Tracing the Political: Depoliticisation, Governance and the State 9781447326618

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New Perspectives in Policy & Politics Edited by Sarah Ayres and Matthew Flinders

Tracing the Political

Depoliticisation, Governance and the State Edited by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

New Perspectives in Policy & Politics Edited by Sarah Ayres and Matthew Flinders

TRACING THE POLITICAL Depoliticisation, governance and the state Edited by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773 702 9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2015 Policy & Politics is a leading international journal in the field of public and social policy, published by Policy Press. Spanning the boundaries between theory and practice and linking macro-scale debates with micro-scale issues, it seeks to analyse new trends and advance knowledge by publishing research at the forefront of academic debates. It is published four times a year, and is ranked on the Thomson Reuters Social Science Citation Index. Please visit the website for more information: www.policypress.co.uk/journals_pap.asp British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978 1 44732 660 1 hardcover The right of Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover image: kindly supplied by Asif Akbar Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners.

Contents Notes on contributors

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one Depoliticisation, governance and the state Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

1

two

Rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental Matt Wood and Matthew Flinders

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three

Depoliticisation, governance and political participation Paul Fawcett and David Marsh

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four

Depoliticisation: economic crisis and political management Peter Burnham

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five

Repoliticising depoliticisation: theoretical preliminaries on 95 some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises Bob Jessop

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Rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government Emma Ann Foster, Peter Kerr and Christopher Byrne

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139



(De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery

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Politicising UK energy: what ‘speaking energy security’ can do 1 6 1 Caroline Kuzemko

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Global norms, local contestation: privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin Ross Beveridge and Matthias Naumann

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Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice: what did the ‘first wave’ get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right? Colin Hay

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ten



Conclusion Thinking big: the political imagination Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

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Index

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Notes on contributors Fran Amery is a lecturer in British politics in the Department of Politics,

Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, and coconvener of the UK Political Studies Association’s Women and Politics Specialist Group. Alongside her interest in gender and academia, she is interested in the role of ideas in policy making, with a particular focus on gender and women’s movement activism. She has previously conducted research on the parliamentary politics of abortion, and is currently working on a project which assesses the role of activists and practitioners in the creation of sexual health policy. Stephen Bates is a lecturer in political science in the Department of

Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. His research is concerned with power, agency and political change and with the politics of the body. He has published on these topics in journals such as Polity, Sociology, British Politics, Policy & Politics, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour and Global Society. Ross Beveridge is a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional

Development and Structural Planning in Germany. His work focuses on environmental and infrastructural politics at the urban and regional levels. Peter Burnham is professor of politics and international studies at the

University of Birmingham, UK. He was previously professor of politics at the University of Warwick. His research interests lie in the fields of Marxian political economy, state theory and historical analysis of economic policy in Britain. Christopher Byrne is a research assistant in British politics in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published work on a range of topics including the modernisation of British political parties and parliamentary reform. Paul Fawcett is an associate professor of governance in the Centre for

Critical Governance Studies at the University of Canberra. His research interests are in governance and political participation, including executive politics, political and administrative leadership, public service reform, policy transfer and anti-politics. He has published in journals such as Administration & Society, Government and Opposition, Policy & Politics and the Australian

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Journal of Political Science. Paul is currently associate editor (Australasia) for the journal Policy & Politics. Matthew Flinders is professor of politics at the University of Sheffield

(UK) and founding director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. He is currently working on an ESRC-funded project on renewing democracy in Britain through citizen participation in constitutional conventions. Emma Ann Foster is a lecturer in international politics and gender studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Informed by the works of Michel Foucault as well as the concepts of politicisation/depoliticisation, Emma’s research chiefly focuses on the relationship between (inter)national environment/development policy and gender and sexuality. Emma has published in a variety of journals - including Globalisations, British Politics, the British Journal of Politics & International Relations and Gender, Place & Culture - as well as contributing to a number of edited collections. Colin Hay is professor of political sciences at Sciences Po (France) and an

affiliate professor of political analysis at the University of Sheffield (UK) where he co-founded the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. He is the author many books including Civic capitalism (with Anthony Payne; 2015, Polity), The legacy of Thatcherism (with Stephen Farrall; 2014, Oxford University Press) and The failure of Anglo-Liberal capitalism (2013, Palgrave). He is lead editor of New Political Economy and founding coeditor of Comparative European Politics and British Politics. He is a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. Laura Jenkins is a lecturer in political science at the University of

Birmingham, UK. She has published work on depoliticisation, gender and the political science profession, and the politics of the body in journals such as Political Studies, Policy & Politics, Politics and European Political Science. Bob Jessop is distinguished professor of sociology and co-director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre at Lancaster University, UK. He is best known for his contributions to state theory, critical political economy, critical governance studies, cultural political economy and the analysis of welfare state restructuring. His recent work includes Towards a cultural political economy (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum; 2013, Edward Elgar); Cultures of finance and crisis dynamics (co-edited with Brigitte Young and Christoph Scherrer; 2014, Routledge); and The state: Past, present, future (2015, Polity). His personal archive can be found at www.bobjessop.org vi

