From Financial Crisis to a Crisis of Interpellation: Unpacking Ideology Production in the European Union and Clarifying How Its Failures Affect Foreign Affairs

ABSTRACT

We identify an ideology gap in the Marxist EU (European Union) literature, which we then set out to narrow by identifying and analysing core elements of the particularising EU version of the global ideology of feel-good and ethical capitalism through which the EU interpellates certain subaltern classes towards identifying with the deepening and widening of neoliberal governance. We then show, by means of discourse analysis, how ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) secure but also occasionally undermine the ideological bloc of dominant and dominated classes. We conclude by arguing that the ideological dimension of EU foreign policy is becoming increasingly important as the EU’s self-ascribed status as a uniquely normative power in world politics offers multiple opportunities for ISAs to obscure the reality of a materially increasingly polarised EU whose internal structure has acquired pronounced imperialist properties during the recent financial crisis. This does not harbour well for international order in Europe and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• EU financial crisis
• EU foreign policy
• class analysis
• interpellation
• middle class

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Michael Merlingen is a professor at the Department of International Relations, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. His main research interests lie in Foucauldian IR and historical-materialist IR, in Foucault and Marx. He is particularly puzzled by how the international/global is implicated in the enclosure of our socio-economic and political imaginaries and the production of our affects, that is, by what with Foucault one might call the demonic aspect of liberal world order and with Marx one might call alienation or the impoverishment of thought and practice engendered by this world order.

Notes

1. Here we draw on that strand of neo-Poulantzasian scholarship which describes the EU as a “heterogeneous European ensemble of state apparatuses,” with “institutions located on various scales within it” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2014, 68; emphasis added). “No coherent European state has emerged; the EU rather displays a spatially fragmented form of statehood” whose components exist in “a cooperative—competitive relation” (Wissel and Wolff 2017, 232, 239).

2. Negative integration is about market-making, the abolishing of obstacles to trade and competition. Positive integration is about supranational regulation.

3. Being “a formidable force for good in the world” is how the EU described itself in its 2003 security strategy.

4. “AND” is a logical operator that we used to connect two or more search terms in our search of the LexisNexis database. It is not an abbreviation in this sentence.