PUTTING CULTURE IN ITS PLACE

ABSTRACT

The European Union has been constructed through common ontologies of a world composed and divided on spatial scales. This paper elaborates on this point and examines anthropologically some of the key notions that have been called on to construct the EU, notably that of ‘culture’. It is suggested that we might profitably take ‘culture’ out of our own analytical tool-kits and treat it instead as an interesting but problematic invention. Drawing on the author's own fieldwork inside European institutions, the paper explores relevant aspects of life inside the Commission and what it is to be ‘European’. The paper sets out some of the negative and positive ways in which ‘culture’ is lived or understood in the Commission, and it outlines some of the problems of ‘culture’ as an analytical tool, from its earlier history to the stereotypes it still encourages, and in so doing points to aspects of the practical imagination and difficulties of the EU project more generally. We see that Europe may respect cultures but only by cherishing the notionally culture-free.

Keywords:

• EU
• European Commission
• culture
• stereotypes
• corruption
• cosmopolitanism
• management

Notes

¹There are many helpful accounts available of the workings of the Commission, including Page (1997); Cini (1996); Stevens and Stevens (2001); Hooghe (2001); Rhinard (2010).

²Some of this material was written up in internal, unpublished reports – including Abélès et al. (1993); and McDonald (1998). I am grateful to participants in a seminar in 2003 at the European University Institute (Florence) for their comments on my attempts to re-think the language of analysis.

³For some of the evolving differences between the services or Departments on the one hand, and the Commissioners and their cabinets on the other, see the works cited in note 1 above and Peterson (2008).

⁴There is a large literature suggesting that these are important questions (e.g., Diez and Wiener 2004) and giving various hypotheses of how the transformation to ‘European’ loyalties might happen, or seeking to measure for reliable ‘socialization’ or ‘Europeanization’ models: for some of this, see Beyers (2005); Checkel (2003, 2005); Christiansen (1997); George (1985); Hooghe (1999, 2005); Kelley (2004); Michel and Robert (eds.) 2010; Niemann (1997); O'Neill (1996); Pierson (1996); Trondal (2004). My own paper here starts from a different analytical framework and my methodology has been predominantly that of full-time anthropological fieldwork inside the Commission, rather than relying on interviews (e.g., Shore 2000) or questionnaires (e.g., Checkel 2003, 2005) from outside.

⁵See ‘Debates of the European Parliament’ (special supplement of the Official Journal of the European Communities) of the 1950s and 1960s, especially September 1952, January 1965, and 1968–69.

⁶See, for example, the website of Culture Action Europe: www.cultureactioneurope.org; in language shared with the Commission, this lobbying group aims to encourage ‘Intercultural dialogue’ in order to promote a common sense of European citizenship. On cultural policy, see also Littoz-Monnet (2007).

⁷In anthropology, attempts to (i) dispense with ‘culture’ analytically are not new although sometimes controversial (e.g., Carrithers et al. 2010) but various attempts to (ii) centre the corporeal – from Csordas (ed.) (1994) and Toren (1999) to Ingold (2011), for example – have become common. Combining aspects of (i) and (ii), the approach I take can also encompass ‘local biologies’ and ‘epigenetics’, and the term ‘circumstances’ here would include everything, human and non-human: McDonald (2012). The ‘beyond culture’ sub-heading is taken from Fox and King (eds) (2002).

⁸What were classed as ‘psycho-social’ illnesses amounted to almost 40% of officially recognized ‘invalidity’ claims in the Commission.

⁹The reforms known as ‘SEM’ and ‘MAP 2000’ under Santer were largely incorporated into the similar – if more loudly proclaimed – reforms that came after him under Prodi and Barroso. See McDonald (1998, 2000); Cini (2007); Ellinas and Suleiman (2008); Peterson (2008). These reforms, publicly described as ‘radical’, began in 1997, gained a perceived urgency with the 1999 scandals, and were notionally completed during the 1999–2004 Commission, prior to the 2004 EU enlargement.

¹⁰On ‘sociolanguage’, see McDonald (1989); my use of this term is intended, in part, to avoid the implications of bounded, distinct languages or a necessary consciousness of and respect for such boundaries in normal, everyday speech.

¹¹On language issues in the Commission, see Abélès et al. (1993); Bellier (1994); McDonald (1998, 2000); and on differences between the European Parliament and the Commission, McDonald (1996).

¹²The explicit enrolment of ‘cultural diversity’ into the Internal Market through an elision of ‘mutual recognition’ with respect for cultural difference has also been made in writing by a former Internal Market Director: Mattera (2005). On the ‘mutual recognition’ approach, which speeded up the Internal Market, see Schioppa (2005).

¹³On the different ‘policy modes’ involved here, see Wallace et al. (2010: ch. 4).

¹⁴See, for example, http://www.euronews.net/2011/09/28/barroso-urges-economic-union-in-face-of-euro-crisis/ (accessed 30th September 2011).

¹⁵Cf. on this point Candea (2011), where we see that examining the ‘political’ ethnographically also brings into focus areas (e.g., écoles laïques in France) deemed free of politics. In my analysis here, there has been no space to discuss the separation of the administrative and the political that the Commission reforms have sought to effect.

¹⁶For a discussion of this sometimes vague use of non-Herderian organisational ‘culture’ in relation to the Commission, see Cini (2001).