Notes on contributors

Peter Kerr is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Birmingham, UK. He specialises in the area of British politics, with a particular focus on the British state, UK political parties, political leadership and ideology in the UK and changes and continuities in British political institutions and public policy since 1945. He is the author of several articles and two books on postwar British politics and is the co-founder and co-executive editor of the journal British Politics. Caroline Kuzemko is part of Innovation and Governance (IGov), an EPSRC-funded project based in the Energy Policy Group at the University of Exeter, UK. She has research interests in energy and climate governance, (de)politicisation and institutional change. She is a co-convenor of two international, interdisciplinary academic networks: the PSA-sponsored Anti-Politics and Depoliticisation Special Group and the Political Economy of Energy in Europe and Russia. Caroline has recently published The energy security-climate nexus: Institutional change in the UK and beyond (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and articles (2014) in the Journal of European Public Policy, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations and Policy & Politics. David Marsh is a British political scientist. He was previously director of

the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. Prior to this he was professor of political sociology at the University of Birmingham (UK), and also worked at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Essex. His publications include Theory and methods in political science (co-edited with Gerry Stoker; 1995/2002/2010, Palgrave Macmillan), Demystifying globalization (co-edited with Colin Hay; 2000, Macmillan/St Martin’s Press) and The new politics of British trade unionism: Union power and the Thatcher legacy (1992, Macmillan). He has published over 90 articles and book chapters during his career. Matthias Naumann is a human geographer at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning in Germany, and a visiting lecturer at Brandenburg University of Technology CottbusSenftenberg. His research interests include urban and regional development, infrastructure governance and critical geography. Matt Wood is lecturer in politics at the University of Sheffield and deputy

director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics (UK). His work currently focuses on the concepts of depoliticisation and legitimacy in the field of governance and public policy.

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CHAPTER ONE

Depoliticisation, governance and the state Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

Introduction Crisis and contingency; delegation and democracy; exceptions and excuses; fate and fear; autonomy and apathy; control and contradictions: these are just some of the issues that underpin this special edition, and which serve to shed new perspectives on the changing constellation of relationships that concern depoliticisation, governance and the state in the twenty-first century. The need for new perspectives can hardly be denied. These – as we are constantly reminded – are ‘exceptional times’ and it is therefore likely that our analytical toolkit, those concepts, theories and methods that were forged in an arguably more conventional historical period, are no longer sufficient for the tasks of understanding the intellectual puzzles that are likely to shape future decades. Indeed, it is possible – albeit imperfectly – to place the three concepts that form the main pillars of this collection within some form of historical flow; with the concept of ‘the (modern) state’ emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the concept of ‘governance’ towards the end of the twentieth century and then ‘depoliticisation’ emerging as an increasingly visible but strangely nebulous concept in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The concept of depoliticisation, while contested, essentially refers to the denial of political contingency and the transfer of functions away from elected politicians. Moreover it has arguably evolved as the dominant model of statecraft in the twenty-first century. Efforts to insulate decisionmaking processes beyond the direct control of elected politicians or even place complete areas of policy beyond the reach of the state have become prevalent across the world (Roberts, 2011). Depoliticisation has been proposed by think tanks and pressure groups as a solution to both public policy and constitutional challenges, and is described by the European Policy Forum (2001) as ‘one of the most promising developments since the last war – the depoliticisation of many government decisions’.At the global level the World Bank (2000) has advocated large-scale depoliticisation as a central aspect of building state capacity and market confidence while in the United Kingdom (and beyond) national politicians have sought to depoliticise significant elements of the state. In 2003, for example, the 1

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then Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs argued that what defined the approach of the New Labour government was ‘a clear desire to place power where it should be: increasingly not with politicians, but with those best fitted in different ways to deploy it… This depoliticising of key decision making is a vital element in bringing power closer to the people’ (Falconer, 2003). More recently the coalition government in the United Kingdom has overseen the introduction of a Health and Social Care Act 2012 that creates a new independent National Health Service Commissioning Board - with an annual budget in excess of eighty-five billion pounds – on the basis of explicit arguments concerning the need to depoliticise healthcare policy. Such is the global shift towards purportedly depoliticised modes of governance that Edward Rubin (2012) has written of the shift toward hyper-depoliticisation. The paradox, however, is that few scholars associate depoliticisation with the removal of politics; and many associate it with the denial of politics or the imposition of a specific (and highly politicised) model of statecraft. The problem is, however, that the literature on this topic is limited, and where it exists it remains in isolated intellectual pools. The aim of this special edition is therefore quite simple: to provide the first extensive and interdisciplinary account of depoliticisation and, through this, to develop the analytical traction and leverage of the concept by exploring its meaning, relevance and application in a range of contexts. The aim of this specific chapter is to offer an account of Carl Schmitt’s work on ‘the concept of the political’ and specifically his lecture on ‘The age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’ (Schmitt, 2007) as a historical foundation for the critical analysis of depoliticisation contained within this symposium. Schmitt’s work, as we illustrate, has been completely overlooked in the recent surge of interest in the concept, and as such we seek to not only bring it to the forefront of contemporary scholarship but also to detail its modern-day relevance and how it connects with each of the contributions to this volume. Put slightly differently, Schmitt’s seminal work allows us to both dissect and stress test the concept; to explore not only its ‘essentially contested’ features but also its antithesis (that is, politicisation), and the degree to which the concept can survive the transition from politics ‘as theory’ to politics ‘as practice’.The aim is not so much to look back towards existing clichés regarding conceptual ‘stretching’ and ‘travelling’ (Sartori, 1970); but to look forward in the sense of considering the concept’s capacity to fly (a phrase developed from Shapiro, 2005). The notion of making a concept ‘fly’ may not be a conventional approach to political analysis, but the metaphor is intended to capture a heady sort of intellectual freedom and manoeuvrability, a feeling that the written outputs of the social and political sciences may have outcomes beyond academe, and is 2

