy of European government is necessarily always incomplete. We have endeavoured to outline certain ways in which one might analyse European integration in a way that does not presume we already know what and where Europe is. But genealogy is a collective enterprise: we can only hope that future studies will further elucidate the governmentalization of Europe.

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Index

Acheson, Dean 33 Adenauer, Konrad 24 agency 16, 121; technology of 75–6, 83, 121–4, 134–5 Agnew, John 4, 108–9 airports 110 Amsterdam Treaty 65, 91, 94, 98, 103 area of freedom, security and justice 19, 91–2, 98, 103–4 arts of government 3, 5, 8; and Europe 42 authoritarian populism 99 Baker, Keith Michael 69, 73, 81 balance of power 10, 108 Balibar, Étienne 17 Ball, George 32 Barry, Andrew 14, 20 n. 3 Bauman, Zygmunt 38–9, 40 n. 5 Beeson, M. 46 Bellamy, R. 36 benchmarking 116, 121–2, 124 Beyen Plan 64 n. 4 Bigo, Didier 73, 112 n. 2, 112 n. 4 bilan (balance sheet) 31–2 biopolitics 12, 55–7, 134, 145 Birmingham Declaration 74 Böhm, Franz 51, 64 n. 2 border controls 60–1, 91, 95, 103, 106, 112 n. 8, 112 n. 12; sea 109; space of 110 Brasília 24 Bretton Woods 93 ‘bricolage’ 141

Chandigarh 24 Charter of Fundamental Rights 80, 88 n. 10 Chatterjee, Partha 9 Cecchini, P. 138 CIAM 24 citizenship 70, 91, 119, 143; games of 12; technology of 121, 123; see also European citizenship civil society 45, 76, 79, 83, 102; global 87 Clémentel, Etienne 27 Cold War 2, 96, 109, 111 Cologne process 115 Colquhoun, Patrick 102 comitology 81 Commissaire Générale du Plan de Modernisation et d’Equipement (CGP) 26 Committee of Regions 81, 82 common agricultural policy 58 common market 8–9, 11, 18–19, 34–6, 38, 43, 51–2, 55, 57, 58–9, 71–2, 109, 120, 126, 134, 144; artificiality 49; and government through freedom 43–8, 53, 103; and transparency 34–6 communitarianism 77 concertation 29, 30 Constant, Benjamin 10 Council of Ministers 68, 74 countries of origin 97 critical security studies 93, 94, 101 Customs Union 64 n. 4

Cardiff process 115 Carr, E. H. 28

Dean, Mitchell 14, 16, 75, 121 Declaration of Independence 43–5

164

Index

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 46–7 dedifferentiation: technology of 69, 71–4, 75, 80 De Gaulle, Charles 24, 30 Deleuze, Gilles 30, 40 n. 6, 70 Delors, Jacques 24 democracy 34, 66–8, 73, 76, 77, 80, 111, 140, 143; as rational government 67; realist theory of 77; and reason 81 democratic deficit 27, 65–6 De Saint Simon, Henry Comte 23 Diebold, W. 35 Diez, Thomas 4 differentiation: technology of 72–3, 100 Dinan, D. 51 dirigisme 29 disciplinary power 9–10, 70 discourse analysis 5, 6–7; and rarity 67, 70, 79, 88 n. 7 Donzelot, Jacques 118 Dublin Convention 105 Duchêne, F. 32 Eastern Bloc 109 Economic and Monetary Union 53 Economic and Social Committee 47 Economic and Social Council 81–2 economic constitution 51, 120 Edinburgh Summit 74 Ekengren, M. 64 n. 3 elitism 27, 28, 36 Empire 145 enlargement 144 Enlightenment 81 Eucken, Walter 64 n. 2 Eurodac 105 Europe 2, 7, 37; and balance of power 10; and competitiveness 59, 138; denaturalizing 2–5; in/secure 106, 109; mobilization of 119–21; as region 138; spatialization of 111; un/democratic 19, 66, 67, 68, 78–9, 85–6, 100, 123, 143 European citizenship 47, 72–3, 76, 80, 82–3, 86, 111; (non-) acts of 87, 89 n. 18, 100

