Friday, April 15, 2016
Assembly A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Since its inception, the European Commission has played a central role in the integration project and, uniquely among EU institutions, has been tasked with constructing ‘social Europe’ from the top down. Launching its ‘People’s Europe’ programme in the 1980s, the supranational administration sought to unite the putative citizens of EU member states though an embrace of common symbols to foster among them a shared identity. After two substantive enlargements, a global economic crisis, the rise of populist and eurosceptic movements on the Left and Right, potential ‘Grexits’ and ‘Brexits’, and the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War, the cries that ‘Europe’ as an idea is dying is lent credence by a conspicuous absence of tangible European demos on the continent. This paper seeks to gain insight into Commission officials’ understandings of the challenges these existential crises pose and presents an empirical analysis of the modes by which they react to such criticisms from beyond the ‘EU bubble’. While the effects of EU officials’ attempts to foster a European consciousness has been studied extensively throughout Europe’s multifarious regional populations, little empirical work has been carried out in the halls and corridors of the institutions themselves, among the social actors who generate the legislation themselves. Drawing on an extensive period of ethnographic field research among the European Commission civil service in Brussels, the study employs a multinational and multigenerational approach in order to discover how officials understand their roles in building and managing a social Europe in crisis.