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therefore inevitably intertwined with taking risks, challenging self-evident truths and reaching out to new audiences (Ostrom, 2000). If the aim of this special edition is to engage with the concept of depoliticisation in a more full-blooded and focused manner than has hitherto been the case, then the reasons for such a focus can hardly be ignored, and in this sense it would appear that two macro-political trends – one democratic, one bureaucratic – have evolved in parallel, but that both serve to focus attention on the concept of depoliticisation as the lens or prism through which contemporary debates regarding democratic governance and the state appear increasingly orientated. The first trend is therefore democratic, and concerns growing evidence of a rise in public distrust of democratic political processes, political institutions and politicians.This evidence has been documented and analysed in a vast body of scholarship – within which Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam’s Disaffected democracies (2000), Colin Hay’s Why we hate politics (2007), Pippa Norris’s Democratic deficit (2011), and Alfio Mastropaolo’s Is democracy a lost cause? (2012) remain critical reference points – that frequently leads to a focus on what has been variously termed Post-democracy (Crouch, 2004), The end of politics (Boggs, 2000) or Counter democracy (Rosanvallon, 2008). Such terms seek to identify and critique what is interpreted as the gradual marginalisation or closing down of democratic governance, due to the paradigmatic influence of neoliberalism’s antipathy towards the state and its deification of the market. Depoliticisation is therefore part of a two-stage shift, whereby the hollowing out of the public sphere leads, in turn, to a sense of diminished interest in public affairs on the part of the public (see, for example, Marquand, 2004). That is, a growing sense of disconnection – possibly even of democratic anomie – a sense that something has changed. And yet what is interesting about this rich seam of scholarship is the manner in which the concept of depoliticisation haunts many texts, frequently lurking between the lines, sometimes mentioned in passing, but never fully exposed in terms of its meanings, forms and consequences.What the concept of depoliticisation may actually point to and provide is exactly that something. Something in the sense of a common language and a certain intellectual coherence, a system of describing the manifold transformation of contemporary democracy; a new capacity to engage with pressing questions about the ‘life and death’ of democracy in the twenty-first century (Keane, 2009). Such questions lead us to our second (bureaucratic) trend and a clearer focus on questions concerning governance and the state. The global financial crisis challenged certain dominant assumptions about the appropriate relationship between the market and the state and between markets and individuals. Arguments concerning ‘the state’ as a 3

Tracing the political

counterweight to the ‘the market’ suddenly enjoyed greater traction, as the crisis arguably served to politicise a set of issues that had for some time been lost beneath a certain sense of inevitability or the more robust logic of TINA (that is,‘there is no alternative’). Suddenly new alternatives emerged but in many cases they involved, not the democratisation of democratic governance, but the further marginalisation of elected politics and the imposition of technocratic governments. Market confidence demanded – so the argument went (see Majone, 2001) – not the imposition of short-term partisan politics with its self-interested biases and credible commitment dilemmas, but a cleaner, sharper and – most of all – more disciplined form of governance with the capacity to take tough decisions. The ‘logic of discipline’ therefore arguably triumphed over the ‘logic of democracy’ (Roberts, 2011). Achieving greater conceptual precision, through theoretical advancement and empirical application, is therefore the core aim of this special issue and, as a result, many of these issues concerning the changing nature of democracy, questions regarding governance and the state, and specifically the relationship between different forms of depoliticisation and politicisation, form the focus of later contributions. Put slightly differently, if we are to ‘rethink governance’ (see for example Bell and Hindmoor, 2009; Bevir, 2012) as we are regularly entreated to do, then we must also ‘rethink depoliticisation’. A conventional introductory chapter to a themed special issue would at this stage normally offer a potted account of each subsequent chapter and seek to place them all within some form of coherent intellectual narrative. This introductory chapter, however, hopes to be a little unconventional, and in many ways this objective is facilitated by the fact that the distinctive ‘hook’ of the collection (that is, the concept of depoliticisation in theory and practice) has already been set out, and the subsequent chapters are strong enough – and the links between them obvious enough – to stand without extensive introduction. This creates a little space within this introduction to begin the process of drilling down into the concept, and to begin examining its intellectual heritage as a precursor to the more contemporary analyses provided in this collection. The need for such an endeavor is underlined by the fact that if Jacques Ranciere (1995, 19) is correct that ‘depoliticisation is the oldest task in politics’, then it is a task that has historically been strangely overlooked by political and social scientists. And yet it is possible to identify one detailed exposition on the topic that has lain unnoticed despite the recent upsurge in interest in depoliticisation – Carl Schmitt’s classic 1927 essay The concept of the political and more specifically his 1929 lecture ‘The age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’ (published together in Schmitt, 2007). What this provides, the remainder of this chapter argues, is – when combined with 4

