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Between Conceptual Innovation and ‘There is no Alternative’: Conceptual Politics and the Building of the EU as a Polity

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Rhetoric and Bricolage in European Politics and Beyond

Part of the book series: Rhetoric, Politics and Society ((RPS))

Abstract

The chapter argues that the building of the EU as a polity was, and is, shaped by conceptual politics, understood as the innovations and controversies related to interpretations and practices of political concepts in European Union (EU) integration, and the actors, processes, and success factors that helped institutionalise some of the concepts and interpretations. This means that the building of the EU as a polity was decisively shaped by political conflicts and micropolitical struggles around controversial interpretations of key concepts such as democracy, parliament, or citizenship and the ways how these concepts are invented and put into practice in the developing EU polity. These conceptual politics are in part driven by actors that are based in the EU institutions themselves. I therefore argue that conceptual politics and conceptual controversies related to EU integration are particularly fruitful objects of analysis. The chapter discusses two cases of such conceptual controversies: first, it is discussed how, and by whom, EU citizenship has been conceptualised and shaped. Second, the chapter discusses the changes that were brought about by financial crisis governance in the EU.

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  1. Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany

    Claudia Wiesner

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  1. Claudia Wiesner
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  1. SAGE/University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

    Niilo Kauppi

  2. University of Jyväskylä, Helsinki, Finland

    Kari Palonen

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Wiesner, C. (2022). Between Conceptual Innovation and ‘There is no Alternative’: Conceptual Politics and the Building of the EU as a Polity. In: Kauppi, N., Palonen, K. (eds) Rhetoric and Bricolage in European Politics and Beyond. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98632-2_5

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