From governmentality to inter-governmentality in EU governance

The governmentality approach has gained momentum in the study of international politics. Michel Foucault conceptualised governmentality as the last stage of power imposition upon a biopolitical population, beyond discipline and sovereignty. Little do we know, though, about how governmental power reifies within a context of multi-level governance (MLG) and in particular within EU governance. This paper argues that within EU governance governmental power is imposed on interconnected political subjects on behalf of equally interconnected centres of executive power. In the era of regional interdependence and cosmopolitanism, we thus observe the emergence of EU inter-governmentality. The paper’s first section revisits existing post-Foucauldian accounts, showing that they have not sufficiently elaborated on how governmental power gets qualified within transnationalism and supranationalism. The article proceeds with an epistemological analysis of how governmentality within the EU's framework has so far paved the way for EU inter-governmentality. The third section of the paper uses the actions of the European Council during the EU financial crisis to empirically illustrate inter-governmentality as a new stage of power imposition in EU politics. The concluding remarks refer to the theoretical value-added of inter-governmentality for the study of EU governance.