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Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) focus on ‘the state of exception’ – a perceptive and ambitious meta-canvas on which the dilemmas and challenges of modern governance can be drawn and therefore rendered visible. One reason for the absence of any focus on Schmitt’s work within this field may well reflect a broader distaste for a thinker whose name is directly linked with some of the most infamous anti-Semitic writings of the 1930s in Germany. He openly embraced and justified the rise of National Socialism to power (see Bendersky, 1983). As a result, his thinking and writing was generally ignored, or at the very least marginalised, for fear of being somehow found guilty of even the slightest hint of intellectual guilt by association. It was not until his death in 1985 (at the age of 96) that a new generation of scholars has sought to reconsider elements of his work from a fresh perspective. John McCormick (1999), Peter Caldwell (2005), David Dyzenhaus (2005) and Renato Cristi (1998) – to name just a few – are all part of this process and their work has revealed the manner in which a robust rereading of Schmitt’s work can inform contemporary debates concerning the nature of politics, the role of the state and the relationship between crisis and legitimacy (for a review see Kalyvas, 1999). It is clearly neither possible nor necessary to offer a detailed account of Schmitt’s work within this short opening chapter, but it is possible to engage with three specific questions which each in their own way raise issues and provoke responses to themes that will be raised in later contributions to this special issue. 1. What does Carl Schmitt offer the contemporary analysis of depoliticisation, governance and the state? 2. A more subtle characterisation of why depoliticisation matters than is commonly recognised. That is, a characterisation that is linked to meaningfulness and human instinct; one that flows into a discussion regarding the neutralisation – even anaesthetisation – of politics 3. What is distinctive about his approach? 4. It is forged within an account that embraces five centuries of European history in order to reveal the constant depoliticisation and politicisation of various domains in the hope of providing a solution to social conflict 5. How does his work sit at the intersection of the questions concerning governance, democracy and the state that have already been mentioned? 6. By focusing attention on ‘the state of exception’ in which tools of depoliticisation have become less an ‘exception’ to the rule of democratic governance, and more the ‘norm’ in contemporary liberal democratic states 5

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The aim of the remainder of this introductory chapter is to engage with these questions in a little more detail and – more specifically – to develop them, to craft them, into a tighter focus on their contemporary relevance. We do this by focusing on: (1) Schmitt’s concept of ‘the political’; (2) reflecting on his ‘stages of neutralisation and depoliticisation’; and then (3) converging on the link between crises and depoliticisation – ‘the state of exception’ – as a prism through which to understand contemporary dilemmas and challenges.

The concept of the political Schmitt’s conception of ‘the political’ is as raw as it is muscular (‘politicsas-war’ according to Sartori (1989; see also Arditi, 1995). It stands in opposition to the ‘political romanticism’ that there might ever be a last word or agreed position on anything, and instead points to the inevitability of conflict and a critique of what Schmitt sees as the liberal tendency to substitute discussion and debate for the political (Schmitt, 1986). ‘The political’ was hence ‘the arena of authority rather than general law and requires decisions which are singular, absolute and final’ (Schmitt 2007, xiv). For Schmitt, ‘the political’ defined what it was to be a human being in the modern world; it defined friends and enemies and those who were with you or against you. Importantly, Schmitt (2007, 20) defined the political in opposition to definitions that equated it with the state, since too often ‘the state appears as something political, the political as pertaining to the state – obviously an unsatisfactory circle’. For Schmitt (2007, 22), the so-called ‘political’ realm of the state could not be separated from other ‘ostensibly neutral realms – religion, culture, education, the economy’ as their separation ‘becomes erroneous at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other’, hence dissolving the distinction. Rather, the political conceived as the friend-enemy distinction was not confined to a single ‘domain’ but anywhere this conflict arose (in parliament, civil society, the market, and even the private sphere). Thus, as Hirst (1999, 10) notes, ‘politics means a broadening of the agenda to include the affairs of all society – everything is potentially political’. ‘Politicisation’ thus involves the emergence and intensification of friend-enemy conflict, while depoliticisation involves attempts to stifle or diffuse conflict. And yet the problem, in Schmitt’s mind, was the way in which the liberal democratic state dealt with this inevitable conflict; that is precisely by trying to stifle or ‘depoliticise’ it. He thought that the historical conjunction of liberalism and democracy had attempted to ignore this basic and underlying fact and had in its place established a polity founded on compromise, and 6

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as such its decisions were generally weak, and bedazzled by the illusion that procedures and rules could veil the existence of tension, conflict and struggle. Schmitt was widely considered a realist. This is reflected in Leo Strauss’ summary of his political theology as: [B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men… the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state. (quoted in Meier, 1995, 125) The state therefore stood, according to Schmitt, as a neutral force over a potentially fractious and unruly civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of ‘the political’. Critically for the focus of this special issue, Schmitt claimed that liberalism’s reliance on procedure led to a depoliticisation and dehumanisation of the world, because people would only take responsibility for what they were if the reality of death and conflict remain present (Schmitt, 2007, 77). Hence, Schmitt appears to return towards what some might interpret as the pre-political Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. A softer reading of his work reveals a more subtle and arguably insightful line of thought that resonates with contemporary concerns regarding the decline of civic life and the future of the public sphere. For Schmitt ‘the political’ defined what it was to be a human being in the modern world and, as Leo Strauss has argued, Schmitt’s work is essentially concerned not with life and death, pain and pleasure, or friends and enemies, but with the meaningfulness of life and a fear that modernity will make life unmeaningful (that is, dehumanised): ‘The political defines what it is to be a human being in the modern world and that those who would diminish the political diminish humanity’ (Schmitt, 2007, xv). At root, what Schmitt seems most alert to is a sense that the West is losing touch with those qualities that actually give meaning to human life. This, Schmitt suggests, is little more than a symptom of a deeper sociopolitical malady – a historical trajectory forged around various forms of neutralisation and depoliticisation.

