Niilo Kauppi

Bourdieu’s political sociology and the politics of European integration

The purpose of this article is to explore what Bourdieu’s political sociology could bring to the study of European integration. I first present, very briefly, some of the traditional approaches in European integration studies. Then I move to my interpretation of Bourdieu’s structural constructivist theory of politics through a discussion of political capital and political field, drawing parallels between these concepts and some of Max Weber’s ideas. In the third part, while discussing the works of some scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, I present some structural constructivist studies of European integration. Structural constructivism provides theoretical tools for a critical analysis of European integration.

Democracy, social resources and political power in the European Union

Introduction 1. Some theoretical premises of European Union research 2. A structural constructivist theory of politics and of European integration 3. French European policy 4. Social and constitutional integration in Finland and France 5. French members of the European Parliament 6. European Parliament elections in Finland and France in 1999 7. Intellectual politics and Europe Conclusions

Power or Subjection?: French Women Politicians in the European Parliament

In the majority of European Union countries, women are far better represented in the European Parliament than in the lower house of their respective national parliaments. This article examines the political signicance of this imbalance through a case study of French women members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The marginality of the European Parliament in French politics has meant that women have succeeded in getting elected there and that they have had access to power positions in the European Parliament. Some of these women have occupied positions in traditionally male areas like economics and nance. The European Parliament has been for many women politicians a secondary point of entry into national electoral politics. In French politics, the European Parliament provides a forum for the partial overturning of nationally determined political values, especially those that determine the sexual division of political labour. The European Parliament also creates pressures for changes in the gender composition of other sectors in the French political field.

Ranking European Social Science and Stratifying Global Knowledge: The Example of European Political Science

With globalization the world has become more complex, creating in all sectors of society a social demand for symbolic tools that enable the governance of this complexity. This social demand is particularly strong among professionals involved in the governance of higher education, university administrators and civil servants in national and regional ministries, politicians and decision makers, but also those individuals whose professional life depends on higher education, notably faculty and students. Since the 1990s, the European Commission and national civil servants in Europe have been spending considerable energy in attempts to reform the European university system, to make it more competitive vis-a-vis certain American universities. Rankings of performance and efficiency as quantitative tools of public policy have played a key role in this process (Hazelkorn, 2007, 2011; Kauppi and Erkkila, 2011). The much publicized league tables of the best universities in the world have been accompanied by a host of techniques of higher education transnational governance that produce, despite the considerable criticism, equivalences between certain quantitative indicators and academic excellence (for overviews see, for instance, Reinalda and Kulesza, 2006; and Harmsen and Kauppi, 2013).

Die Politik der Europäischen Union

Die Europaische Union (EU) umfasst nicht nur 500 Millionen Einwohner, ist mit einem Anteil von 20 % der globalen Importe und Exporte die weltweit groste wirtschaftlich Kraft und besitzt das komplexeste jemals realisierte politische System; sondern die EU ist auch eine Burokratie mit 30.000 offentlichen Angestellten, verfugt uber einen grosen Korpus an Gemeinschaftsrecht und eine eigene Wahrung (den Euro) und besitzt zahlreiche Politikbereiche sowie eine komplizierte Struktur von Wechselbeziehungen mit historisch gewachsenen nationalen Politiksystemen. Dennoch ist unsere Sicht auf die Politik der EU zumeist eingeschrankt, da wir uns am traditionellen Blick der Politikwissenschaftler, Okonomen und Rechtswissenschaftler orientieren. Demnach ist die EU entweder ein entpersonalisierter autarker institutioneller Komplex, oder – auf eine Weise, die Thomas Carlyle’s „great man theory“ evoziert – ein Schlachtfeld von Super-Individuen, wie Nicolas Sarkozy und Angela Merkel, die das Geschehen von oben beeinflussen.

Non-elected Political Elites in the EU

With globalization and Europeanization, profound changes have taken place in the composition and structure of elites. Once solidly tied to the nation state, elites have, following processes of differentiation and specialization, become more transnational than ever before. Their development has been conditioned by the evolving relationship between international, transnational, and national powers. In the European context, key institutional players today include the European Commission, the European Ombudsman and the European Court of Justice as aspiring representatives of the general European interest and the Council of Ministers and member states as representing national interests in the EU. Their relationship and changing interfaces are crucial when assessing the development of non-elected political elites as well as more generally the rise of an institutionalized and integrated Europe.

Constructing Transnational Fields

This chapter studies the evolving relationship between the redistribution of social resources and the structuration of institutional spaces beyond the nation-state. The author first discusses general features of transnational fields and then moves to an examination of the European Parliament as an empirical case. In this perspective, the object of this approach, transnational social fields, form the social infrastructure of globalization processes. They are historical constructions, subjected to a double historicity: the development of the position of the scholar and the development of the objects that she tries to elucidate in relation to other objects. Transnational fields enable the scholar to highlight through controlled contextualization certain structural aspects that are crucial to the development of power resources and spaces that cross nation-state borders.

Processes of Differentiation of Political Power in the EU

This chapter starts with reflections on the difficulties of studying the EU. The author then presents some of the research that develops a political sociology perspective to European integration and political power. Key concepts include structural differentiation and stratification. Scholars explore European integration as a process of structural differentiation and stratification, which provides politicians and civil servants new power resources. In this transnational political ‘market’, old resources tied to the nation-state, resources like legislative experience and national political visibility, are exchanged into newer resources tied to the EU. In other words, something old such as a national political career is converted into something new and riskier, such as a transnational political career in the European Parliament.

Translation and the Politics of Circulating Ideas

This chapter explores the politics of circulating ideas, as part of a broader reflection on the circulation/diffusion/transfer/transplantation of concepts and ideas in the EU. The chapter starts with a discussion of some main points of Pierre Bourdieu’s text on the international circulation of ideas in which he develops a framework for the analysis of the diffusion of culture. The author then proceeds to develop some further lines of inquiry for an alternative social science approach to these issues. He explores the mechanisms by which ideas and concepts are associated to one another, how they form semantic fields, how they come to form institutionalized and taken-for-granted horizons of action and how they are appropriated by and attributed to individuals and groups through definitional struggles.

European Academic Identity

This chapter argues that neoliberalism, through its bureaucratically led reform frenzy, produces not only identitarian uncertainty amid a politically relatively unorganized academe but also a scientifically legitimized ambivalent discourse that confuses more than clarifies the mission of the university and research. Resistance to neoliberalism is variable. More resistance can be observed from the humanities and the social sciences, from countries in whose self-image globalization plays a modest role, from individuals operating uniquely in their national contexts while less resistance will be found from those disciplines that are linked with economic development, business, or the international, from those countries that are dependent culturally and economically of globalization processes, and from individuals who desire investing in the international.