The Politics of Everyday Europe: Constructing Authority in the European Union
Kathleen R. McNamara
Abstract
How do political authorities build support for themselves and their rule? Doing so is key to accruing power, but it can be a complicated affair. This book shows how social processes can legitimate new rulers and make their exercise of power seem natural. Historically, political authorities have used carefully crafted symbols and practices to create a cultural infrastructure for rule, most notably through nationalism and state-building. The European Union (EU), as a new governance form, faces a particularly acute set of challenges in naturalizing itself. However, a slow transformation in the sy ... More
How do political authorities build support for themselves and their rule? Doing so is key to accruing power, but it can be a complicated affair. This book shows how social processes can legitimate new rulers and make their exercise of power seem natural. Historically, political authorities have used carefully crafted symbols and practices to create a cultural infrastructure for rule, most notably through nationalism and state-building. The European Union (EU), as a new governance form, faces a particularly acute set of challenges in naturalizing itself. However, a slow transformation in the symbols and practices of everyday life has made the EU a “taken-for-granted” political authority and generated a particular type of common European identity. Yet the EU is not simply a supersized nation state. Instead, the EU’s cultural infrastructure is rooted in a specific type of “banal” authority, which navigates national loyalties while portraying the EU as complementary to, not in competition with, local identities. The labels, mental maps, and narratives generated by EU policies are often deracinated, purged of their associations with the powers of the nation state and standardized into a seemingly unobjectionable blandness. By taking a novel comparative political development approach, this book helps us understand both the EU’s surprising legitimacy as a new emergent actor and the potential limits of the cultural processes that have constructed it.
Keywords:
European Union,
authority,
cultural infrastructure,
symbols and practices,
legitimacy,
comparative political development,
state building,
European identity,
nationalism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198716235 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716235.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Kathleen R. McNamara, author
Associate Professor and Director, Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University
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