The European Union, a Promoter of Values or a Shopkeepers’ Empire? Economy and society the European Union

• In Event: 408 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Elites, Politics, and the Economy

Abstract

With its 508 million consumers and 28 member states, the European Union can today be seen as an empire in the making. To shed light on the nature of the emerging empire the paper analyses the Europe 2020 Strategy and the related policy documents of the EU. The analysis of the ‘symbolic universe’ implied by the documents shows that the EU operates in every field and sector of politics with a cultural model in which the economic categories are the most fundamental ones. However, it also promotes values and does not hesitate to expand the public sector. In a critical discussion of the three previous interpretations – the Normative Power Europe model (Manners 2002), the Market Power Europe model (Damro 2012), and Foucault’s account on liberalism (Foucault 2008; Dardot & Laval 2013) – the paper concludes by maintaining that the EU is a peculiar empire in that it justifies its actions in economic terms. Yet it is more appropriate to call it an ‘ordoliberal’ rather than a ‘neoliberal’ empire because it does not represent such optimist market fundamentalism that believes that markets left alone can solve all coordination problems. Rather, the political wisdom of the EU emerges from the sociologically more realist ordoliberal thinking, according to which markets are the most just mechanism of resource allocation, but at the same time vulnerable, and therefore in a constant need of support from the part of the public authorities.

Authors

• Risto K. Heiskala, University of Tampere

• Jari Aro, University of Tampere