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Abstract
This article applies a Foucauldian analytics of government to recent developments in the European Union (EU), focusing particularly on open methods of co-ordination (OMCs) in the EU. It argues that in the perspective of an analytics of government, the open method of co-ordination can fruitfully be understood as ‘advanced liberal government’, a particular conceptualization of government constituted of ‘practices of liberty’. These practices continuously presuppose, depend on and enable their subjects – in the case of the OMC most often the relevant national government agencies. At the same time, however, they shape and reshape them. There is thus a dual nature to the open method which is typical of advanced liberal government: the method enables and opens up new possibilities for its subjects and at the same time restrains these subjects as they are subjected to a certain calculative and disciplinary regime.
Notes
An extended version of this article will appear in William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr, Governing Europe. Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration, London: Routledge, 2004. This book subjects a number of fields of European integration to analysis along the lines of a Foucauldian analytics of government.
The concept of ‘network governance’ has also, however, been applied in analyses of policy-making in the EU (Kohler-Koch and Eising Citation1999).
The concept of panopticism stems from Foucault’s analysis of the historical development of prison institutions, where the surveillance mechanisms of the emerging modernity find an architectonical expression in Jeremy Bentham’s ideas on prison reform and his proposal for a transparent Panopticon.