Europe Anti-Power (Interventions) - Hardcover

Loriaux, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138659681 ISBN 13: 9781138659681

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

The EU seeks to define a role for itself in power politics while remaining firm in its rejection of power politics. In order to make power compatible with the European project, EU debate has appended a number of progressive adjectives to the word "power," adjectives like "civilian" and "normative," among others. This book asks what is power, such that it can be modified, tamed, and modulated by adjectives, yet remain "powerful"?

Loriaux passes EU debate on power through the mill of phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis, juxtaposing it against writings by Machiavelli, Agamben, Thucydides, Nietzsche, Patocka, and Levinas. The book locates power in "power/play," the theatrical, staged representation of threat that generates aesthetic effect and undecidability. Power/play endows the word "power" with perlocutionary force, which the adjectives of EU "qualified" power actually enhance rather than moderate. Loriaux argues that EU discourse on power therefore risks inviting EU "exceptionalism," or risks lapsing into an expression of EU ressentiment, rather than advancing a new, progressive understanding of "power." If European Union is to remain steadfast in its opposition to power politics, it must represent itself as "anti-power." 

This book will be of interest to those who work in the area of EU foreign policy, as well as to those who have a more general theoretical interest in the concept of power.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Loriaux is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, USA. His teaching and research areas are International Relations, the European Union and Critical Theory. He is the author of European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier (2008).

From the Back Cover

Michael Loriaux's book is a model of political analysis. Read it, above all teach it. A
profound understanding of power informs the detailed ways in which it tracks the history
of European debate. If you want to understand how current problematisations of security
have helped bring the European project to the brink of dissolution, but also how the very
idea of Europe has been inspired by the need to transcend the murderous dynamics of
geopolitics, this is the book for you. In philosophically sophisticated yet entirely readable
ways, Loriaux details how this ambivalence runs throughout the debate on European
security policy.
Michael Dillon, Emeritus Professor of Politics, Lancaster University, UK

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138659681
• ISBN 13: 9781138659681
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190