Friday, March 14, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
That crises are in part defined by being moments of disjuncture, which create opportunities to act, is well established (Hay 1996). This paper considers the content of 'discourse' and 'rhetoric' (Hay and Rosamond 2002) surrounding three significant ‘crises’ in the history of EU integration – namely the 1970s oil shocks, the Maastricht ratification crisis, and the present global financial crisis – in order to determine the extent to which these events have been contemporarily defined as providing opportunities to act, or simply challenges to the existing order. The paper provides an analysis of the way in which EU actors, the media and academics have mobilised the idea of ‘crisis’ in order to exert control over endogenous and exogenous destabilising forces; to (re)define the EU as an object of both political engagement and academic study; and finally make the case for further expansion and (particularly economic) integration. In short, crises provide opportunities for the EU to reshape both its internal architecture and its relative position in the global economy, but only to the extent that they are viewed as an opportunity to effect change and not simply as an insurmountable state of flux. The comparative nature of the findings particularly aims to contextualise the current discourse around the global financial crisis, in order to evaluate the EU’s previous efforts at global repositioning, and the significance of crisis discourse to these efforts.