The age of neutralisations and depoliticisations ‘The state and politics cannot be exterminated’ Schmitt concludes the original 1927 edition of The concept of the political:

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The world will not become depoliticised with the aid of definitions and constructions, all of which circle the polarity of ethics and economics… this allegedly non-political and apparently even anti-political system serves existing or newly emerging friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political. (Schmitt 2007, 79) At a conference in Barcelona in 1929 Schmitt gave a lecture entitled ‘The age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’, which was subsequently published in 1930 and was added to the 1932 edition of The concept of the political. The argument he develops is this: the West is standing within the most recent of a series of ‘central domains of thought’ – ‘central domains’ here being similar in use and meaning to Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) ‘dominant paradigms’ – therefore: if a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domains – they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved. (Schmitt 2007, 86) There have been five domains since the Renaissance according to Schmitt, each roughly according to a specific century, but what the long view of this historical sweep reveals is the manner in which the social and political elite have altered according to differing conceptions of knowledge and evidence. Therefore, in the sixteenth century the world was structured according to an explicitly theological understanding with God and the scriptures as foundational certainties. In the seventeenth century metaphysics and rational-scientific research replaced theology; in the eighteenth century ethical humanism focused on notions of duty and virtue; and in the nineteenth century economics became the ‘central domain’. In the twentieth century technicity had evolved to become the dominant logic of the day, and it was this that lay at the core of Schmitt’s concerns regarding the neutralisation and depoliticisation of politics.Whereas all the other previous eras (that is, sixteenth century theological, seventeenth century metaphysical, eighteenth century ethical humanism, nineteenth century economic) had explicit leaders – or what he termed clercs – the era of technology and technological progress had no need of individual persons. The changing central domains concern only the concrete fact that in these centuries of European history the intellectual vanguard changed, that its convictions and arguments continued to change, 8

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as did the content of its intellectual interests, the basis of its actions, the secret of its political success, and the willingness of the great masses to be impressed by certain suggestions (Schmitt 2007, 83). Although ‘it is quite a question whether one wishes to interpret this as a succession of stages upwards or downwards, as an ascent or a decline’ (Schmitt 2007, 82), Schmitt was clear that the central strand that ran throughout each of these historical stages or epochs was ‘the striving for a neutral domain’. In Europe the attraction of such a neutral domain was that it appeared to offer a solution to the conflicts that would inevitably exist within any increasingly complex and fragmented social system. The essential point for me is that theology, the former central domain, was abandoned because it was controversial, in favor of another – neutral – domain.The former central domain became neutralised in that it ceased to be the central domain. On the basis of the new central domain, one hoped to find minimum agreement and common premises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity, prudence and peace. Europeans thus moved in the direction of neutralisation and minimalisation… . But in the dialectic of such a development one creates a new domain of struggle precisely through the shifting of the central domain. In the new domain, at first considered neutral, the antithesis of men and interests unfold with a new intensity and become increasingly sharper. Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly one neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle. Scientific thinking was also unable to achieve peace.The religious wars evolved into the still cultural yet already economically determined national wars of the nineteenth century and, finally, into economic wars (Schmitt, 2007, 89–90). Neutral domains therefore become the focus of antagonisms that lead them to become politicised, and hence to the search for a new central domain. The great promise of technicity, however, was that unlike theological, metaphysical, moral and even economic questions – that are forever debatable – purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual and neutral about them. ‘They are easy to solve’, Schmitt suggests, ‘and it is easy to understand why there is a tendency to take refuge in technicity from the inextricable problems of all other domains’ (Schmitt, 2007, 91). This, according to Schmitt, explains the rise of a religion-like faith in the capacity of technological progress to ameliorate social conflict. The 9

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state was, as a result, viewed by Schmitt as little more than a dehumanised and depoliticised ‘huge industrial plant’ (Schmitt, 1922, 65) – ‘a soulless mechanism’ – veiled within a cloak of faux neutrality (Schmitt 2007, 93). Schmitt concluded his Barcelona lecture with a warning and a theme. The warning was that technology was not neutral and that ‘every strong politics will make use of it’, and in this sense his position chimes with those contemporary critical theorists – like Chantal Mouffe (1993), Jacques Rancierre (1995) and Pierre Bourdieu – who have sought to politicise and challenge the implicit values and assumptions of neoliberal manifestations of globalisation (see, for example, Bourdieu, 2002; 2003). The theme was a concern regarding the growth of a ‘fear of cultural and nothingness’, a concern that for many people life would lose its meaningfulness as the major debates that define humanity are placed at one remove (if not several) from day to day politics and a thin model of consumer based democracy became the norm. ‘A life which has only death as its antithesis’, Schmitt argues with typical intellectual gusto, ‘is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness’ (Schmitt, 2007, 95). This theme resonates with those contemporary political scientists – like Colin Hay (2007), Gerry Stoker (2006) and Robert Putnam (Pharr and Putnam, 2000) – who have sought to trace and understand the rise of political disaffection in the West; while notions of powerlessness and social anomie also connect with recent sociological analyses of fear, uncertainty and forms of vulnerability – Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid fear (2006) and Guy Standing’s The precariat (2011) being notable works. The temptation to pull Schmitt’s analysis within the debate concerning contemporary democratic governance is clearly strong, but must for the moment by resisted in favour of a focus on one more element of his work: the relationship between power, the state, crises and depoliticisation.

