The Eurozone Crisis as a Problem of Liberal Governmentaltiy_Simmerl

8/12/2019 The Eurozone Crisis as a Problem of Liberal Governmentaltiy_Simmerl

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THE EUROZONE CRISIS AS A PROBLEM OF LIBERAL

GOVERNMENTALITY1

PRELIMINARIES FOR A FOUCAULTIAN ANALYSIS THROUGH THE LENS OF THE GERMAN

PUBLIC

Author: Georg Simmerl

Institutions: Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fr

Sozialforschung

Contact: [email protected]

- Read, cite and distribute at your own risk-

1. IntroductionThe so-called Eurozone crisis is widely understood as the self-inflicted inability of some

member states of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) to re-finance their debt

independently in the face of contracted global financial markets. Three years of continuous

but ultimately futile emergency politics indicate, however, that it is not just another

sovereign debt crisis like the dominant narrative might make belief. In fact, it is the

simultaneous dominance of this reading as the intellectual basis of European crisis

management and the apparent failure of the political responses conducted in this fashion

that make the situation appear as an encompassing crisis of governmental rationality. So far

1A first draft of this paper was presented at the workshop "Post-positivist Approaches to IPE in Times ofEconomic Crisis, 11 12 January 2013, Erfurt.


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action.3To the extent that European crisis management conforms to this logic of making a

specific kind of anticipated market rationality the premise of the political responses and fails

to stop the financial turmoil when following this logic, the Eurozone crisis can be considered

as a crisis of liberal governmentality.

Secondly, an engagement with Foucaults work allows applying two distinct analytical

approaches archaeology and genealogy - to study this problem in the discourse on the

Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public. A genealogical perspective would

focus on the official discourseof crisis management. The discursive interaction between

political representatives of the EMU would be analysed diachronically as a (dis-)continuous

struggle for the prerogative of interpretation over the adequate crisis management as

represented in the German media. In an environment of encompassing financialisation,

EMU's crisis management can be understood as successive attempt to re-establish confidence

among financial actors in the monetary union. Thus, the "official discourse" of EMU

representatives is arguably directly disciplined by the anticipated rationality of the market

and operates within the horizon of liberal governmentality as a struggle to assert an

interpretation of the specific kind of rationality the financial markets obey. A genealogical

inquiry would thus trace the discursive interaction among representatives of the EMU in

order to determine whether European emergency politics really follows the logic of

anticipating a specific kind of market rationality and whether different interpretations of this

rationality become dominant over time. In contrast, an archaeological perspective would

analyse the broader discourse of various societal actors on the Eurozone crisis in the German

public synchronically at different points in time to identify commonalities in the dispersion

of statements.4While the speaking positions of societal actors are not necessarily disciplined

by the market as site of veridicition, neoliberal governmentality has been the foundational

3 This relates directly to discussions of the assumptions of a "world of risk" and a "world of

uncertainty" as intellectual basis for the political responses to the global financial crisis in IPE (see

Taleb 2007; Nelson & Katzenstein 2011; Blyth 2012; Kessler 2012). Liberal governmental rationality

holds that we live in a "world of risk" and assumes that the financial markets will respond in a rational

manner to its actions which are thus calculable in advance.

4In this regard, this project follows the trend in Foucaultian social science to move beyond a discourse

analysis that is solely derived from a reductionist reading of the Archaeology of Knowledge towards amore integrative perspective taking Foucaults later work into account as well (seeAngermller & van

Dyk 2007; Bhrmann & Schneider 2007;Jger & Maier 2009).


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raison d'tatof the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus be expected to be a discursive

formation in the discourse of German societal actors (Foucault 2008). The aim of the

archaeological analysis is then to determine whether this liberal unconsciousnessgoverns

the broader societal discourse at the beginning of the Eurozone crisis and, if so, whether

there have been ruptures and transformations in this discursive formation over the course of

the crisis. In sum, these two Foucaultian perspectives allow to examine both how EMUs

crisis management handles the financial markets as its site of veridicition (geneaology of the

official discourse) and whether the debate in the broader public conforms to this constitutive

principle of liberal governmentality as well (archaeology of the societal discourse).

