Crisis, Power, and Policymaking in the New Europe

Abstract

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 governments and by local authorities, and to the collective, organised, and individual responses they elicit in this part of the world. Our critical 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 governance 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.

Pojmovanje podjetništva mladih v diskurzih politike Evropske unije

“…Dosedanje raziskave, ki preučujejo politike EU (glej med drugim Shore 2000;Thedvall 2006;Garzon 2007;Holmes 2009;Demossier 2012Demossier , 2016, prikazujejo uporabo različnih metodologij za povezovanje izbranih politik s tistimi diskurzi, akterji in institucijami, ki so vključeni v njihovo produkcijo in implementacijo -kar, kot menita Shore in Wright ( 2011), skupaj sestavlja oziroma predstavlja »svetove politik«. Kot trdi Bilge Firat (2014), antropološke raziskave politik poudarjajo pomen kulturnega interpretativnega okvira, v katerem delujejo oblikovalci tovrstnih politik -vključno z uradniki EU. Pomemben vidik tega okvira sestavljajo diskurzi, kategorije in metafore, s pomočjo katerih se sestavljajo dokumenti in besedila različnih politik (Wedel in Feldman 2005).…”

Conceptualising youth entrepreneurship in EU policy discourse

“…Anthropological research centred on the policies of the EU (including, among others, Shore 2000;Thedvall 2006;Garzon 2007;Holmes 2009;Demossier 2012Demossier , 2016 demonstrates the use of diverse methods to link policies to the discourses, actors, and institutions involved in their production and implementation into what Shore and Wright term "policy worlds" (Shore and Wright 2011). As Bilge Firat argues, anthropological inquiries into policies emphasise the significance of the cultural interpretative framework in which policymakers -including EU officials -operate (Firat 2014). An important aspect of this framework comprises the discourses, categories, and metaphors that underpin policy and policy documents (Wedel and Feldman 2005).…”

“…The analysis of the narrative genealogy and analysis of youth entrepreneurship also build upon anthropological research on crisis, primarily those works that examine the experiences of the latest financial crisis in the EU (including Knight and Stewart 2016;Pina-Cabral 2018;Raudon and Shore 2018;Kozorog 2019) and the operation of the EU's narrative frameworks of crisis (including Wilson 2010;Firat 2014;Gkintidis 2016). More specifically, it is inspired by Janet Roitman's research on the operation of crisis as a normative rhetorical or narrative mechanism, which serves to invoke what she terms moments of truth that rhetorically facilitate "the questioning of the epistemological or ethical grounds of certain domains of life and thought" (Roitman 2014:4).…”