Europe as a Discursive Device, In Approaching Europe and the European Union: Europe’s Spaces and their Government

What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? To what extent is our understanding of the EU – of its development, its policies and its working processes – shaped by unacknowledged assumptions about what Europe really is? This book argues that continued theoretical debates on the EU, although important, are nonetheless camouflaging a more fundamental divide about how we can and should imagine Europe. Indeed, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions over whether the EU is supranational or intergovernmental or multi-level. This book constructs a case for re-imagining Europe – not as an entity in Brussels or a series of fixed relations - but as a simultaneously real and imagined space of action which exists to the extent that Europeans and others act in and on it. This Europe is constantly being made in particular spaces, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill defined. We ask how do those concerned with building Europe, with extending and elaborating the EU, think of where they are and what they are doing? The book presents original empirical material to capture Europeans in the process of making Europe: of performing, interpreting, modelling, referencing, consulting, measuring and de-politicising Europe. It will be of interest both to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics or practitioners who work in and on Europe – anyone who wants to look afresh at Europe and its Union and think again about its political project.