Uses of Politicisation in the EP and European Parliaments

This paper aims to contribute to the conceptual history of politics, as opposed to the narrow and unhistorical use of ‘politicisation’ that dominates the EU studies. I shall continue the action- and contingency-perspective presented in Kauppi, Palonen and Wiesner (in Redescriptiona 19:1, 2016) and the typologisation of politics to the pairs politicisation-polity and politicking-polity (see Palonen in Alternatives 28:2, 2003). From this perspective I shall analyse the actual uses of the politicisation vocabulary and their implicit conceptualisations of politics in the parliamentary language. As sources I shall use the European Parliament as well as parliaments of a number of EU member states in the post-WWII period, in so far as they are available online. The debates would selected from those parliaments which use English, French and German language, eventually Finnish and Swedish (although their debates are online only from the early 1990s). The wider point of the paper is to de-provincialise the EU studies by linking them with political thought, conceptual history of politics and the rhetorical analysis of conceptual changes à la Quentin Skinner as well as with the use of parliamentary debates as primary sources in this kind of studies.