Anthropology, State-Formation and Regulatory Governance: EU Bureaucracy as a Site for Analysing the (Post?)-Modern State
Cris Shore (Auckland) University of Auckland
Questions about the role of the state in society have long been central to anthropology, but the fundamental problem of how to grasp the state conceptually remains unresolved. Over the past decade scholars have increasing recognized that the modern state should not be seen as a unified, coherent entity with a clear project, but rather as a diffuse field of power relations and set of practices, processes and their effects that typically reflect the incoherent, disunited and ‘mystifying’ workings of government (Jessop 1990; Alonso 1994; Nagengast 1994; Mitchell 1999). Michel Rolph Trouillot (2001) has developed this so-called ‘cultural turn’ to map out a programme for the anthropological study of the modern state in terms of these practices and their effects in producing particular kinds of individualized subjects, spaces, identities and classifications. In this paper I apply Trouillot’s arguments to the European Union. I argue that the bureaucracy of the EU provides a key site for analyzing contemporary processes and practices associated with state-formation. These phenomena are assessed within the context of the EU’s persistent denials that it has become, or is the process of becoming, a supranational European state. The vexed problem of what exactly is the European Union raises more fundamental analytical questions including; how is European integration transforming the EU and the nation-states of Europe? How do EU officials themselves see this process and their role within it? And what are the implications of this transformation for European democracy, citizenship and subjectivity?
