The Temporality of European Governance

Abstract

One of the main points of departures in the study of European governance, has been to question in which way this phenomena transforms the member states of the European Community/Union (EC/EU). Most of these mainstream approaches¹ have been built up around conceptions of change regarding ‘the limits and territory of state sovereignty’, ‘new boundaries between internal-external politics’, ‘spill over between, or overlapping, levels and fields of competence’ etc. The weakness of these theories is that they focus on only one dimension of state transformation, namely, as underlined with the italics above, processes affecting the state’s spatial delimitation. Thereby, these approaches have tended to draw the a-historical conclusion that European governance resembles the nation state in most aspects except size. The fact that changes in the time dimension have been down-graded theoretically is to a large extent due to the very nature of structuralism — the origin of many mainstream theories — which philosophically has its foundations in concepts of space, extension, networks etc. The result is that the referred approaches have overlooked the effects of European governance on member state temporality. By temporality I mean, peoples’ and organizations’ ‘knowledge’² of their past, present and future.