1

THE EUROZONE CRISIS AS A PROBLEM OF LIBERAL

GOVERNMENTALITY
1

PRELIMINARIES FOR A FOUCAULTIAN ANALYSIS THROUGH THE LENS OF THE GERMAN
PUBLIC




Author: Georg Simmerl
Institutions: Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fr
Sozialforschung
Contact: simmerl@wzb.eu


- Read, cite and distribute at your own risk-

1. Introduction
The so-called Eurozone crisis is widely understood as the self-inflicted inability of some
member states of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) to re-finance their debt
independently in the face of contracted global financial markets. Three years of continuous
but ultimately futile emergency politics indicate, however, that it is not just another
sovereign debt crisis like the dominant narrative might make belief. In fact, it is the
simultaneous dominance of this reading as the intellectual basis of European crisis
management and the apparent failure of the political responses conducted in this fashion
that make the situation appear as an encompassing crisis of governmental rationality. So far

1
A first draft of this paper was presented at the workshop "Post-positivist Approaches to IPE in Times of
Economic Crisis, 11 12 January 2013, Erfurt.
2

none of the political measures taken in EMU's erratic crisis management from fiscal
austerity to the institutionalization of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to unlimited
bond buying by the European Central Bank (ECB) could prevent that the contagious effects
of the crisis spread to ever more member states. The inability of the political institutions of
the EMU to bring the enduring crisis to an end seems to show that the financial markets
simply do not obey the specific rationality that is presumed in their political responses.
2

If the Eurozone crisis is read in this way - as a potential problem of (liberal governmental)
rationality - it becomes clear why post-positivist approaches to International Political
Economy (IPE) promise to provide invaluable insights in both analytical and political terms:
analytically, because only approaches that are not themselves based on assumptions of
objective knowledge can grasp the dynamic relationship between knowledge and power that
drives EMUs erratic crisis management; and politically, because it can be argued that post-
positivist thinking can provide an alternative to the positive forms of neoclassical economic
knowledge which largely underpin the governmental rationality of Europes failing
emergency politics. However, to fulfil this promise of post-positivist approaches to IPE,
much work remains to be done.
In this paper, I would like to contribute a preliminary step to this task by showing how
Foucaults work can inform a discourse analysis of the Eurozone crisis that investigates this
crisis as a potential problem of liberal governmental rationality. Foucaults work is highly
inspirational for such an inquiry in two ways: first, his studies on liberal governmentality
help to specify why the Eurozone crisis could be a crisis of liberal governmental rationality in
the first place. According to Foucault, the constitutive principle of liberal governmentality is
to treat the market as a rational "site of veridicition" for its own governmental practice
(Foucault 2008: 13-35) or, to put it more bluntly: the market is assumed to tell the truth
about political decisions and thus its anticipated rationality becomes the premise for political

2
That the contagious effects of the crisis cannot be explained with reference to the economic
fundamentals of the attacked states (De Grauwe & Ji 2012) is just a case in point for the Minskyian
claim that there is no (stable) rationality inherent to financial markets at least not the one envisioned
by neoclassical equilibrium economics.
3

action.
3
To the extent that European crisis management conforms to this logic of making a
specific kind of anticipated market rationality the premise of the political responses and fails
to stop the financial turmoil when following this logic, the Eurozone crisis can be considered
as a crisis of liberal governmentality.
Secondly, an engagement with Foucaults work allows applying two distinct analytical
approaches archaeology and genealogy - to study this problem in the discourse on the
Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public. A genealogical perspective would
focus on the official discourse of crisis management. The discursive interaction between
political representatives of the EMU would be analysed diachronically as a (dis-)continuous
struggle for the prerogative of interpretation over the adequate crisis management as
represented in the German media. In an environment of encompassing financialisation,
EMU's crisis management can be understood as successive attempt to re-establish confidence
among financial actors in the monetary union. Thus, the "official discourse" of EMU
representatives is arguably directly disciplined by the anticipated rationality of the market
and operates within the horizon of liberal governmentality as a struggle to assert an
interpretation of the specific kind of rationality the financial markets obey. A genealogical
inquiry would thus trace the discursive interaction among representatives of the EMU in
order to determine whether European emergency politics really follows the logic of
anticipating a specific kind of market rationality and whether different interpretations of this
rationality become dominant over time. In contrast, an archaeological perspective would
analyse the broader discourse of various societal actors on the Eurozone crisis in the German
public synchronically at different points in time to identify commonalities in the dispersion
of statements.
4
While the speaking positions of societal actors are not necessarily disciplined
by the market as site of veridicition, neoliberal governmentality has been the foundational

