Paper short abstract:

My paper explores how policymaking processes in the EU pool expertise to foster and regulate markets and provide non-market entities (like human plasma) for capital accumulation. It analyzes consequent shifts between ideas of gift and commodity and related moral discourses that tint EU policymaking.

Paper long abstract:

„Blood is national, plasma is global” (Farrugia, 2009). Blood management has been historically imagined as state/national affair, outside market spheres, governed by solidarity and gift relations between citizens (Titmuss, 1970). However, its precious component – plasma – circulates in global markets and is primarily used as raw material for pharmaceutical manufacturing for which the European Union relies heavily on US import. Post-pandemic crisis management and subsequent healthcare-related legislative revisions provided an opportunity for the EU to (re)make its markets, foster competitiveness and increase ‘self-sufficiency’ by transforming national and European plasma collection systems.

This project explores how the EU with its vast bureaucratic apparatus pools and consolidates knowledge from the international plasma field (from state, non-profit, commercial actors, national medical experts and EU policymakers alike) to produce policies that simultaneously enable and regulate national and European markets by making available certain entities outside the market (like human bodies and their substances) for extraction and capital accumulation (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017). These policies also complicate the status of blood plasma as gift and/or commodity, while help (re)produce the Union as a unified market but also as a biopolitical and moral community. Through participant observation and interviews with involved experts and policymakers, it is also revealed that despite being imagined as a supranational entity, the EU is haunted by the idea and perceived responsibilities of the state (e.g. managing bodily donations, securing healthcare) while regulating and fostering markets (Oksala, 2017) and filling them with moral sentiments and arguments about care (Muehlebach, 2012).