This talk looks at the EU’s political reactions to the eurozone crisis with Foucauldian categories and insights from governmentality studies. Instead of a narrow institutionalist account, this perspective allows for an analysis of different and sometimes competing rationalities and modes of government. While many of the measures and structural reforms can be described as a blend of disciplinary power and security-oriented governmentality, other Foucauldian concepts can be employed for analytical reasons as well: pastoral power, but especially instances of sovereignty, which Foucault under-theorizes in his work and discards too fast.
Jan Christoph Suntrup is a political scientist from the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn. He is Associated Researcher at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn and a Visiting Fellow at the European Institute. He obtained a Ph.D., summa cum laude, in 2010 at the LMU Munich with a thesis on the transformation of the intellectual field in France. In 2017, he completed his habilitation at the University of Bonn with a theoretical and empirical thesis on various dimensions of conflicts of legal cultures. Jan Christoph Suntrup’s general research area is political theory and philosophy and the study of political culture with a special focus on the analysis of law and democracy, structures of authority and power, legal pluralism and constitutionalism. His current book project deals with an analysis of states of exception and modes of emergency politics.