3
This relates directly to discussions of the assumptions of a "world of risk" and a "world of
uncertainty" as intellectual basis for the political responses to the global financial crisis in IPE (see
Taleb 2007; Nelson & Katzenstein 2011; Blyth 2012; Kessler 2012). Liberal governmental rationality
holds that we live in a "world of risk" and assumes that the financial markets will respond in a rational
manner to its actions which are thus calculable in advance.
4
In this regard, this project follows the trend in Foucaultian social science to move beyond a discourse
analysis that is solely derived from a reductionist reading of the Archaeology of Knowledge towards a
more integrative perspective taking Foucaults later work into account as well (see Angermller & van
Dyk 2007; Bhrmann & Schneider 2007; Jger & Maier 2009).
4

raison d'tat of the Federal Republic of Germany and can thus be expected to be a discursive
formation in the discourse of German societal actors (Foucault 2008). The aim of the
archaeological analysis is then to determine whether this liberal unconsciousness governs
the broader societal discourse at the beginning of the Eurozone crisis and, if so, whether
there have been ruptures and transformations in this discursive formation over the course of
the crisis. In sum, these two Foucaultian perspectives allow to examine both how EMUs
crisis management handles the financial markets as its site of veridicition (geneaology of the
official discourse) and whether the debate in the broader public conforms to this constitutive
principle of liberal governmentality as well (archaeology of the societal discourse).
In the remainder of this paper, I will discuss at first theoretical and methodological aspects of
Foucaults work in order to show how it can inform an analysis of the Eurozone crisis as a
potential problem of liberal governmentality (2.). Afterwards, I will develop the contours of a
research project that draws on these theoretical insights to analyse the discourse on the
Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public (3). I will conclude with discussing the
relationship of this Foucaultian ananlyis to the politics of post-positivism.

2. Foucault and the Eurozone Crisis
Michel Foucault as a philosopher, social theorist and methodologist of discourse analysis
is a major meta-theoretical point of reference for post-positivist approaches in the various
branches of the social sciences that identify themselves as post-structuralist. Similarly, the
growing literature on post-structuralist IPE has also largely made use of Foucaults work in
meta-theoretical terms to define discourse, representation and identity as its distinct
analytical terrain in the study of the global political economy (de Goede 2002; de Goede 2006;
Wullweber & Scherrer 2010). While it is undeniably the inevitable first step for post-
structuralist IPE to develop a fully-fledged meta-theoretical alternative to the positivist
mainstream, I would argue that there is a growing need to follow the lead of performativity
studies in the sociology of finance and to convert these meta-theoretical insights into a
productive research agenda which would establish post-structuralism more firmly in IPE.
In the following, I will try to show that Foucault's work provides both theoretical and
methodological points of departure for developing a productive empirical research agenda
5

on the Eurozone crisis in its own right. To make Foucaults writings accessible for this aim, I
will at first provide a short discussion of the transformations in Foucaults work. Thereafter, I
will show how the insights of this nuanced discussion can be translated into an empirical
research project that analyses the discourse on the Eurozone crisis in the German public.

2.1 Foucault and the politics of truth
There are three axes that run through the intellectual journey of Michel Foucault: knowledge,
power and the subject (Foucault 1990b: 4-6). The intersections of these axes mark out the
politics of truth as the guiding problem of Foucaults analyses of the history of Western
civilization: how do certain forms of knowledge become established as truth through their
fusion with relationships of power and form thereby subjectivities? Foucaults work is
traditionally categorized into three canonical phases - archaeology, genealogy and the ethical
techniques of the self in which he addressed the guiding problem of the politics of truth
from different perspectives and prioritized one of the axes each. While it is possible to
identify in retrospect a distinct analytical stance of interpretative analytics that developed
in Foucaults writings over the years (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983), I will discuss these phases
and the ruptures between them because I would like to demonstrate with respect to the case
of the Eurozone crisis that it is a promising empirical research strategy to apply the different
analytical perspectives separately. Furthermore, such a separated discussion makes it easier
to see that Foucault can be read as a post-positivist and post-structuralist in the best sense of
the words since his archaeological phase was rather positivist and structuralist in its
analytical outlook, while the integrative approach of "interpretative analytics" that moved
beyond structuralism and positivism only developed over the course of the two latter
phases.
5

In the early phase of his academic career, Foucault tried to unearth the discontinuities in the
apriori that make valid knowledge in Western civilization possible. The archaeological
approach he developed for this task was heavily indebted to the philosophical movement of

