Introduction: European Crises (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Crisis in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
This book explores the resilience of the European Union in the face of repeated crises that are often seen as likely to derail its very existence. While it is often observed that these crises serve as opportunities for more integration, scholars have yet to offer an explanation for why this is true. This book is the first to identify a pattern across EU crises – specifically, the 2003 Iraq crisis, 2005 constitutional crisis, and 2010-12 Eurozone crisis. I argue that we cannot understand the nature and severity of these crises without delving into the role of societal reaction to events and the nature of social narratives about crisis, especially those advanced by the media. The EU is plagued by episodes of what I call integrational panic – periods of often overblown, existential crisis in which social narratives about events create the perception that the “end of Europe” is at hand. While most explanations of crisis focus on systemic or structural flaws in the European institutional structure, this narratives approach also explains a renewed will to find consensus post-crisis. Using the concept of catharsis, I argue that narratives about crises provide the means to openly air underlying societal tensions that would otherwise remain under the surface, and impede further integration.
Facing Global Crises After Europe: Between Philosophy and Politics (2016)
Europe is beset by crises. This refrain resounds today from all corners and under many guises: economic, social, geopolitical and environmental. Yet there is no consensus on what defines these crises. Even the meaning of the subject of the refrain, "Europe" , is a matter of contention. Is Europe the entity that shall face and possibly overcome these crises or is it only passively subjected to them? Over the last few years many attempts have been made by philosophers and intellectuals to write petitions and manifestos to give remedy the lack of clarity about the very idea of Europe and the possible outcomes of its crises; there is indeed widespread confusion and doubts not only amongst Europe's political, economic and cultural elites, but also amongst its citizenry concerning Europe's identity, task, role in the world, and even whether Europe exists in a relevant sense. This Special Issue of Metodo aims at addressing the issue of "crisis" from different angles. Our contention is, indeed, that an analysis of the crisis concept, and in particular of the kind of crises which are currently affecting Europe, necessarily requires multidisciplinary insights into the problem, which range from philosophy to political theory, from economy to law. By engaging different approaches and languages, this Issue aims at generating an open debate on this topic.
It has become utterly banal to speak of “the crisis” in Europe, even as there have proliferated invocations of a veritable “crisis of Europe” – a putative crisis of the very idea of “Europe.” This project, aimed at formulating New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe,” was initiated in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, and has been brought to a necessarily tentative and only partial “completion” in the aftermath of the subsequent massacre in Paris on 13 November 2015. Eerily resembling a kind of uncanny pair of book-ends, these spectacles of “terror” and “security” (De Genova 2011; 2013a) awkwardly seem to frame what otherwise, during the intervening several months, has been represented as “the migrant crisis,” or “the refugee crisis,” or more broadly, as a “crisis” of the borders of “Europe.” Of course, for several years, the protracted and enduring ramifications of global economic “crisis” and the concomitant policies of austerity have already been a kind of fixture of European social and political life. Similarly, the events in Paris are simply the most recent and most hyper-mediated occasions for a re-intensification of the ongoing processes of securitization that have been a persistent (if inconstant) mandate of the putative Global War on Terror (De Genova 2010a, 2010c). Hence, this collaborative project of collective authorship emerges from an acute sense of the necessity of rethinking the conceptual and discursive categories that govern borders, migration, and asylum and simultaneously overshadow how scholarship and research on these topics commonly come to recapitulate both these dominant discourses and re-reify them.
Crisis, Power, and Policymaking in the New Europe: Why Should Anthropologists Care?
Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
At a time when European integration faces many crises, the efficacy of public policies decided in Brussels, and in member state capitals, for managing the everyday lives of average Europeans demands scrutiny. Most attuned to how global uncertainties interact with local realities, anthropologists and ethnographers have paid scant attention to public policies that are created by the EU, by member state gov- ernments and by local authorities, and to the collective, organised, and individual responses they elicit in this part of the world. Our crit- ical faculties and means to test out established relations between global–local, centre–periphery, macro–micro are crucial to see how far the EU’s normative power and European integration as a gover- nance model permeates peoples’ and states’ lives in Europe, broadly defined. Identifying the strengths and shortcomings in the literature, this review essay scrutinises anthropological scholarship on culture, power and policy in a post-Foucaultian Europe.