European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) 22, 26, 138, 139; see also High Authority European Commission 27, 32, 38–9, 50–1, 57, 65, 74, 81–2, 84, 112 n. 3, 114–15, 121–2, 126, 131 European Community see European Union European Constitutional Treaty 86–7 European Convention 78 European Council 47, 55, 64 n. 3, 65, 78, 88 n. 10, 98, 114–15, 120, 122–4 European Court of Justice 68, 72, 88 n. 9, 112 n. 3 European Defence Community (EDC) 108 European democracy 16–17, 19, 66, 78, 85–7, 143; problematics and discourses of 67–9, 79–85; and rationality 80–5; symbolism 79 European economy 10–11, 20 n. 4, 31, 46, 61, 103, 124–5, 133–4 European employment strategy 115 European government 7, 14–15, 71–80, 82, 103, 114, 118–20, 140–2; and advanced liberalism 126; authoritarian mentalities of 7–9; conditions of possibility 141; and expert rationality 82, 83–4; and freedom 46, 62–3, 124, 134, 143; and genealogy 16–17, 104, 146; and police 103–7; and public rationality 82; as strategic activity 126–8, 133; and temporality 52–3 European integration 1–3, 5, 7, 8–10, 13–14, 16–18, 21–2, 49, 53–4, 74, 84, 110, 116, 142–4, 146; and critical geopolitics 4–5; and democratic deficit 27, 65–6, 68, 80, 121; genealogy 16–17, 92, 140; and high modernism 28–31, 142; as indirect 134–5; and insecurity 92, 143; and modernity 21–3; and neofunctionalism 21; police and 103–4; and postmodernity 21; problematics of 138–40; and rights 71; and social construction 3–4 European Investment Bank 122 Europeanization 4, 137, 139

Index 165 European law 11 European Ombudsman 76, 88 n. 12 European Parliament 65, 68, 72, 80–2, 86–7, 112 n. 3, 122 European security 11, 19, 53–5, 143 European Social Forum 87 European Social Fund 51 European Union (EU) 37, 65, 68, 71, 74–85, 91–2, 94, 96–8, 114–18, 120; as community of destiny 131–2; frontiers 107, 110; governmentality of 9; identity 98–101, 107, 128, 131; il/legitimacy of 65; origins 18; studies of 42; territoriality 107–10 Eurosclerosis 59 expertise 82–4, 105, 124; changing forms of 26–8 Fair Trade Commission (US) 34 Featherstone, Kevin 27 Ferguson, Adam 45 Fortress (Europe) 92, 107 Forward Studies Unit 38–9 Foucault, Michel 3, 9, 12, 20 n. 3, 30, 50–1, 54, 66–7, 101–3, 107–8, 137, 139–40; and French Revolution 69–70 freedom 44, 47–8, 53–4, 62–3, 124, 143; as an instrument of government 44–6, 62; of movement 45, 47–8, 51, 56, 63, 110, 143 French Revolution 47–8, 69–71, 73, 81 functionalism 13, 21, 28–30, 37, 40 n. 1 Futurum 78 Garland, D. 100 genealogy 16–17, 23, 93, 145–6; and the market 57–62 geopolitics 59, 108; critical approaches 4–5 globalization 11, 17, 21, 23, 77, 84, 85, 95, 142 governance theory 117–18, 134 ‘governed, the’ 12, 13 governing through crime 99–101 government 11–12; advanced liberal 118–19; at a distance 12–13, 34, 118, 125; and ‘the conduct of conduct’