5
The following draws both on Foucaults writings and central secondary literature (Dreyfus &
Rabinow 1983; Deleuze 1992; Sarasin 2005).
6

structuralism and conceived of these apriori as holistic structures underpinning language. As
autonomous systems, they precede the speaking individual and direct what can be said and
known. Since these structures are not to be mistaken with the articulated words themselves,
they are best understood as the unconsciousness of Western culture which regulates the
way in which knowledge is produced and articulated without the speaker being aware of it.
This structuralist reading is most succinctly articulated in The Order of Things (Foucault 1970)
which identifies in a synchronic manner (i.e. through a comparison of the same scientific
disciplines at several points in time) the different epistemes of three successive epochs. This
analysis shows that only in the modern epoch man became the subject and object of
knowledge production. As such, the speaking and intentionally acting subject is not a
transcendental starting point of knowledge production but rather a provisional effect of the
anonymous forces in the evolution of Western thought. Although the Archaeology of
Knowledge (Foucault 1972) was designed as a methodological supplement to The Order of
Things, it already heralded a break with the staunch structuralism Foucault had advocated
before. In this explication of discourse analysis, he replaced the notion of episteme with the
concept discursive formation which narrowed down the perspective from the level of
Western thought to single scientific disciplines and introduced a clear analytical link to the
study of individual statements. In fact, Foucault defined a discursive formation as a
regularity in the dispersion of statements of a scientific discipline. These rule-like structures
govern discourses which he conceptualized as practices that systematically form the objects
of which they speak (Foucault 1972: 54). While Foucault thus stuck to a structuralist
position in that he claimed to describe - in a purely positivist manner which is completely
agnostic to questions of interpretation - the regularities of knowledge production that lie
under the (wordily) surface of dispersed statements, he started at the same time to take the
practices of the speaking individual seriously without making it the point of departure of his
analysis. What will be outlined in the next section in detail is that an archaeological
perspective allows to analyse structures underpinning the public discourse on the Eurozone
crisis and to examine possible ruptures and discontinuities.
The turn towards discursive practice in the Archaeology of Knowledge is representative of a
broader transformation in the work of Foucault towards genealogy which he started to
develop more fully in an article on Nietzsche (Foucault 1984) and his inaugural lecture at the
7

Collge de France (Foucault 1981). Roughly speaking, genealogy denotes the switch from the
outside-perspective on the regularities of autonomous discursive formations that was
characteristic for archaeology to a perspective which tries to understand the diachronic
creation of ordering effects within these formations. The genealogist examines in a radically
historicising fashion who is able to seize control over discourse and can enforce certain
interpretations of singular events within the constant struggle for domination that defines
the social. In this regard, genealogy focuses on the role power plays in the contingent
production of truth. The decisive point is that Foucault advocated an understanding of
power as decentralized relationships at the micro-level of social interaction through which
both repressive and productive effects are exercised (Foucault 1990a). Over the course of his
genealogical studies, Foucault increasingly translated the interplay of power and knowledge
into the question of how people are governed in (post-)modern societies. For Foucault,
governmental effects can only emerge when certain governmental practices find their mirror-
expression in the self-governing activities of the subordinates. These kind of relationships
between governors and governed are made possible by a power/knowledge-dispositif which
couples certain governmental practices of power with specific regimes of truth and
thereby effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it
to the division between true and false (Foucault 2008: 19). This is what Foucaults calls
governmentality the linkage between governmental practices of the state and self-governing
practices of the subordinates through a regime of truth. The liberal version of governmentality
that dominates in (post)modern societies is defined by a self-restricting art of government
which equally depends on individuals that adopt the subject position of free and docile
citizens. As will be explicated in the next section more fully, Foucault conceives of political
economy as establishing the market as a naturalized regime of truth which is constitutive of
self-limiting liberal governmental practice.
The question of how people become free and docile citizens which arises in the studies on
governmentality leads over to the final transformation in the work of Foucault that became
manifest in an increasing interest in the technologies of the self in the second volume of the
History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990b) and his last lectures at the Collge de France. Although
these studies remain within the scope of genealogy by complementing Foucaults inquiries
into the genealogy of the modern subject, they nevertheless mark out a distinct final phase in
8

Foucaults intellectual journey since he started to take the possibility seriously for the first
time that an individual can constitute itself as a free subject. While the individual cannot
escape being enmeshed in relations of domination and existing regimes of truth, it has
nevertheless the chance to defend his or her freedom through some form of virtue ethics.
One of the decisive practices in this regard is critique which, according to Foucault, has to be
understood as the art of not being governed like that and at that cost (Foucault 1997: 29).
While Foucault's inquiries into the technologies of the self will not be applied directly in the
analysis of the Eurozone crisis, it provides important points of departure for making sense of
the act of post-positivist research and the role of the researcher as a political actor (see 4).
When Foucaults examinations of the ethical practices of the self are read as a framework for
research activity, it is possible to see that that he fully replaced the cold-hearted and quasi-
positivist diagnosis of discursive regularities that was characteristic for the archaeologist
with a deeply engaged understanding of research that recognizes its own entanglement with
the politics of truth. In this regard, the inquiries into the ethical practices of the self can be
considered the completing step in Foucaults movement towards an analytic position that is
both post-structuralist and post-positivist.