In the remainder of this paper, I will discuss at first theoretical and methodological aspects of

Foucaults work in order to show how it can inform an analysis of the Eurozone crisis as a

potential problem of liberal governmentality (2.). Afterwards, I will develop the contours of a

research project that draws on these theoretical insights to analyse the discourse on the

Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public (3). I will conclude with discussing the

relationship of this Foucaultian ananlyis to the politics of post-positivism.

2. Foucault and the Eurozone CrisisMichel Foucault as a philosopher, social theorist and methodologist of discourse analysis

is a major meta-theoretical point of reference for post-positivist approaches in the various

branches of the social sciences that identify themselves as post-structuralist. Similarly, the

growing literature on post-structuralist IPE has also largely made use of Foucaults work in

meta-theoretical terms to define discourse, representation and identity as its distinct

analytical terrain in the study of the global political economy (de Goede 2002; de Goede 2006;

Wullweber & Scherrer 2010). While it is undeniably the inevitable first step for post-

structuralist IPE to develop a fully-fledged meta-theoretical alternative to the positivist

mainstream, I would argue that there is a growing need to follow the lead of performativity

studies in the sociology of finance and to convert these meta-theoretical insights into a

productive research agenda which would establish post-structuralism more firmly in IPE.

In the following, I will try to show that Foucault's work provides both theoretical and

methodological points of departure for developing a productive empirical research agenda


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on the Eurozone crisis in its own right. To make Foucaults writings accessible for this aim, I

will at first provide a short discussion of the transformations in Foucaults work. Thereafter, I

will show how the insights of this nuanced discussion can be translated into an empirical

research project that analyses the discourse on the Eurozone crisis in the German public.

2.1 Foucault and the politics of truth

There are three axes that run through the intellectual journey of Michel Foucault: knowledge,

power and the subject (Foucault 1990b: 4-6). The intersections of these axes mark out the

politics of truth as the guiding problem of Foucaults analyses of the history of Western

civilization: how do certain forms of knowledge become established as truth through their

fusion with relationships of power and form thereby subjectivities? Foucaults work is

traditionally categorized into three canonical phases - archaeology, genealogy and the ethical

techniques of the self in which he addressed the guiding problem of the politics of truth

from different perspectives and prioritized one of the axes each. While it is possible to

identify in retrospect a distinct analytical stance of interpretative analytics that developed

in Foucaults writings over the years (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983), I will discuss these phases

and the ruptures between them because I would like to demonstrate with respect to the case

of the Eurozone crisis that it is a promising empirical research strategy to apply the different

analytical perspectives separately. Furthermore, such a separated discussion makes it easier

to see that Foucault can be read as a post-positivist and post-structuralist in the best sense of

the words since his archaeological phase was rather positivist and structuralist in its

analytical outlook, while the integrative approach of "interpretative analytics" that moved

beyond structuralism and positivism only developed over the course of the two latter

phases.5

In the early phase of his academic career, Foucault tried to unearth the discontinuities in the

apriori that make valid knowledge in Western civilization possible. The archaeological

approach he developed for this task was heavily indebted to the philosophical movement of

5 The following draws both on Foucaults writings and central secondary literature (Dreyfus &

Rabinow 1983; Deleuze 1992;Sarasin 2005).


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structuralism and conceived of these apriori as holistic structures underpinning language. As

autonomous systems, they precede the speaking individual and direct what can be said and

known. Since these structures are not to be mistaken with the articulated words themselves,

they are best understood as the unconsciousnessof Western culture which regulates the

way in which knowledge is produced and articulated without the speaker being aware of it.

