Book Description

My research brings together work in sociolegal studies with anthropological explorations of the political uses of culture to foster inclusion within the European Union (EU). Focusing on European bureaucrats charged with managing culture, my dissertation research examines how actors involved in the production and interpretation of culture set this concept in motion within the legal and political structures of their work. A key question animating much of my work is: How do culture bureaucrats implement EU-wide cultural policies in an increasingly globalised world while respecting local control over culture? In my dissertation research I worked with the policymakers and bureaucrats whose task was to create, disseminate and implement new definitions of culture, tolerance and policy itself. I thus take as my starting point two instances of culture administration in the EU. The first of these was the EU's Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008 initiated by the European Commission in collaboration with non-governmental organizations to develop soft European cultural policy recommendations. The second instance is the Dutch state's audiovisual culture test designed to test the tolerance of immigrants seeking Dutch citizenship. My research considers the struggle in developing what EU bureaucrats often term common European cultural objectives and the implications this has in managing disparate immigration policies, defining the contours of belonging and exclusion, and coordinating the linkages between law, culture and democracy. My dissertation is thus not only a discussion of the paradox of inclusion and exclusion within Europe, but is also an examination of the various uses of law and policy that manage this paradox, paying particular attention to how soft law and subsidiarity are embodied techniques that work in tandem to create culture as an object of surveillance, emotion, and experimentation. I argue that these relationships re-orientate the European policy process's engagement with history to maintain a virtual Europe, create the conditions of possibility for desirable shaming practices which re-define law and punishment under modalities of competence, and produce experimental legal systems that attempt to infuse emotion within the policy process.