2.2 An archaeological and a genealogical perspective for analysing the problem of liberal
governmentality in the discourse on the Eurozone crisis
Foucaults work provides important points of departure in theoretical terms for
understanding the Eurozone crisis as a potential problem of liberal governmental rationality
and in theoretical terms for analysing this problem in the discourse on the Eurozone crisis
from both an archaeological and a genealogical perspective. To understand the Eurozone
crisis as a potential problem of liberal governmental rationality, it is necessary to review
briefly how Foucault conceptualizes the relationship between governmental practice, the
market and the scientific discipline of political economy (or economics) in his lectures on
liberal governmentality (Foucault 2008: 13-35). Here, Foucault describes the market as a
regime of truth which is the constitutive principle of self-limitation in liberal governmental
rationality. The market is treated as "site of veridiction" which judges governmental practices
as either good or bad or true and false, if you will. For the market to become this integral
9

part of liberal governmental practice, it needs to be constructed as consisting of natural, law-
like and objectifying mechanisms which must be left to function with the least possible
interventions precisely so that it can both formulate its truth and propose it to governmental
practice as rule and norm (Foucault 2008: 30). This is essentially what classical political
economy (and then neoclassical economics) did from the middle of the 18
th
century onwards:
to establish the market as site where the truth about governmental practice itself is
allegedly formed in a natural and law-like manner (see also Vogl 2010). Political economy
was influential not as a theory inside the heads of the economists but as a discursive practice
altering governmental rationality.
With the help of the archaeological and genealogical perspectives developed by Foucault,
this constellation can be described in two radically different ways. From an archaeological
point of view, this relationship between governmental practice and the (financial) market as
its constitutive regime of truth established by political economy can be understood from the
outside as a potential discursive formation defining Western societies in times of "financial
capitalism" (Windolf 2005). Thus, an archaeological perspective would ask at first whether it
is possible to describe a regularity in the dispersion of statements in the publics of financial
capitalism that affirms this relationship. Furthermore, if such regularity does exist,
encompassing crises of financial capitalism might trigger ruptures or transformations in this
discursive formation. In contrast, a genealogical perspective examines how liberal
governmental practice deals with this principle constitutive of its own existence. For
governmental officials in capitalist societies, the market as a regime of truth for their own
actions is simply a given. Thus, what a genealogical inquiry would seek to examine are the
power/knowledge-struggles for the prerogative of interpretation over how to govern
correctly based on the premise that the market will tell the truth about these practices.
It should be pretty easy to see that this second, genealogical reading describes concisely the
social reality in which the representatives of the EMU operate during the Eurozone crisis
(Simmerl 2012). Crisis management in the Eurozone crisis can be understood as a situation in
which the political representatives of the EMU (including the ECB) address the public of
10

financial actors to re-establish confidence in the monetary union.
6
In the face of contracted
financial markets, the representatives of the EMU have to actively convince freely moving
capital of the creditworthiness of all of its member states (more often than not under
perceived time pressure). Over the course of the crisis, this problem has become more and
more acute to the extent that the very possibility of sovereign default was actively
promulgated by political representatives of the EMU with German governmental officials at
the front (Tsingou & Zimmermann 2011; Zimmermann 2011). What emerges among the
different political representatives of the EMU is a struggle for the prerogative of
interpretation over the correct crisis management. Proponents of austerity argue, for
example, that reduced governmental spending will re-assure confidence of the lenders and
favour an exclusion of troubled member states in case they do not conform to this precept,
while the "Keynesians" of our time assume that contracted financial markets will not stop to
attack the EMU until liquidity is restored and the possibility of sovereign default within the
monetary union is effectively ruled out via credible commitments such as Eurobonds. The
decisive aspect is that all these interpretations seem to operate within the horizon of liberal
governmentality in that they take the financial market as a site of veridiction for their own
action as a given and try to anticipate in the political responses they propose the likely
reactions of the markets. The bone of contention is only how this rationality of the market
works. What a genealogical inquiry within the official discourse of the Eurozone crisis tries
to examine is how the discursive struggle among political representatives of the EMU on