The state of exception For those interested in notions of power in times of crisis and how behaviours in such historical moments –or phases – connect with contemporary concerns regarding post-democracy or counter-democracy, then Schmitt’s (1922) focus on ‘the exception’ provides much food for thought. Indeed, a great deal of Schmitt’s work concerned the capacity – indeed, the obligation – of political leaders to assume far-reaching powers in times of emergency.‘The sovereign’ in terms of the true locus of power, Schmitt suggested ‘is he who decides upon the exception’ (1922, 5, emphasis added). In Schmittian terminology a state of emergency entails ‘any kind of severe economic or political disturbance that requires the application of extraordinary measures’ (1922, 5). The idiom of ‘exception’ is central 10

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to the politics of insecurity, governance and state reform in many parts of the world today. Schmitt’s (1922) focus on this idiom is contemporarily insightful in at least three ways. First and foremost his writing alerts readers to the boundary between the rule of law and conventional democratic decision making, on the one hand, and executive, arbitrary government, on the other. Secondly, a focus on the idiom of exception sensitises observers to the role and power of interpretive narratives and how they ‘frame’ certain issues in certain ways so as to narrow down the range of legitimate responses. Finally, Schmitt’s focus on ‘the exception’ provides an antithesis that, in turn, flows back into an account of politicisation or even repoliticisation, as the need for ‘emergency powers’ may lead to the sidelining of democratic safeguards or to the dominance of narratives concerning the lack of alternatives. To ‘take exception to exceptionalism’ is therefore to reintroduce a political reading of an issue in such a way that the neutralising effects of technocratic interpretations are cast aside and the political realm is reconfigured to encompass the topic. And yet the main historical trend that subsequent scholars have generally sought to emphasise (as discussed above) has not been the dominance of ‘the political’ or the vitality of democratic politics but – on the contrary –the decline of the public sphere, the emergence of choiceless democracies, the dominance of ‘the logic of discipline’, and what Frank Vibert (2007) has termed ‘the rise of the unelected’. What this spread of depoliticising ‘principles, tactics and tools’ suggests is not so much an exceptional state of affairs but a situation more akin to exception as the rule.To make such an argument is to work within the contours of Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) scholarship, and notably his extension of Schmitt’s concept of the state of emergency to a reappropriation of the term as the ‘state of exception’ (that is,‘a threshold of indeterminacy between absolutism and democracy’). The critical focus of Agamben’s work is not so much the neutralisation of the private sphere in times of crisis, or the depoliticisation of certain issues or responsibilities in times of emergency, but on the emergence of the exception as the rule; or, to put the same point slightly differently, the manner in which depoliticised modes of governance have mutated from being used provisionally and exceptionally to becoming a ‘technique of government’ which had, as a consequence, made it harder for citizens to challenge the authority of the state (Agamben 2005, 3). Agamben’s analysis of the exception therefore differs from Schmitt’s politically, in the sense that while the latter endorses exceptionalism as a political choice, the former posits exceptionalism as a symptom of what is wrong with modern politics and governance. Unlike Schmitt, for Agamben the exception as the rule that facilitates depoliticisation is not what politics should be about, and as such the jargon and practice of exception needs 11

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to be challenged (see Huysmans, 2008). From here it would be possible to (inter alia) engage in a sophisticated account of Agemben’s homo sacer as the human being reduced to ‘bare life’, and then to contrast this with a discussion of Schmitt’s notion of ‘meaningfulness’ (possibly with a twist Durkheim’s (1897) analysis of anomie), and from this flow into a Foucaultinspired discussion of the depoliticising role of discourse and language; but to embark upon such paths risks unnecessarily shifting attention away from the simple manner in which a focus on ‘the state of exception’ sits at the intersection of the questions concerning governance, democracy and the state that have already been mentioned. These – as we are so frequently told – are exceptional times (see Hassner, 2012); or as Slavoj Žižek (2010) suggests ‘end times’. Žižek’s focus on economic instability and capitalism, and the challenges of ‘living in the end times’, provides a useful intellectual tool through which to project this chapter’s focus on Schmitt’s discussion of the ages of neutralisation and depoliticisation into the twenty-first century, and more specifically into some discussion of the ‘state of exception’ that is fuelling such concern over the future of democratic governance and the evolution of the state –the global financial crisis. What this provides is arguably an almost perfect case study of the (depoliticised) ‘logic of discipline’ trumping the (politicised) ‘logic of democracy’, to the extent that anyone arguing against the former and in favour of the latter risks being almost immediately defined as naïve, irrational or unwilling to take responsibility for what is required from all sections of society (‘we are all in this together’, therefore became the legitimating mantra). In December 2012, for example, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny, gave a televised address to the Irish people warning them of the ‘exceptional times’ they live in and of the ‘exceptional challenge’ they face together. This narrative reflected the tone and content of the ‘Government for National Recovery Plan, 2011–16’ with its stark opening statement that: It is no exaggeration to say that we now face one of the darkest hours in the history of our independent state. To deal with this unprecedented national economic emergency, our country needs an unprecedented level of political resolve. What is needed now after a long period of reckless, ill-disciplined government is strong, resolute leadership. (Irish Times, 2011, 2) One element of that ‘resolute leadership’ was a plan for democratic reform that attempts to centralise power within the Irish constitutional configuration (notably through the abolition of the Upper House of the Irish Parliament). Discipline, not democracy, is the order of the day in ‘a 12