This structuralist reading is most succinctly articulated in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970)

which identifies in a synchronic manner (i.e. through a comparison of the same scientific

disciplines at several points in time) the different epistemes of three successive epochs. This

analysis shows that only in the modern epoch man became the subject and object of

knowledge production. As such, the speaking and intentionally acting subject is not a

transcendental starting point of knowledge production but rather a provisional effect of the

anonymous forces in the evolution of Western thought. Although the Archaeology of

Knowledge (Foucault 1972) was designed as a methodological supplement to The Order of

Things, it already heralded a break with the staunch structuralism Foucault had advocated

before. In this explication of discourse analysis, he replaced the notion of episteme with the

concept discursive formation which narrowed down the perspective from the level of

Western thought to single scientific disciplines and introduced a clear analytical link to the

study of individual statements. In fact, Foucault defined a discursive formation as a

regularity in the dispersion of statements of a scientific discipline. These rule-like structures

govern discourses which he conceptualized as practices that systematically form the objects

of which they speak (Foucault 1972: 54). While Foucault thus stuck to a structuralist

position in that he claimed to describe - in a purely positivist manner which is completely

agnostic to questions of interpretation - the regularities of knowledge production that lie

under the (wordily) surface of dispersed statements, he started at the same time to take the

practices of the speaking individual seriously without making it the point of departure of his

analysis. What will be outlined in the next section in detail is that an archaeological

perspective allows to analyse structures underpinning the public discourse on the Eurozone

crisis and to examine possible ruptures and discontinuities.

The turn towards discursive practice in the Archaeology of Knowledge is representative of a

broader transformation in the work of Foucault towards genealogy which he started to

develop more fully in an article on Nietzsche (Foucault 1984)and his inaugural lecture at the


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Collge de France (Foucault 1981). Roughly speaking, genealogy denotes the switch from the

outside-perspective on the regularities of autonomous discursive formations that was

characteristic for archaeology to a perspective which tries to understand the diachronic

creation of ordering effects within these formations. The genealogist examines in a radically

historicising fashion who is able to seize control over discourse and can enforce certain

interpretations of singular events within the constant struggle for domination that defines

the social. In this regard, genealogy focuses on the role power plays in the contingent

production of truth. The decisive point is that Foucault advocated an understanding of

power as decentralized relationships at the micro-level of social interaction through which

both repressive and productive effects are exercised (Foucault 1990a). Over the course of his

genealogical studies, Foucault increasingly translated the interplay of power and knowledge

into the question of how people are governed in (post-)modern societies. For Foucault,

governmental effects can only emerge when certain governmental practices find their mirror-

expression in the self-governing activities of the subordinates. These kind of relationships

between governors and governed are made possible by a power/knowledge-dispositifwhich

couples certain governmental practices of power with specific regimes of truth and

thereby effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it

to the division between true and false (Foucault 2008: 19). This is what Foucaults calls

governmentalitythe linkage between governmental practices of the state and self-governing

practices of the subordinates through a regime of truth. The liberal version ofgovernmentality

that dominates in (post)modern societies is defined by a self-restricting art of government

which equally depends on individuals that adopt the subject position of free and docile

citizens. As will be explicated in the next section more fully, Foucault conceives of political

economy as establishing the market as a naturalized regime of truth which is constitutive of

self-limiting liberal governmental practice.

The question of how people become free and docile citizens which arises in the studies on

governmentality leads over to the final transformation in the work of Foucault that became

manifest in an increasing interest in the technologies of the self in the second volume of the

History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990b)and his last lectures at the Collge de France. Although

these studies remain within the scope of genealogy by complementing Foucaults inquiries

into the genealogy of the modern subject, they nevertheless mark out a distinct final phase in


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Foucaults intellectual journey since he started to take the possibility seriously for the first

time that an individual can constitute itself as a free subject. While the individual cannot

escape being enmeshed in relations of domination and existing regimes of truth, it has

nevertheless the chance to defend his or her freedom through some form of virtue ethics.

One of the decisive practices in this regard is critique which, according to Foucault, has to be

understood as the art of not being governed like that and at that cost (Foucault 1997: 29).

While Foucault's inquiries into the technologies of the self will not be applied directly in the

analysis of the Eurozone crisis, it provides important points of departure for making sense of

the act of post-positivist research and the role of the researcher as a political actor (see 4).