6
This understanding of crisis management as a discursive interaction between governmental officials
and financial markets derives from two theoretical arguments: financialisation and the performativity
of economic activity. It starts from the assumption that we live in fully financialised societies in which
governments have become structurally dependent on financial markets for re-financing their debt (see
Windolf 2005; Heires & Nlke 2011). In times of crisis, governments feel pressured to re-establish
confidence of financial actors (see also Swedberg 2011). The discursive character of this interaction is
best grasped by performativity studies in the sociology of finance. Inspired by post-structuralist
theorizing, these studies hold that market action is not a process of neutral price formation which
follows certain objective economic laws but is actively created (performed) through the enactment
of certain forms of financial knowledge which may or may not succeed in realising what they say
(Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2006; MacKenzie et al. 2008; Hall 2009; Butler 2010; Langley 2010). For a
general theoretical argument on the discursive interaction between governments and financial
markets see Langenohl (2009) and Langenohl & Wetzel (2012).
11

how to govern the crisis developed and whether it really only operates within the confines of
liberal governmentality.
7

The articulations of the representatives of the political institutions are not only directed to
the audience of the financial actors but are also part of the totality of statements in society on
how to govern the Eurozone crisis. Unlike the representatives of the political executive,
many participants of the societal discourse such as politicians of the opposition, scientists or
journalists are not necessarily disciplined by anticipated consequences of market reaction.
For an empirical investigation of discourse on the Eurozone crisis in the spirit of
archaeology, it would nevertheless be of interest to examine whether it is possible to describe
a regularity of this kind in the whole dispersion of statements on how to govern the
Eurozone crisis. While the genealogist studies struggles among contending perspectives, an
archaeological analysis searches for commonalities among them instead. To stick with the
example mentioned above: Is there an underlying logic that unifies positions such as
"Monetarism" and "Keynesianism"? The underlying logic which upholds the market as
regime of truth for politics is represented by the assumption that financial markets follow
some kind of rationality which can be anticipated and calculated. While the official discourse
on the management of the Eurozone crisis has consequently not moved beyond this horizon
(see Streeck 2011; Blyth 2013), it is a very important complementary analytical goal to
determine whether the broader societal discourse does also adhere to this constitutive logic
of the power/knowledge-dispositif of liberal governmentality (see Hall 2007). If this kind of
unconsciousness of the societal discourse on the Eurozone crisis could be described as
discursive formation, the question would remain whether the dynamics of the Eurozone
crisis have led to ruptures or transformations which alter the limits of the sayable.
To make a long story short: If the whole societal discourse (i.e. all statements made) on the
Eurozone crisis is imagined as a big flow, applying the genealogical perspective just outlined

7
The political responses emerging out of this struggle are in turn assessed by financial actors, which
express their judgments in different ways: first and foremost in the form of the interest rate on
governmental bonds but also as worldly articulations such as public assessments by rating agencies or
statements by bank representatives. In this regard, it should also not be forgotten that it is not only the
governments who are dependent on the judgements of the financial markets. The Eurozone crisis is
also characterized by the dependency of large banks on the actions of the political institutions of the
EMU due to their severe exposure to governmental debt.
12

means tracing with interpretative methods the evolution of a specific stream (the "official
discourse" of political representatives of the EMU) within this discourse diachronically over
the whole course of the crisis, while an archaeological inquiry would "cut through" the whole
societal discourse in a synchronic manner at different points in time to determine positively
whether regularities in the whole dispersion of statements can be detected.
8


3. Analysing the Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German Public A Research
Project
Drawing on the Foucault-inspired understanding of the Eurozone crisis as a potential
problem of liberal governmentality and the two analytical perspectives of archaeology and
genealogy developed in the previous section, I will now briefly outline the contours of a
research project that studies this problematique through the lens of the German public. This
project will treat three different mainstream newspapers (Bild, Die Zeit and Sddeutsche
Zeitung) as representative sources for the German public and analyse the discourse on the
Eurozone crisis from October 2009 till the end of 2012 on both genealogical and
archaeological terms. Thus, this study will examine the discursive representation of the
Eurozone crisis in the German public in two ways. First, in a diachronic manner as a
succession of discursive struggles among political representatives of the EMU to define the
right way to govern the crisis (genealogy of the official discourse); second, in a synchronic
manner as dispersion of statements from various actors at certain points in time which are
compared to identify possible regularities and ruptures (archaeology of the societal
discourse). The overall aim is to determine the extent to which this discourse is governed by
the constitutive principle of liberal governmentality to treat the (financial) market as a
rational site of veridiction for political action.
The analysis of the discourse on the Eurozone crisis is restricted to the German public in
general and to three newspapers in specific to mark out a range of empirical material that

