Bulletin n. 2/2008
September 2008
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Diez, Thomas
    Michel Foucault and the Problematization of European Governance
    in International Political Sociology , Vol. 2, Issue 3, September 2008 ,  2008 ,  266-268
    If I were to make a list of the articles that have influenced me most in my academic writing, Richard Ashley's "Imposing International Purpose" (Ashley 1989) would definitely be on it. In a period when it had become fashionable for those who wanted to be progressive to talk about "global governance" and "governance without government" (see Rosenau and Czempiel 1992), Ashley developed a distinctly Foucauldian theme to problematize the governance fad. Problems of transnational or global governance, he argued, do not simply exist as objectively given, but are constructed by discourses that "impose" a "purpose" on international society. This may have been a rather obvious statement, but it is easy to forget how uncontested the principal idea of governance was at the time, and how rarely challenged its positive connotations. The problems of the global governance literature, however, ran even deeper through the work on European integration and governance. Andrew Moravcsik's liberal-intergovernmentalist voice, giving prominence to the power of domestic interest groups within member states in the formulation of European policies, was just about to enter the scene (Moravcsik 1991). Even though Moravcsik did question the more or less teleological and largely uncritical vision of European integration espoused by neofunctionalists and federalists, his focus was on an alternative explanation of core decisions in the integration process and not on the conceptual dissection of European governance as such. He also stuck to a narrow, rationalist approach that did not aspire to be "critical" (see the exchange between Diez 1999 and Moravcsik 1999). The turn to Foucault's work provided an escape route from the confines of the academic debate at the time. In the first instance, the Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 2002) and The Order of Things (Foucault 2001) in their different ways provided the background against which the question of "imposing European purpose" could be posed: What are the rules according to which constructions of European governance can be legitimately articulated? How are particular visions of the European project—such as that of a largely decentralized, "network" Europe already found in the writings of so-called integral federalists in the aftermath of the Second World War—marginalized yet always present in the integration discourse? What are the alternative rules that these discourses follow? How do particular issues become "problems" of European governance, and how does their solution tie into dominant contemporary discourses? While by no means dominant, there has over the last decade or so been a mushrooming of discursive analyses of European integration with these questions at their heart (for an initial overview, see Wæver 2004). The spirit of these works is captured in the title of a book that to the detriment of the field was never published: Ole Wæver and colleagues in Copenhagen labeled their project The Struggle for Europe, notably juxtaposed to Moravcsik's The Choice for Europe (Moravcsik 1998). Here European integration was neither an inevitable outcome of functionalist spillovers nor the result of strategic choices by particular actors. It was shaped by competing discourses of European governance that struggled with each other not so much on the stage of political summits and intergovernmental conferences, but in the articulations of European integration that take place in the daily speeches of politicians as well as other public speakers, the newspaper commentaries, the "table talk" in the canteens of Brussels, and so on. There are undoubtedly problems with this literature. Perhaps the most obvious one is the tendency to focus on political discourse in a traditional sense. Much of this work (including my own) is based on analyses of parliamentary debates, public speeches of politicians, party pamphlets, and other public speeches and papers. Yet, it seems to me that the Foucauldian spirit should have driven the analysis to seemingly less central sites, and should have included less traditionally "political" discourses such as popular culture. Some work since the late 1990s has moved in this direction, and to a certain degree has also taken up Foucault's later work on governmentality (see Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991). This seems immediately suitable for analyzing today's modes of European governance that often operate via decentralized technology and co-ordination in which the collection of statistics to meet targets has become the dominant mentality of governmental administrators. Much of this work has focused on issues of borders and migration (e.g., Huysmans 2004; Walters and Haahr 2005) and has opened up avenues for both the study of the construction of European identity through its margins and the problematization of increasingly dominant forms of governance. Bringing Foucauldian themes to the study of European integration has had two major effects. It has revitalized a particular concern with power beyond the question of which member state would get the most out of an intergovernmental bargain. It has also enabled the formulation of a critical position that does not fall into the pro-/anti-European trap. For me, personally, it has also made attractive and exciting an area of study that many students of international relations still consider boring and tedious. References Ashley, Richard K. (1989) Imposing International Purpose: Notes on a Problematique of Governance. In Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges: Approaches to World Politics for the 1990s, edited by Ernst-Otto Czempiel, and James N. Rosenau. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 251–290. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller ( eds ). (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diez, Thomas. (1999) Riding the AM-Track Through Europe, Or: The Pitfalls of a Rationalist Journey Through European Integration. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28(2): 355–370. Links Foucault, Michel. (2001) The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge Classics. Foucault, Michel. (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics. Huysmans, Jef. (2004) A Foucauldian View on Spill-Over: Freedom and Security in the EU. Journal of International Relations and Development 7(3): 294–318. Links Moravcsik, Andrew. (1991) Negotiating the Single European Act: National Interests and Conventional Statecraft in the European Community. International Organization 45(1): 19–56. Links Moravcsik, Andrew. (1998) The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power From Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moravcsik, Andrew. (1999) The Future of European Integration Studies: Social Science or Social Theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 28(2): 371–391. Links Rosenau, James N., and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (). (1992) Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wæver, Ole. (2004) Discursive Approaches. In European Integration Theory, edited by Antje Wienerand Thomas Diez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 197–215. Walters, William, and Jens-Henrik Haahr. (2005) Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London: Routledge.
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