Europe in Crisis: “Old,” “New,” or Incomplete?
In this policy memo, we bring together the results of our recently published research to shed some light on how the idea of Europe has been contested in Russia and in Central Europe as represented by the Visegrad Four (V4). Based on our findings, we suggest, first, that despite persisting differences between normative and geopolitical contexts in which Russia and the V4 have existed, Russian and Central European discourses have exhibited a degree of convergence toward a new understanding of Europe. Their imagery of Europe, which places a premium on national sovereignty and cultural integrity, is currently in conflict with mainstream (hegemonic) Western ideas of Europe as a cosmopolitan and supranational project that should be characterized by higher degrees of openness toward the cultural " Other " (including refugees). Our second major point is that developing these new visions is only part of the story. Apart from using them for domestic political consumption, the narrative of an " alternative " Europe is an important element of a political strategy of influencing the existing understandings of Europeanness in the Western " core " itself. This political gamble, played by the Kremlin and to a lesser extent by some Central European leaders, is ultimately aimed at reshaping the meaning of Europe so that it would be more accommodating toward their political stance. In this sense, the Russian and Central European narratives on a " new " or " alternative " Europe are mutually amplifying, even if they are not necessarily crafted by the same political actors and can also conflict on many other issues such as memory of the Second World War.
Beyond Crisis Talk: Interrogating Migration and Crises in Europe
Sociology
Commencing with some recent examples drawn from Anglophone media, this introductory article reflects on the multiple ways in which crisis and migration have been interconnected over the last decade in public discourse, political debates and academic research. It underlines how crisis has not simply become a key descriptor of specific events, but continues to operate as a powerful narrative device that structures knowledge of migration and shapes policy decisions and governance structures. It explains the rationale for choosing Europe as a multidimensional setting for investigating the diverse links between migration and crisis. It ends with a summary of the contributions that are divided into four thematic strands: relationships between the economic crisis and migrant workers and their families; the Mediterranean in crisis; political and public discourses about the post-2015 'migration crisis'; and ethnographies of everyday experiences of the 'refugee crisis' on the part of migrants, activists and local people.
Narratives of the European Crisis and the Future of (Social) Europe
PSN: Other Political Economy: International Political Economy (Topic), 2013
This article examines two distinct types of narratives prevalent in academic writing and popular press regarding the causes of the crisis in Europe. The first type, a morality tale, attributes the crisis to profligate southern states that refused to abide by the strictures of the Stability and Growth Pact. The second type is focused on the structural reasons for the crisis, emphasizing the nature of the European Union as a non-optimal currency area, and the euro as a factor in the creation of trade imbalances and competitiveness problems within the euro zone. Each type of narrative suggests a different type of solution. The morality tale tends to see austerity measures and stricter fiscal discipline as the solution, while the structural narratives suggest anything from banking, to fiscal, to full political union or, by contrast, breakup as the potential ways out. The article argues that European politicians have focused on the morality tale and this in turn makes the structural solu...
The EU in Crisis: Crisis Discourse as a Technique of Government
2014
This chapter argues that it is illuminating to read ‘crisis’ not as a fact, but as a political discourse that functions as a ‘technique of government’. Drawing examples from the context of the EU’s contemporary policy responses to the financial crisis, it illustrates how experts produce knowledge about ‘crises’, and how the discourse of crisis is operationalized as a tool for giving effect to governmental ambitions. This reading of crisis as a technique of government raises three inter-related challenges to the implied assumptions of the crisis narrative. First, it puts into question the idea that crises are ‘uncommon’ or ‘special’ events, and instead argues that the discourse of crisis is commonplace in the EU, and acts as a normative assertion about the status quo. Second, it undermines the simplistic logic of cause and effect by emphasizing the production of truth that lies at the heart of crisis discourse and how these truths shape expectations and policy proposals. Third, this reading complicates the idea that crises are ‘game changing’ moments of social or political shift, arguing rather that their political effects remain uncertain and tied up with the success of particular forms of knowledge.