8
In this regard, I would argue that these two perspectives resemble what Bob Jessop describes as
semiotic and structural analysis of crisis narratives (Jessop 2013) with the difference that this
Foucaultian analysis advanced here does not introduce a kind of rump materialism but studies the
Eurozone crisis solely on the level of discourse .
13

can be examined in a reasonable amount of time. What is more, the discursive struggle in the
German public is likely to have direct effects for the overall direction of European crisis
management since German governmental officials and German representatives in the ECB
are decisive actors in the emergency politics of the EMU. They are not only called upon from
various sides to take the lead as representative of Europes economic powerhouse but self-
consciously seize a hegemonic position and have to so far succeed in asserting a distinct
approach to govern the Eurozone crisis on the European level. Nevertheless, it has to be
emphasized that the idea of this project is not to restrict the analysis to articulations of
Germans. It is only restricted to articulations that were covered in the three German
newspapers. With regard to the genealogy of the official discourse, this research strategy
should make a description of the dynamics of the debate on the Eurozone crisis possible
which produces at least similar results like a an analysis hypothetically conducted through
the lens of other European publics would produce. In contrast, with regard to the
archaeology of the societal discourse, this research strategy will certainly draw a specifically
German picture of regularities and ruptures in the dispersion of statements on the Eurozone
crisis.
To make the promises and perils of applying both approaches to study articulations on the
Eurozone crisis in the German public more transparent, I will try to spell out the aspired
research procedure more concretely.
A genealogy of the official discourse means studying in a diachronic fashion the
interpretative struggles among political representatives of the EMU over the correct crisis
management. I will examine which interpretations of the causes of the crisis and the
adequate political response are advanced and which of these interpretations become
dominant over time. As outlined in the preceding section, in theory these interpretations are
liberal governmental practices and thus articulated from speaking positions which are
disciplined by the financial markets as their site of veridiction. The geneaological study
examines whether these statements follow the logic of anticipating a specific rationality of
financial markets. To study these interpretations genealogically means identifying the
articulations of the political representatives of the EMU in the various newspaper reports,
commentaries and interviews first, ordering them into a sequence afterwards and tracing
then the emergence of dominant interpretations hermeneutically and compare them with
14

collective decisions made on the European level. Commentary by journalists or other societal
actors will not be included into this genealogical study but will only become empirical
material for the archaeological examination of the broader societal discourse. The only
interpretations which will be analysed are those articulated by political officials of the EMU
such as heads of governments, ministers of finance or ECB representatives in order to trace
as detailed as possible how the crisis management policy of the EMU was defined and
refined over time. Although the official discourse is studied through the lens of the German
public, it will include articulations from the full range of actors who are formally in charge of
the EMUs emergency politics. Nevertheless, German officials will undoubtedly be over-
represented in the German public. While this focus might be justified due to the decisive role
most of them play in crisis management and might also reveal deeper insights into the exact
route the erratic approach of the Merkel government to the Eurozone crisis took, it will
nevertheless create a certain bias.
In the archaeological analysis of the societal discourse, this German bias will become even
more pronounced. In fact, this part of the analysis will produce first and foremost a
specifically German reading of the Eurozone crisis derived from the articulations of societal
actors such as journalists, scientists, bankers and politicians of the opposition that are
covered at different points in time in the respective newspapers. Its self-evident that the
share of German voices in the overall number of articulations covered will rise significantly
compared to the genealogical examination. This archaeological analysis will thus directly
lead into the specificities of the German discourse on the EMU and the relationship between
governmental practice and the market in general. Foucault argued that the German
economic tradition of ordoliberalism is one of the two central intellectual roots of neoliberal
governmentality and showed that the market became the foundational raison d'tat of the
Federal Republic of Germany to which also the oppositional social democrats had to adapt
quickly (Foucault 2008: 75-100).
9
Thus, it appears reasonable for an archaeological inquiry
into Germany's societal discourse on the Eurozone crisis to examine if a discursive formation
which represents the underlying logic of the (financial) market being a rational site of
veridiction for governmental practice can be unearthed. The aim of the archaeological

