Conditionality and the Ambitions of Governance (ePub)

As the European Union is continually remade through periods of crisis, conditionality emerges as the technique of governance tasked with realizing cohesion through 'social transformation' in the candidate states of the European periphery. Drawing on EU documents, field research, and the tradition of political economy, Shelton investigates the ambitions and limits of the instruments of conditionality currently at work in the Republic of Macedonia and throughout Southeastern Europe. Exploring the emergence of the ideas and practices that drive conditionality in its latest phase, the author challenges existing accounts of conditionality in IPE that focus on formal bargaining and institutional reform but neglect the social and subjective dimensions of the 'European project'. Shelton traces anxieties about the need to govern social and subjective sources of disharmony to canonical works in political economy. He argues that EU-funded efforts to develop 'human resources' in the Republic of Macedonia reflect a neoliberal modification of much older preoccupations, aiming to remake persons as workers, citizens, students, and administrators. Yet these ambitions often remain unrealized. Conditionality necessarily encounters limits that exceed technical impediments – reaching back to the origins of political economy itself, with implications for the politics of 'Europe' and beyond.