11–13; democratic 66; history of 7; indirect 8, 9, 12–13, 118, 125; liberal 9, 118; pastoral 12, 56; targeted 104; telos of 132 governmentality 3, 5, 20 n. 1, 20 n. 2, 25, 62, 75, 92, 107–8, 118, 145; of advanced liberalism 119; and European integration 5–17, 53; of the EU 22; as form of power 11, 54, 137; liberal 53; regional 20 n. 3; and security 101–3; of unease 62, 73 governmentalization of Europe 10, 11, 20, 92, 110, 137–42, 144, 146; of government 120; of the state 10, 140, 142 governmental rationality 3, 114 Gramsci, Antonio 88 n. 8 Grossman-Doerth, Hans 64 n. 2 Grossraumwirtschaft 8; European 11 Guattari, Félix 30 Haas, Ernst 21–2, 34 Habermas, Jurgen 140 Hall, Stuart 99 Hansen, L. 40 n. 1 Harvey, David 24 hegemony 67, 88 n. 1 High Authority (of the European Coal and Steel Community) 29, 31–3, 40 n. 2; and transparency 34–6 high modernism 18, 22, 23–6, 35, 37, 48, 49, 135, 142, 143; authoritarian versions 25, 28, 29; and European integration 28–31; liberal versions 22–3, 25, 28–9, 31, 33–4, 36, 38 High Representative of Common Foreign and Security Policy 144 history of government 7 Hobson, J. 40 n. 3 homeland security 145 Huysmans, Jeff 100–1, 112 n. 4 immigration 18; illegal 96–8, 109; policy 93 inessentialism 67, 138 infrastructural power 9

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inscription 7, 31–2, 132 International Monetary Fund 112 n. 5 Järviö, Pekka 113 n. 11 Jayasuriya, K. 46 Joppke, Christian 72 Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) 13, 57, 73, 91–4, 96, 98–100, 110, 112 n. 3 Kant, Immanuel 10, 24 Keynes, J. M. 20 n. 4 Keynesianism 49 Laclau, Ernesto 68, 88 n. 1 League of Nations 26 Le Corbusier, Charles-Eduoard Jeanneret 23, 24, 28 legibility 31, 125; practices of 31 Lenin, Vladimir I. 23–4, 28 Levi-Strauss, C. 141 liberalism 3, 12, 29, 43–5,47, 49, 50, 62–4, 67–8, 102–3; advanced 118–9; embedded 58; see also neoliberalism and ordoliberalism Lilienthal, David 23 Lisbon European Council 114–16, 122, 125 Lisbon process 53, 128, 131, 139 Loucheur, Louis 27 Luxembourg process 115, 126 Maastricht Treaty (Treaty of European Union) 18, 65, 72, 74, 77, 80, 115 McNamara, Robert 23 Malthus, Thomas 45 Marshall Plan 33 mentality of government 5, 6, 8, 14, 62–3, 102 migration policy: of EC/EU 96–8 Miller, Peter 30, 31–2 Milward, A. S. 54, 58, 64 n. 5 Mitrany, David 28 modernization 11, 17, 23; French 26, 29, 30, 142; theory 21 Monnet, Jean 18, 22–36, 40 n. 2, 49, 91, 108, 114, 116, 138, 141, 143 Montesquieu 10 Mopas, M. 104

Moses, Robert 23 Mouffe, Chantal 88 n. 1 Müller-Armack, Alfred 64 n. 2 NAFTA 8 nationalism 86 NATO 108, 145 Nazi Germany 8 negative vs. postive integration 61 neofunctionalism see functionalism neoliberalism 3, 12, 26, 42–3, 62–3, 68, 75, 118, 124; see also liberalism networks 108 new contractualism 121 New Economic Order 7–9 new public management 116 Niemeyer, Oscar 37 North Rhine-Westphalia 15 Nyere, Julius 23 O’Dowd, L. 109 OEEC 11, 20 n. 4 open method of coordination (OMC) 19–20, 26, 114–35, 142–3 ordoliberalism 38, 48–52, 59, 63, 118, 120; and competition policy 51; and social policy 51 Ó Tuathail, Geróid 4 planning 25–6, 28–9, 32, 138, 141, 143 police: as political rationality 45, 56, 63, 102–5, 111, 145 policing: transnational liberal 99, 104, 105–7, 110, 145 political invention 23 political reason 6 population 9, 45, 56, 102–3, 107–8, 133 Porto Alegre 79, 87 postmodernism 21, 38 postmodernity see postmodernism post-structuralist political analysis 3, 4, 6 power 12–13, 107–8, 119; diagrams of 40 n. 6; and resistance 12; and visibility 125–8 presentism 22–3, 36, 40 n. 3 problematization 6, 54, 61, 67, 69, 71, 74, 78, 84, 86, 133