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state of exception’, and the imposition of technocratic governments in Italy and Greece is possibly the starkest example of the changing relationship between depoliticisation, governance and the state. The financial crisis therefore provides a rather crude example of the shifting boundary between the rule of law and conventional democratic safeguards, on the one hand, and insulated technocratic executive government, on the other. A more subtle and emerging example concerns the second of Žižek’s global challenges – the ecological crisis. What this reveals is another set of arguments concerning the depoliticisation of democracy and the need to instill a degree of social discipline. As Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005), Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field notes from catastrophe (2007), Alistair McIntosh’s Hell and high water (2008) and Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a species (2010) – to mention just a few leading texts – argue, a rhetoric-reality gap exists between political statements concerning the need for far-reaching reform and the reality of very little meaningful reform in the face of shrinking ice sheets and rising sea temperatures. As Anthony Gidden’s (2009, 4) argued in his influential The politics of climate change, ‘we have no politics of climate change’. As a result, an increasing number of scholars and commentators are seeking to frame the politics of climate change very much as a crisis that urgently demands exceptional measures that hinge on the concept of depoliticisation, a far thinner conceptualisation of democracy than has hitherto been dominant, and a more aggressive role for the state. It is in exactly this vein that David Shearman and Joseph Smith (2008, 140) draw upon William Ophuls’ Ecology and the politics of scarcity (1977) in order to conclude that ‘it is clear that hard environmental choices cannot be made in liberal democratic societies, for the elites and the citizens of market economies have become too selfish to make sacrifices’.Therefore whereas Pierre Bourdieu (2002) comes out squarely ‘against the policy of depoliticisation’ in the economic sphere, Shearman and Smith (2008) (reluctantly) argue ‘in favour’ of the policy of depoliticisation by promoting the ‘authoritarian alternative’. Not only does this ‘alternative’ speak very much to Schmitt’s conceptualisation of politics and sovereignty, but it also resonates with Agamben’s (2005) ‘state of exception’.The paradox of Shearman and Smith (2008) is the manner in which they seek to politicise the climate change challenge (that is, to increase the sense of urgency surrounding the topic), in order to construct a case for the depoliticisation of environmental governance.

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Towards a new ‘neutral’ domain? The point here is not to come out either ‘for’ or ‘against’ depoliticisation as a strategy of governance. Arguably, existing analyses tend to be overly preoccupied with normative debates, and it is the purpose of this special issue to move beyond rather stale denunciations of depoliticisation as inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, this special issue seeks to highlight the purchase offered by depoliticisation as an analytical concept for teasing apart some of the critical trends and overlooked issues in relation to contemporary transformations of democratic governance. As such, in the opening chapter (21–45) we offer what might be termed a conceptual map of three prominent forms or modes of depoliticisation and seek to reveal the interplay that often exists between them. The aim of this opening contribution is not to seal off the intellectual terrain within which interested scholars should operate, but simply to argue that a focus on institutional or governmental forms of depoliticisation has so far tended to dominate analyses and – as a result – has possibly masked the existence of equally important but possibly less subtle discursive or societal forms. At base, we argue that the topography of the depoliticisation-politicisation nexus is both complex and contested, and we attempt to find a way into this complexity by offering a broad, critical overview of the literature. While our ambition, then, is generally to map the terrain, Paul Fawcett and David Marsh (47–69) link our arguments to salient contemporary debates surrounding political participation and meta-governance. They argue most critically that the three modes of depoliticisation we identify exist in a ‘shadow of hierarchy’, with the state still retaining a substantial amount of power over other agents to determine the course of depoliticisation. This argument resonates with the ambition of Peter Burnham’s (71–93) chapter, which digs a little deeper in order to assess the nature and stability of the dynamic terrain we identify. As such, Burnham continues a focus on what Agamben (2005) would label ‘the state of exception’, by examining the relationship between the concept of crisis and forms of depoliticisation. More specifically – and arguably offering an implicit resonance with the arguments of Schmitt (2007) – he suggests that politicians and their officials engage in depoliticisation as a mechanism of crisis-avoidance. Peter Burnham is therefore seeking to reveal the role of depoliticisation at a more basic and fundamental socio-political level. These arguments flow into the chapter provided by Bob Jessop (95–115), and particularly his focus on repoliticising depoliticisation. Heidenheimer (1986), Gramsci (1971), Mitchell (1991) and a host of other theorists therefore inspire an argument that brings together a focus on crisis (qua Burnham) and meta-governance (qua Fawcett and Marsh), conceptualising 14

