European Integration and the Postmodern Condition: Governance, Democracy, Identity by Peter Van Ham

Author:Peter Van Ham [Ham, Peter Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781134539949
Google: gJDAK7EFuAgC
Goodreads: 17492323
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Power/knowledge, civil association and transversalism

Asking the classical questions of political science — Who governs?, Who gets what, when, how? — remains relevant to the study of European policy-making, even though the answers to these questions are becoming ever more unsatisfactory.37 Obviously, where financial matters are at stake, European states are keen to pay less into the EU budget and get out more. The near-impossibility of radically overhauling the Common Agricultural Policy (GAP) testifies to the rigidity of this egoistic streak among EU Member States.

However, the continued import of this classic fight for slices of the EU pie is only the surface of a more complex picture of European reality Classical notions of political power are problematic in the European context, since there is no A who has such power over any ‘B’ that s/he can get this ‘B’ to do something that ‘B’ would not otherwise do. Within the EU system, ‘power’ seems to work (as Talcott Parsons suggested long ago) as a ‘circulating medium, analogous to money, within what is called the political system’. Following this metaphor, Foucault has added that power

must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.

(Michel Foucault, ‘Disciplinary Power and Subjection’, reprinted in Steven Lukes (ed.), Power (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 234)

These are especially valuable analytical points of departure, since the EU cannot be imagined as a simple multilateral political instrument. Instead, it has become a supranational entity with extensive bureaucratic competencies, a measure of judicial control and the authority to initiate, develop and implement policies. Although, like all complex organizations, the EU can be portrayed and translated into an organigram showing clear and unambiguous ‘lines of authority’, political practice is (as always) entirely different. In many ways the EU resembles a humming bazaar of policies and ideas which has more impact on the day-to-day lives of Europeans than they can imagine. Located at the interface of assiduous territorial, state-centric politics and the sphere of international politics, the EU relentlessly uses its authority to think up collective solutions to a wide range of problems which its Member States no longer can, or want, to address independently.38 We should acknowledge that more legislation originates within the EU system than ever before. By use of so-called ‘directives’, the EU's dominant legal instrument, a joint European decision has to be transposed into national law with a certain flexibility and before a specific deadline. European law therefore often cross-dresses as national

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.