Joint MUSTS/PCE Colloquium
Wednesday, October 17 2018, 15:30-17:00
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, Grote Gracht 80-82, Spiegelzaal
Arendt, Metaphors and the EU: How Language Reveals the Conceptual Frameworks on which EU Industry and Technology Policies Draw
Abstract:
The rise of populism signals a profound crisis of the political, and the EU does not escape from this. I will argue that this crisis has beengenerated by the fact that politics is still understood and practiced in a modern way, while we are stepping out of Modernity. Hannah Arendt’s well-known but controversial distinction between labour, work and action provides, perhaps unexpectedly, a conceptual grounding for transforming politics and policy-making at the EU level. Arendt provides the conceptual tools for transforming the conceptualisation of relations and of agents that fuels the growing dissatisfaction among many Europeans with EU policy-making. I will make this argument by stretching and re-articulating Arendt’s labour-work-action distinction and taking seriously both the biological and plural dimensions of the human condition, on top of its rational one. By applying this shift to an EU context, EU policies might change their priorities and better address the needs and expectations of plural political agents and of European citizens. Thisargument is informed by my analysis of the use of metaphors in EU policy documents over the past decades, focusing on industry and technology policies, and on those relating to the Lisbon Treaty and EU 2020.
Nicole Dewandre is Adviser for Societal Issues, Communications Networks, Content & Technology to the Directorate-General, European Commission