When Foucaults examinations ofthe ethical practices of the self are read as a framework for

research activity, it is possible to see that that he fully replaced the cold-hearted and quasi-

positivist diagnosis of discursive regularities that was characteristic for the archaeologist

with a deeply engaged understanding of research that recognizes its own entanglement with

the politics of truth. In this regard, the inquiries into the ethical practices of the self can be

considered the completing step in Foucaults movement towards an analytic position that is

both post-structuralist and post-positivist.

2.2 An archaeological and a genealogical perspective for analysing the problem of liberal

governmentality in the discourse on the Eurozone crisis

Foucaults work provides important points of departure in theoretical terms for

understanding the Eurozone crisis as a potential problem of liberal governmental rationality

and in theoretical terms for analysing this problem in the discourse on the Eurozone crisis

from both an archaeological and a genealogical perspective. To understand the Eurozone

crisis as a potential problem of liberal governmental rationality, it is necessary to review

briefly how Foucault conceptualizes the relationship between governmental practice, the

market and the scientific discipline of political economy (or economics) in his lectures on

liberal governmentality (Foucault 2008: 13-35). Here, Foucault describes the market as a

regime of truth which is the constitutive principle of self-limitation in liberal governmental

rationality. The market is treated as "site of veridiction" which judges governmental practices

as either good or bad or true and false, if you will. For the market to become this integral


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part of liberal governmental practice, it needs to be constructed as consisting of natural, law-

like and objectifying mechanisms which must be left to function with the least possible

interventions precisely so that it can both formulate its truth and propose it to governmental

practice as rule and norm (Foucault 2008: 30). This is essentially what classical political

economy (and then neoclassical economics) did from the middle of the 18thcentury onwards:

to establish the market as site where the truth about governmental practice itself is

allegedly formed in a natural and law-like manner (see also Vogl 2010). Political economy

was influential not as a theory inside the heads of the economists but as a discursive practice

altering governmental rationality.

With the help of the archaeological and genealogical perspectives developed by Foucault,

this constellation can be described in two radically different ways. From an archaeological

point of view, this relationship between governmental practice and the (financial) market as

its constitutive regime of truth established by political economy can be understood from the

outside as a potential discursive formation defining Western societies in times of "financial

capitalism" (Windolf 2005). Thus, an archaeological perspective would ask at first whether it

is possible to describe a regularity in the dispersion of statements in the publics of financial

capitalism that affirms this relationship. Furthermore, if such regularity does exist,

encompassing crises of financial capitalism might trigger ruptures or transformations in this

discursive formation. In contrast, a genealogical perspective examines how liberal

governmental practice deals with this principle constitutive of its own existence. For

governmental officials in capitalist societies, the market as a regime of truth for their own

actions is simply a given. Thus, what a genealogical inquiry would seek to examine are the

power/knowledge-struggles for the prerogative of interpretation over how to govern

correctly based on the premise that the market will tell the truth about these practices.

It should be pretty easy to see that this second, genealogical reading describes concisely the

social reality in which the representatives of the EMU operate during the Eurozone crisis

(Simmerl 2012). Crisis management in the Eurozone crisis can be understood as a situation in

which the political representatives of the EMU (including the ECB) address the public of


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financial actors to re-establish confidence in the monetary union.6 In the face of contracted

financial markets, the representatives of the EMU have to actively convince freely moving

capital of the creditworthiness of all of its member states (more often than not under

perceived time pressure). Over the course of the crisis, this problem has become more and

more acute to the extent that the very possibility of sovereign default was actively

promulgated by political representatives of the EMU with German governmental officials at

the front (Tsingou & Zimmermann 2011; Zimmermann 2011). What emerges among the

different political representatives of the EMU is a struggle for the prerogative of

interpretation over the correct crisis management. Proponents of austerity argue, for

example, that reduced governmental spending will re-assure confidence of the lenders and

favour an exclusion of troubled member states in case they do not conform to this precept,

while the "Keynesians" of our time assume that contracted financial markets will not stop to

attack the EMU until liquidity is restored and the possibility of sovereign default within the

monetary union is effectively ruled out via credible commitments such as Eurobonds. The

decisive aspect is that all these interpretations seem to operate within the horizon of liberal

governmentality in that they take the financial market as a site of veridiction for their own

action as a given and try to anticipate in the political responses they propose the likely

reactions of the markets. The bone of contention is only how this rationality of the market

works. What a genealogical inquiry within the official discourse of the Eurozone crisis tries

to examine is how the discursive struggle among political representatives of the EMU on

