Time and Power in the European Union

To speak of politics is to speak of time and power. Politics is about time pressure, urgency, crunch times, or emergencies. What happens often seems unexpected, sudden, or unprecedented. Politics appears to move too fast, too slow, too early, too late, with undue haste or with unacceptable delays. Good timing is essential in politics; bad timing is frequent. Politics has a need for schedules, timetables, roadmaps, anticipation, foresight, forecasting, appropriate time horizons, short-term action, and long-term planning. It requires attention to future generations, to the immediate challenges of the present, and to the legacies of the past. In politics, time is of the essence (Goetz 2024) and there are urgent calls to transform the temporal features of Western democracies (Zielonka 2023). The language of politics is also infused with references to political power, although empirical research that uses power as its central guiding concept is quite rare, in part because of the many forms that it can take. In recent years, the dual distinction between structural and actor-centered forms of power, and between “power over”, with its emphasis on hierarchy and coercion, and “power to”, i.e., the capacity to act, has inspired attempts to understand the changing power relations in the EU’s multi-level system (Laffan 2023). The ambition of the workshop is to provide a forum for an intensive exchange between scholars interested in the temporality of European politics, government, and public policy and those who inquire into the changing power relations in the EU’s multi-level system.

Goetz, Klaus H. (2024). “Time, Politics, and Political Science”, in Klaus H. Goetz (ed.) The Oxford Handbook on Time and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goetz, Klaus H. and Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen (2022). “COVID-19 and Europe’s Multi-level Democracy”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 60 S1, pp. 137-149. Laffan, Brigid (2023). “Collective Power in Europe? (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Shapiro Lecture 2022)”, Government and Opposition, 58 (4), pp. 623-640. Laffan, Brigid and Stefan Telle (2023). EU’s Response to Brexit: United and Effective. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Zielonka, Jan (2023). The Lost Future and How to Reclaim it. New Haven: Yale University Press.

1: Why and in what ways has the temporality of EU politics, government and public policy changed?
2: How is time embedded in EU’s institutions, processes, organizations, actor constellations, ideas, and policies?
3: What are the empowering and disempowering effects of the changing timescape of the EU’s multi-level system?
4: How does the emergence of novel temporal practices affect the EU’s problem-solving capacity and collective power?
5: Do new ways of organizing political time allow for the representation of concerns that were previously “timed out”?

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