Publisher's Synopsis
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 spans 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.