6This understanding of crisis management as a discursive interaction between governmental officials

and financial markets derives from two theoretical arguments: financialisation and the performativity

of economic activity. It starts from the assumption that we live in fully financialised societies in which

governments have become structurally dependent on financial markets for re-financing their debt (see

Windolf 2005; Heires & Nlke 2011). In times of crisis, governments feel pressured to re-establish

confidence of financial actors (see also Swedberg 2011). The discursive character of this interaction is

best grasped by performativity studies in the sociology of finance. Inspired by post-structuralist

theorizing, these studies hold that market action is not a process of neutral price formation which

follows certain objective economic laws but is actively created (performed) through the enactment

of certain forms of financial knowledge which may or may not succeed in realising what they say

(Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2006; MacKenzie et al. 2008; Hall 2009; Butler 2010; Langley 2010). For ageneral theoretical argument on the discursive interaction between governments and financial

markets see Langenohl (2009)and Langenohl & Wetzel (2012).


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how to govern the crisis developed and whether it really only operates within the confines of

liberal governmentality.7

The articulations of the representatives of the political institutions are not only directed to

the audience of the financial actors but are also part of the totality of statements in society on

how to govern the Eurozone crisis. Unlike the representatives of the political executive,

many participants of the societal discourse such as politicians of the opposition, scientists or

journalists are not necessarily disciplined by anticipated consequences of market reaction.

For an empirical investigation of discourse on the Eurozone crisis in the spirit of

archaeology, it would nevertheless be of interest to examine whether it is possible to describe

a regularity of this kind in the whole dispersion of statements on how to govern the

Eurozone crisis. While the genealogist studies struggles among contending perspectives, an

archaeological analysis searches for commonalities among them instead. To stick with the

example mentioned above: Is there an underlying logic that unifies positions such as

"Monetarism" and "Keynesianism"? The underlying logic which upholds the market as

regime of truth for politics is represented by the assumption that financial markets follow

some kind of rationality which can be anticipated and calculated. While the official discourse

on the management of the Eurozone crisis has consequently not moved beyond this horizon

(see Streeck 2011; Blyth 2013), it is a very important complementary analytical goal to

determine whether the broader societal discourse does also adhere to this constitutive logic

of the power/knowledge-dispositifof liberal governmentality (see Hall 2007). If this kind of

unconsciousness of the societal discourse on the Eurozone crisis could be described as

discursive formation, the question would remain whether the dynamics of the Eurozone

crisis have led to ruptures or transformations which alter the limits of the sayable.

To make a long story short: If the whole societal discourse (i.e. all statements made) on the

Eurozone crisis is imagined as a big flow, applying the genealogical perspective just outlined

7The political responses emerging out of this struggle are in turn assessed by financial actors, which

express their judgments in different ways: first and foremost in the form of the interest rate on

governmental bonds but also as worldly articulations such as public assessments by rating agencies or

statements by bank representatives. In this regard, it should also not be forgotten that it is not only the

governments who are dependent on the judgements of the financial markets. The Eurozone crisis isalso characterized by the dependency of large banks on the actions of the political institutions of the

EMU due to their severe exposure to governmental debt.