9
On the latter aspect, see Nonhoff (2006).
15

analysis is thus to determine whether such a discursive formation can be described at the
beginning of the crisis and to search for continuities and ruptures at different points in the
evolution of the crisis. As outlined in the previous section, the idea behind an archaeological
analysis is a form of synchronic examination which tries to identify regularities in the
dispersion of statements at a given point in time. Following this logic of inquiry, this
research project will randomly define different sample periods in the course of the Eurozone
crisis and identify at these points in time all relevant articulations on crisis management in
the three newspapers. As a next step, the articulations within the different samples are then
compared in their positivity (i.e. no further interpretation) in order to pinpoint regularities in
the dispersion of statements. Finally, the different sample periods will be compared in order
to identify continuities and ruptures. Other discourse analyses of media coverage on the
global financial crisis have already shown that the German public remains dominated by a
ordoliberal episteme which is largely incapable of developing alternative visions for how to
govern global capitalism (Fuchs & Graf 2010; Kutter 2012). What this archaeological analysis
aims at is do determine whether there is a liberal unconsciousness present in the
articulations of different societal actors during the Eurozone crisis and whether breaks and
ruptures which transform the regularities in the dispersion of statements can be detected.

4. Conclusion: Foucault and the politics of post-positivism
What I tried to develop in this paper is a research project that draws on theoretical and
methodological insights from Foucault to understand and analyse the Eurozone crisis as a
problem of liberal governmentality. According to this argument, the Eurozone crisis is a
problem of liberal governmentality to the extent that the public discourse treats the market
as a site of truth and political responses follow the logic of anticipating a specific kind of
market rationality were there very likely is non. The research project outlined in this paper
tried to devise a way on how to translate these insights productively into an empirical study
of the discourse on the Eurozone crisis through the lens of the German public the "official
discourse" is analysed genealogically as a struggle that likely operates within the confines of
liberal governmentality and the societal discourse is studied archaeologically "from the
outside" to see whether it reproduces this discursive formation.
16

To study the Eurozone crisis in a Foucaultian manner means moving beyond the confines of
positivist economic thought which is tightly associated to the discursive formation of liberal
governmentality. In this regard, it expresses the politics of post-positivism. It represents a
political criticism of European crisis management albeit one at the margins of societal
discourse of which almost nobody will take notice of and expresses the "art of not being
governed like that and at that cost". It holds that the Eurozone crisis will likely go on until
political measures are taken which are not disciplined by the anticipated rationality of
financial markets. The question is: What is then supposed to be the alternative intellectual
basis for political responses to financial crises? Starting from the assumption of uncertainty
instead of calculable risk? A socialist political rationality that does not exist? If post-positivist
approaches want to answer this question, they will have to develop some kind of positive
economic knowledge of their own. For all those who do not favour irrationality in the first
place, Foucault's strange mix of positivist and anti-positivist forms of inquiry might be of
help for the task of articulating an alternative political rationality which would be the
consequential next step for a post-positivist political economy which takes (its own) politics
seriously.

Literature
Angermller, J. and van Dyk, S. (eds.) (2007): Diskursanalyse meets
Gouvernementalittsforschung: Perspektiven auf das Verhltnis von Subjekt, Sprache, Macht
und Wissen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Blyth, M. (2012): Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of
Crisis, in: Governance (Early View), Available online:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gove.12010/full.
Blyth, M. (2013): This Time It is Really Different: Europe, the Financial Crisis and Staying on
Top in the Twenty-First Century, in: Breznitz, D. and Zysman, J. (eds.): The Third
Globalization: Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich in the Twenty-First Century? , New York:
Oxford University Press.
Bhrmann, A. and Schneider, W. (2007): Mehr als nur diskursive Praxis? Konzeptionelle
Grundlagen und methodische Aspekte der Dispositivanalyse, in: Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung 8 (2).
Butler, J. (2010): Performative Agency, in: Journal of Cultural Economy 3 (2): 147-161.
Callon, M. (ed. (1998): The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell.
17