Index 167 Prodi, Romano 1, 3 productivisme 27 proximity: technologies of 76–8 public order 55–7 Rabinow, Paul 26–7 Rathenau, Walther 23 Rechtsstaat 50 Ricardo, David 49 Rome, Treaty of 18, 42, 45, 47–8, 51–3, 55, 57, 62, 71, 143; and governmentality 43, 120 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 33 Röpke, Wilhelm 64 n. 2 Rose, Nikolas 14, 26, 31–2, 118 Ross, G. 40 n. 4 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 77 Ruggie, J. G. 58 Ruhr 15 Santer, Jacques 65 Schengen 93; agreement 95, 105 Schengen Implemention Convention 93 Schengen Information System 105, 113 n. 10 Schengenland 19, 57, 62, 73, 93, 105–7, 110–12, 139, 144, 145; as securitization 95–101 Schuman, Robert 24 Schuman Plan 15, 26, 32 Schumpeter, Joseph 17, 77 Scott, James 22, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 35 Scottish Enlightenment 45 securitization 95–6, 98, 107, 111, 144; of immigration 97, 109, 111 security 53–5, 57, 71, 91, 93, 94, 95–101, 144–5; apparatus of 9–10; continuum 92, 112 n. 2; economization of 144; geopolitical 54, 92, 111, 140; of government 135; historicity of 93, 101–2, 107, 143–6; internal 2, 91–4; liberal 55; societal 96–7; as a speech act 94–5, 106; and territory 107–10 Single European Act 82 single market 1, 57, 58, 59, 95, 134, 144; securitization of 144 Smith, Adam 45

social capital 77 social constructivism 3–4 societies of security 9, 54 sovereign power 9, 10, 137 sovereignty 11, 47, 63, 86, 93, 145; popular 80 Spaak, Paul H. 24 strategy 126–8 subjectivization 47, 70 119, 128 subsidiarity 16, 65, 77–8, 79 supranationality 22 Tampere Presidency Conclusions 98, 100 technologies of involvement 123–4 technologies of performance 124–5, 135 technologies of power 5, 14–16, 25, 28, 67, 69–79, 86, 110, 118–19, 138, 140–2 temporality 52 territory 107–110 terrorism 63, 97, 112 n. 2 third country nationals 73, 100–1 third pillar 92, 112 n. 3 Thomas, Albert 27 Torpey, John 106 transparison: technology of 70, 73–5, 82 Tribe, Keith 7 Trotsky, Leon 23 Turgot 81 unbureaucratic bureaucrats 27, 30, 141 Valverde, M. 104 van der Rohe, Mies 24 Veyne, Paul 14 Vichy 29 Waever, Ole 54, 94–7, 101, 112 n. 7 Walker, R. B. J. 2 Warleigh, A. 36 Weber, Max 117 Weiler, Joseph 14 Weimar Republic 49 Westphalia 93 White Paper on European Governance 39, 65, 74–6, 81, 83–5

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Williams, M. C. 40 n. 1 Wilson, T. 109 Wirtschaftsordnung 50 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 37 World Social Forum 79, 87

World War One 26, 27 World War Two 10, 26, 29, 49, 54, 58, 77 Zollverein 38