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means tracing with interpretative methods the evolution of a specific stream (the "official

discourse" of political representatives of the EMU) within this discourse diachronically over

the whole course of the crisis, while an archaeological inquiry would "cut through" the whole

societal discourse in a synchronic manner at different points in time to determine positively

whether regularities in the whole dispersion of statements can be detected.8

3. Analysing the Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German Public A ResearchProject

Drawing on the Foucault-inspired understanding of the Eurozone crisis as a potential

problem of liberal governmentality and the two analytical perspectives of archaeology and

genealogy developed in the previous section, I will now briefly outline the contours of a

research project that studies this problematique through the lens of the German public. This

project will treat three different mainstream newspapers (Bild, Die Zeit and Sddeutsche

Zeitung) as representative sources for the German public and analyse the discourse on the

Eurozone crisis from October 2009 till the end of 2012 on both genealogical and

archaeological terms. Thus, this study will examine the discursive representation of the

Eurozone crisis in the German public in two ways. First, in a diachronic manner as a

succession of discursive struggles among political representatives of the EMU to define the

right way to govern the crisis (genealogy of the official discourse); second, in a synchronic

manner as dispersion of statements from various actors at certain points in time which are

compared to identify possible regularities and ruptures (archaeology of the societal

discourse). The overall aim is to determine the extent to which this discourse is governed by

the constitutive principle of liberal governmentality to treat the (financial) market as a

rational site of veridiction for political action.

The analysis of the discourse on the Eurozone crisis is restricted to the German public in

general and to three newspapers in specific to mark out a range of empirical material that

8 In this regard, I would argue that these two perspectives resemble what Bob Jessop describes as

semiotic and structural analysis of crisis narratives (Jessop 2013) with the difference that thisFoucaultian analysis advanced here does not introduce a kind of rump materialism but studies the

Eurozone crisis solely on the level of discourse .


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can be examined in a reasonable amount of time. What is more, the discursive struggle in the

German public is likely to have direct effects for the overall direction of European crisis

management since German governmental officials and German representatives in the ECB

are decisive actors in the emergency politics of the EMU. They are not only called upon from

various sides to take the lead as representative of Europes economic powerhouse but self -

consciously seize a hegemonic position and have to so far succeed in asserting a distinct

approach to govern the Eurozone crisis on the European level. Nevertheless, it has to be

emphasized that the idea of this project is not to restrict the analysis to articulations of

Germans. It is only restricted to articulations that were covered in the three German

newspapers. With regard to the genealogy of the official discourse, this research strategy

should make a description of the dynamics of the debate on the Eurozone crisis possible

which produces at least similar results like a an analysis hypothetically conducted through

the lens of other European publics would produce. In contrast, with regard to the

archaeology of the societal discourse, this research strategy will certainly draw a specifically

German picture of regularities and ruptures in the dispersion of statements on the Eurozone

crisis.

To make the promises and perils of applying both approaches to study articulations on the

Eurozone crisis in the German public more transparent, I will try to spell out the aspired

research procedure more concretely.

A genealogy of the official discourse means studying in a diachronic fashion the

interpretative struggles among political representatives of the EMU over the correct crisis

management. I will examine which interpretations of the causes of the crisis and the

adequate political response are advanced and which of these interpretations becomedominant over time. As outlined in the preceding section, in theory these interpretations are

liberal governmental practices and thus articulated from speaking positions which are

disciplined by the financial markets as their site of veridiction. The geneaological study

examines whether these statements follow the logic of anticipating a specific rationality of

financial markets. To study these interpretations genealogically means identifying the

articulations of the political representatives of the EMU in the various newspaper reports,

commentaries and interviews first, ordering them into a sequence afterwards and tracing

then the emergence of dominant interpretations hermeneutically and compare them with


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collective decisions made on the European level. Commentary by journalists or other societal

actors will not be included into this genealogical study but will only become empirical

material for the archaeological examination of the broader societal discourse. The only

interpretations which will be analysed are those articulated by political officials of the EMU

such as heads of governments, ministers of finance or ECB representatives in order to trace

as detailed as possible how the crisis management policy of the EMU was defined and

refined over time. Although the official discourse is studied through the lens of the German

public, it will include articulations from the full range of actors who are formally in charge of

the EMUs emergency politics. Nevertheless, German officials will undoubtedly be over-

represented in the German public. While this focus might be justified due to the decisive role

most of them play in crisis management and might also reveal deeper insights into the exact

route the erratic approach of the Merkel government to the Eurozone crisis took, it will

nevertheless create a certain bias.

