The ambiguous personality of the European economy

ABSTRACT

The notion of the existence of ‘the economy’ as a separate domain of social life and an apparently self-evident spatial entity is very much imagined. This paper addresses a specific aspect of the processes through which imagined economic spaces are created and consolidated, namely, the discursive construction of what Ben Rosamond in 2012 called the ‘personality’ of an economic space, and it does so by using the empirical example of the emergence of an imagined European economic space since the late 1980s. It is argued that the European social model (ESM) is central to the personality of the imagined European economy. However, drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and their successors in the so-called ‘Essex School’, this personality is conceptualized as a floating signifier, since different actors, in different contexts, often attribute different meanings to this term. Furthermore, it is argued that it is the very ambiguity at the heart of the ESM that ensures its legitimacy – it allows a multitude of actors to adhere to the common reference frame of an apparently European model, while they simultaneously hold on to their own specific interpretation of that model.

KEYWORDS:

• imagined economy
• Europe
• personality
• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
• discourse theory

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Herrera’s (2005, 2010) work on ‘imagined economies’ shows the importance of economic spaces, or economies, being differentially imagined in terms of economic advantage/disadvantage, and how such imaginations may not correspond with ‘objective’ indicators of economic advantage/disadvantage, but it does not suggest why those spaces become imagined as discrete spaces in the first place.

2 In a wider perspective, this process can be conceptualized as a component of a broader ‘Europeanization’ dynamic, which established the EU as a new layer of supranational governance since the late 1980s. However, given that the Europeanization literature is predominantly concerned with the impact of EU governance on national political systems (Featherstone & Radaelli, 2003), we do not explicitly address this literature here. For a critique of this mainstream Europeanization concept from a political geography perspective, see Clark and Jones (2008). For a broader understanding of Europeanization as policy diffusion, see Börzel and Risse (2014).

 

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding assistance for this research by the Marie Curie Reintegration Grant Scheme [project number PERG06-GA-2009-251018].