de Goede, M. (2002): Beyond economism in international political economy, in: Review of
International Studies 29 (1): 79-97.
de Goede, M. (ed. (2006): International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Grauwe, P. and Ji, Y. (2012): Mispricing of Sovereign Risk and Macroeconomic Stability in
the Eurozone, in: Journal of Common Market Studies 50 (6): 866-880.
Deleuze, G. (1992): Foucault, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1983): Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1970): The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, New York:
Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1981): The Order of Discourse, in: Young, R. (ed.): Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge, 48 - 78.
Foucault, M. (1984): Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in: Rabinow, P. (ed.): The Foucault Reader,
New York: Pantheon Books, 76-100.
Foucault, M. (1990a): The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, New York: Vintage
Books.
Foucault, M. (1990b): The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality, New York:
Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1997): What is Critique?, in: Lotringer, S. and Hochroch, L. (eds.): The Politics of
Truth: Michel Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e), 23-82.
Foucault, M. (2008): The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France 1978 - 1979,
Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fuchs, D. and Graf, A. (2010): The Financial Crisis in Discourse: Banks, Financial Markets and
Political Responses, Paper presented at the SGIR International Relations Conference,
Stockholm, 9 - 10 September 2010.
Hall, R. B. (2007): Explaining "Market Authority" and Liberal Stability: Toward a
Sociological-Constructivist Synthesis, in: Global Society 21 (3): 319-342.
Hall, R. B. (2009): Intersubjective Expectations and Performativity in Global Financial
Governance, in: International Political Sociology 3 (4): 453 - 457.
Heires, M. and Nlke, A. (2011): Finanzkrise und Finanzialisierung, in: Kessler, O. (ed.): Die
Internationale Politische konomie der Weltfinanzkrise, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 37 - 52.
Jger, S. and Maier, F. (2009): Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucauldian
Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis, in: Wodak, R. and Meyer, M.
(eds.): Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, London: SAGE, 34 - 61.
18

Jessop, R. (2013): Recovered imaginaries, imagined recoveries: a cultural political economy of
crisis construals and crisis-management in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, in:
Benner, M. (ed.): Beyond the Global Economic Crisis: Economics and Politics for a Post-
Crisis Settlement, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Kessler, O. (2012): Sleeping with the enemy? On Hayek, constructivist thought, and the
current economic crisis, in: Review of International Studies 38 (02): 275-299.
Kutter, A. (2012): Adjusting Imbalances: Crisis Narratives in the German Financial Press (2006-
2010), Paper presented at the PSA annual conference, Belfast, 3-5 April 2012.
Langenohl, A. (2009): Finanzmarktffentlichkeiten. Die funktionale Beziehung zwischen
Finanzmarkt und ffentlichem Diskurs, in: Diaz-Bone, R. and Krell, G. (eds.): Diskurs
und konomie. Diskursanalytische Perspektiven auf Mrkte und Organisationen,
Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 245 - 266.
Langenohl, A. and Wetzel, D. J. (2012): Finanzmrkte und ihre Sinnformen:
Handlungskoordination und Signalkommunikation, in: Berliner Journal fr Soziologie
21 (4): 539-559.
Langley, P. (2010): The Performance of Liquidity in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, in: New
Political Economy 15 (1): 71-89.
MacKenzie, D. (2006): An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F. and Siu, L. (eds.) (2008): Do Economists Make Markets? On the
Performativity of Economics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nelson, S. and Katzenstein, P. (2011): Risk, Uncertainty, and the Financial Crisis of 2008, Paper
presented at the International Political Economy Society Meeting, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, November 2011.
Nonhoff, M. (2006): Politischer Diskurs und Hegemonie: Das Projekt Soziale Martkwirtschaft,
Bielefeld: transcript.
Sarasin, P. (2005): Michel Foucault zur Einfhrung, Hamburg: Junius.
Simmerl, G. (2012): "Europische Schuldenkrise" als Demokratiekrise. Zur diskursiven
Interaktion zwischen Politk und Finanzmarkt, in: Berliner Debatte Initial 23 (3): 108 -
124.
Streeck, W. (2011): The Crises of Democratic Capitalism, in: New Left Review 2011 (71): 5 - 29.
Swedberg, R. (2011): The Role of Confidence in the European Debt Crisis, in: CSES Working Paper
Series 63, Cornell University, Ithaca: Center for the Study of Economy and Society.
Taleb, N. (2007): The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York: Random
House.
19

Tsingou, E. and Zimmermann, H. (2011): Why Me? The Eurozone as First Line of Defense in the
Sovereign Debt Crisis, Paper presented at the 6th ECPR General Conference 2011,
Reykjavik, 25 - 27 August 2011.
Vogl, J. (2010): Das Gespenst des Kapitals, Zrich: diaphenes.
Windolf, P. (2005): Was ist Finanzmarkt-Kapitalismus?, in: Windolf, P. (ed.): Finanzmarkt-
Kapitalismus. Analysen zum Wandel von Produktionsregimen. Klner Zeitschrift fr
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Sonderheft 45, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 20 - 57.
Wullweber, J. and Scherrer, C. (2010): Post-modern and Post-structural International Political
Economy, in: Denemark, R. (ed.): The International Studies Encyclopedia, Oxford:
Blackwell, Blackwell Reference Online.
Zimmermann, H. (2011): Constructing Contagion: Germanys role in the Eurozone crisis, in:
Perspectives on Europe 41 (2): 27-33.