In the archaeological analysis of the societal discourse, this German bias will become even

more pronounced. In fact, this part of the analysis will produce first and foremost a

specifically German reading of the Eurozone crisis derived from the articulations of societal

actors such as journalists, scientists, bankers and politicians of the opposition that are

covered at different points in time in the respective newspapers. Its self-evident that the

share of German voices in the overall number of articulations covered will rise significantly

compared to the genealogical examination. This archaeological analysis will thus directly

lead into the specificities of the German discourse on the EMU and the relationship between

governmental practice and the market in general. Foucault argued that the German

economic tradition of ordoliberalism is one of the two central intellectual roots of neoliberal

governmentality and showed that the market became the foundational raison d'tat of the

Federal Republic of Germany to which also the oppositional social democrats had to adapt

quickly (Foucault 2008: 75-100).9Thus, it appears reasonable for an archaeological inquiry

into Germany's societal discourse on the Eurozone crisis to examine if a discursive formation

which represents the underlying logic of the (financial) market being a rational site of

veridiction for governmental practice can be unearthed. The aim of the archaeological

9On the latter aspect, see Nonhoff (2006).


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analysis is thus to determine whether such a discursive formation can be described at the

beginning of the crisis and to search for continuities and ruptures at different points in the

evolution of the crisis. As outlined in the previous section, the idea behind an archaeological

analysis is a form of synchronic examination which tries to identify regularities in the

dispersion of statements at a given point in time. Following this logic of inquiry, this

research project will randomly define different sample periods in the course of the Eurozone

crisis and identify at these points in time all relevant articulations on crisis management in

the three newspapers. As a next step, the articulations within the different samples are then

compared in their positivity (i.e. no further interpretation) in order to pinpoint regularities in

the dispersion of statements. Finally, the different sample periods will be compared in order

to identify continuities and ruptures. Other discourse analyses of media coverage on the

global financial crisis have already shown that the German public remains dominated by a

ordoliberal epistemewhich is largely incapable of developing alternative visions for how to

govern global capitalism (Fuchs & Graf 2010;Kutter 2012). What this archaeological analysis

aims at is do determine whether there is a liberal unconsciousness present in the

articulations of different societal actors during the Eurozone crisis and whether breaks and

ruptures which transform the regularities in the dispersion of statements can be detected.

4. Conclusion: Foucault and the politics of post-positivismWhat I tried to develop in this paper is a research project that draws on theoretical and

methodological insights from Foucault to understand and analyse the Eurozone crisis as a

problem of liberal governmentality. According to this argument, the Eurozone crisis is a

problem of liberal governmentality to the extent that the public discourse treats the market

as a site of truth and political responses follow the logic of anticipating a specific kind of

market rationality were there very likely is non. The research project outlined in this paper

tried to devise a way on how to translate these insights productively into an empirical study

of the discourse on the Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public the "official

discourse" is analysed genealogically as a struggle that likely operates within the confines of

liberal governmentality and the societal discourse is studied archaeologically "from the

outside" to see whether it reproduces this discursive formation.


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To study the Eurozone crisis in a Foucaultian manner means moving beyond the confines of

positivist economic thought which is tightly associated to the discursive formation of liberal

governmentality. In this regard, it expresses the politics of post-positivism. It represents a

political criticism of European crisis management albeit one at the margins of societal

discourse of which almost nobody will take notice of and expresses the "art of not being

governed like that and at that cost". It holds that the Eurozone crisis will likely go on until

political measures are taken which are not disciplined by the anticipated rationality of

financial markets. The question is: What is then supposed to be the alternative intellectual

basis for political responses to financial crises? Starting from the assumption of uncertainty

instead of calculable risk? A socialist political rationality that does not exist? If post-positivist

approaches want to answer this question, they will have to develop some kind of positive

economic knowledge of their own. For all those who do not favour irrationality in the first

place, Foucault's strange mix of positivist and anti-positivist forms of inquiry might be of

help for the task of articulating an alternative political rationality which would be the

consequential next step for a post-positivist political economy which takes (its own) politics

seriously.

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Documents

The Eurozone Crisis as a Problem of Liberal Governmentaltiy_Simmerl