Paper short abstract:

This paper explores 'joining social Europe' as a post-colonial encounter or 'contact zone' reframed within a set of narrative turbulences and fragile performative practices, fictions and frictions.

Paper long abstract:

While, for a long time, European integration has been seen as a highly modernist project with associated progressive catch-up, convergence and mutual policy learning, there is an increased recognition, deriving from post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, that Europeanisation is a misplaced, catch-all term for multiple and discontinuous regimes and practices of disciplinarity, translation, knowledge, and power. In this sense, governmentalised Europe can be seen, inter alia, as both a highly mediated post-colonial encounter (a 'contact zone') and as the enactment and embodiment of performative fictions and frictions. By exploring how the domain of 'the social' is re-assembled and re-constructed in and through space and time, we offer a radically different register and narrative to a dominant epistemic modernist discourse on 'Europeanization' and 'social policy'.

We explore the multi-scalar restructuring of and in Europe creating variegated peripheralisations, reframing the social within a set of narrative turbulences and fragile performative practices, encompassing fictions and frictions. In this sense, the social has become a rather unstable floating signifier in the context of diverse 'elsewheres', culminating in the current moment of fiscal austerity seeking to contain the idea of "joining social Europe" within a techno-managerial frame. Exploring social Europe forces us to address complex narrative turbulences, in which different configurations of nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and movements for direct democracy, social justice and decommodification, on the other, become central to the contested dynamics of Europeanisation and its variegated impacts.