Governmentality, political field or public sphere ... - Adrian Favell

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494 European Journal of Social Theory 14(4)way, the domain becomes ascertainable and thus capable of being subjected to theexercise of power. Political technologies are the instruments, procedures and techniquesin which this power manifests itself: the means that are used to affect the conduct ofindividuals in line with the underlying rationalities of government.In this view, government is conceptualized in a much wider sense, well beyond theconventional notion of officials and institutions authorized with the power to make decisionsand to enforce rules for the state and its citizens. Instead, Foucault defines governmentas ‘the conduct of the conduct’, which includes all activities that aim atstandardizing the conduct of individuals in a population through shaping their interests,beliefs, aspirations and desires by using a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge(Dean, 1999: 11). The decoupling of government and power from the state is oneof the attributes that makes the concept of governmentality especially fruitful to theanalysis of deterritorialized politics beyond the nation-state such as the EU. In othermore conventional terms, this would be pointed to as new forms of governance (Larnerand Walters, 2004: 4). From the governmentality perspective the central questionis not what type of state the EU represents. The question is, rather, how the EU, itsmember states and populations are rendered knowable and discursively constructed asa governable entity, and by use of which political technologies is it governedeffectively.The governmentality perspective on the EU is also distinctive in that it does notrequire defining in advance stable concepts like democracy, state, society, citizen, etc.The variable definition and operationalization of such entities through discourse andpractice become the core of the analysis itself. Accordingly, there is no need to (andno point in) analysing a unique political entity like the EU against the yardstick of(alleged) conventional categories of political order. Instead, the focus shifts to theparticular subjects, objects and spaces that the EU brings into existence. At the sametime, the governmentality perspective reminds us that the EU does not have a ‘natural’direction of development that could be known in advance or follows a logical path.Instead, as Walters stresses in an interview (Tietäväinen and Pyykkönen, 2008: 65), theapproach does not make any assumptions about the necessary direction for political andsocial change. This means there is no particular reason to assume, for example, that thenation-states will be functionally replaced by a supranational state. As he concludes:‘Instead we might take a more empirical attitude and ask what exactly do these organizationsdo?’That the empirical value of a Foucauldian approach is stressed should be an importantpoint in its favour. However, Foucauldians are nothing if not ‘post-positivist’ in theirattitudes towards conventional ‘empiricist’ methods of social science inquiry, such asobservations or surveys. Their own investigations thus almost exclusively focus on thereading of given textual sources. On the methodological level, then, governmentalitystudies tend to rely exclusively on the discourse analysis of policy papers, officialpublications, legal texts, speeches, and so forth. They consider how phenomena are discursivelyconstructed as problems whose solutions require governmental intervention,the argumentative justification of the interventions, and the strategies developed fortackling the problems. Often, the analyses also include the materiality and technicalaspects of discourses by drawing the attention to the way in which the world is made
Zimmermann and Favell 495visible, calculable and governable through numbers, charts, tables, graphs, diagrams andreports (Walters, 2004).In the 1990s there was an impressive flourishing of research on governmentalityinfluenced by two widely cited collections (Burchell et al., 1991; Barry et al., 1996),as well as a seminal article by Rose and Miller (1992). Meanwhile, governmentality hasbecome a core concept within a wide range of studies of power, order and subjectivity.Most of these studies focused on the nation-state as their analytical entity. Apart fromsome pioneers like Didier Bigo (1994, 1998, 2000, 2002) or Andrew Barry (1991,1994, 1996, 2001), scholars have only recently begun to apply the governmentalityperspective to the EU (e.g. Rumford, 2002; Merlingen, 2003; Dale, 2004; Larner andWalters, 2004; Walters, 2004; Walters and Haahr, 2005; Shore, 2006).A governmentality account of the EU’s democratic deficitAs an empirical example of a governmentality approach to the EU, we refer to theseminal paper ‘Governmentality and the problem of democracy’ by Jens Henrik Haahr(2005), as well as the chapter ‘Of democratic deficits’ written by Haahr with WilliamWalters in their joint book Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and EuropeanIntegration (Walters and Haahr, 2005).For Walters and Haahr, the main question is not – as in mainstream EU studies –whether the EU can be considered a democracy against the backdrop of certainnormative yardsticks. Instead, they understand their analysis as a critique of such yardsticks,by shifting the object of study from democracy-in-itself to the discursive field ofthe problematization of democracy. Thus, the debate as such comes under scrutiny,including the explicit and implicit understandings about the meanings and workingsof democracy, and the ongoing reproduction of certain ‘truths’ but not others. The centralquestion that Walters and Haahr address is: In which ways has democracy been involvedand invoked as an element of European government?Haahr (2005) argues that the outcomes of the Danish and French referenda in connectionwith the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 opened up a new field ofcontestation. The ‘speechless voice of the people was taken to account for the advanceof new arguments or for the advance of old arguments with new forces; for the formulationof new critiques and for the application of new technologies of power’ (Haahr, 2005:9f.). He claims that in this way it became a characteristic of the presence of Europeanintegration that the ensuing problematization of government from the perspective ofdemocracy predominantly take the forms of moves to ‘insert democracy’ into existingmodes of government. This problematization seeks to actively conceptualize a European‘demos’ of conscious, involved and – at some fundamental level – supportive Europeancitizens. To study these attempts at democratic reform in terms of their specific technologiesof power, Walter and Haahr (2005) then differentiate between what they call technologiesof (de)differentiation, transparison, agency and proximity.Walters and Haahr (2005: 72ff.) show, for example, how technologies ofde-differentiation are used to open up a political space for European democracy, byproducing new subjects through denaturalizing a political order which previouslyconfined rights to the national sphere. This can be traced already in the Rome Treaty’s
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