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de- and repoliticisation across three levels. A link between politics ‘as theory’ and politics ‘as practice’ is then constructed through a focus on two empirical cases of depolitisation (the ‘fiscal cliff ’ debate in the United States, and the Eurozone crisis and the fiscal compact).These cases, in turn, serve to underline questions about the existence of ‘neutral domains’, the role of discursive narrations of change and contingency, and the shifting boundaries of the public/ private or social/ political spheres. Emma Ann Foster, Peter Kerr and Christopher Byrne (117–38) then draw upon the concept of governmentality to argue for a reformulation of our understandings of both depoliticisation and politicisation. This reconceptualisation of depoliticisation serves to not only shed new light on the rationalities of contemporary governance but – more importantly – to generate a set of arguments that challenge the dominant ‘rolling back of the state’ thesis and instead highlight a creeping extension of state capacity (that is, the ‘rolling forward’ of the state behind a thin façade of depoliticisation). If the earlier contributions in this special edition tend to focus on broad conceptual or theoretical issues, then the later contributions drill down into a more empirical focus on the implementation and dynamics of depoliticisation in distinct policy areas. Here, Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery (139–59) swim against the tide of existing empirical work by examining both politicising and depoliticising discourses simultaneously. Their analysis of the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Acts in 1990 and 2008 not only makes the concept of depoliticisation ‘travel’ (qua Sartori) into a new policy domain, but it also leads to the rejection of the zero-sum assumption that politicisation and depoliticisation are inevitably diametrically opposed forces. Indeed, what Bates and his colleagues reveal is the manner in which both politicisation and depoliticisation can operate, at least on some occasions, as parallel and simultaneous socioeconomic trends within and between governmental, public and private realms. Caroline Kuzemko (161–80) then explores the role of language and issue framing, and how in the area of energy policy the framing of the issue as an element of emergent security dilemmas served to repoliticise a dimension of government that to a great extent had effectively been depoliticised since the late 1980s. This focus, not on depoliticisation per se, but on how issues and debates move from what we might, for the sake of simplicity, term depoliticised to politicised arenas is continued in the analysis of urban policy and the governance of the Berlin Water Company by Ross Beveridge and Matthias Naumann (181–201).What this suggests is that depoliticisation strategies may well produce unexpected consequences across and within differing social domains. Or, as this case study suggests, 15

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that governmental depoliticisation of certain issues or policies (to adopt our terminology) may unwittingly contribute to their politicisation within the societal sphere. This emphasis on repoliticisation provides a counterpoint to the existing body of work on this topic, and notably its predominant emphasis on processes of depoliticisation. In order to bridge the micro and the macro and the theory and the practice in the final contribution Colin Hay (203–26) reflects upon some of the interlinking themes and issues that run throughout this collection. The aim is to assess exactly how this special issue has achieved its core aim of developing the analytical traction and leverage of the concept by exploring its meaning, relevance, dilemmas and application across a number of levels (analytical and empirical), and in relation to a range of policy contexts. This leads him to identify a number of debates and controversies that are likely to shape the future of the depoliticisation-repoliticisation debate over future decades, and to critically evaluate these debates and controversies within the contours of this opening chapter’s focus on Schmitt’s work on ‘the political’. To recap, through these diverse empirical, analytical and theoretical approaches, this special issue focuses attention, just as Schmitt did, on emergent tensions and trends of depoliticisation (and re-politicisation) in liberal democratic states. These dynamics already play an important role for contemporary social and political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe (1993), Frank Furedi (2009) and Jurgen Habermas (2008), whose focus, respectively, on ethno-nationalist conflict after the fall of Communism, fundamentalist terrorism and the politics of fear, and the recent political conflict instigated by global recession in 2008, suggest that all is not well with Schmitt’s (2007) ‘central domain’ of technicity. One key theme for the new century may hence prove to be the search for an alternative ‘neutral domain’ (in Schmitt’s terms). For now, though we can only speculate about future epochs and seek to sharpen the analytical tools at our disposal, in the hope of achieving a fine-grained analysis of contemporary transformations within liberal democratic states. References Agamben, G, 2005, State of exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Arditi, B, 1995, Tracing the political, Angelaki, 1, 3, 15–29 Bates, S, Jenkins, L, Amery, F, 2014, (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 243–58 Bauman, Z, 2006, Liquid fear, Cambridge: Polity Press Bell, S, Hindmoor, A, 2009, Rethinking governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Bendersky, J, 1983, Carl Schmitt: Theorists of the Reich, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Beveridge, R, Naumann, M, 2014, Global norms, local contestation: Privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 275–91 Bevir, M, 2012, Democratic governance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Boggs, C, 2000, The end of politics, New York, Guilford Bourdieu, P, 2002, Against the policy of depoliticisation, Studies in Political Economy, 69, 31–41 Bourdieu, P, 2003, Firing back, London:Verso Burnham, P, 2014, Depoliticisation: Economic crisis and political management, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 189–206 Caldwell, P, C, 2005, Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A review of recent literature, The Journal of Modern History, 77, 2, 357–387 Cristi, R, 1998, Carl Schmitt and authoritarian liberalism: Strong state, free economy, Cardiff: University of Wales Press Crouch, C, 2004, Post-democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press Diamond, JM, 2006, Collapse, New York:Viking Durkheim, E,1897, Le Suicide, London: The Free Press Dyzenhaus, D, 2005, Schmitt v. Dicey: Are states of emergency inside or outside the legal order, Cardozo Law Review, 27 European Policy Forum, 2000, Making decisions in Britain, London: European Policy Forum Falconer, Lord, 2003, Speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, London Fawcett, P, Marsh, D, 2014, Depoliticisation, governance and political participation, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 171–88 Foster, EA, Kerr, P, Byrne, C, 2014, Rolling back to roll forward: Depoliticisation and the extension of government, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 225–41 Furedi, F, 2009, Invitation to terror, London: Continuum Giddens, A, 2009, The politics of climate change, Cambridge: Polity Press Gramsci, A, 1971, Selections from the prison notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart Habermas, J, 2008, Europe:The faltering project, Cambridge: Polity Press Hamilton, C, 2010, Requiem for a species, London: Earthscan Hassner, P, 2012, Politics in crisis?, Journal of Democracy, 23, 4, 150–4 Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Press Hay, C, 2014, Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 293–311

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Heidenheimer,A, J, 1986, Politics, policy and policy as concepts in English and Continental languages, Review of Politics, 48, 1–26 Hirst, P, 1999, Carl Schmitt’s decisionism, in Mouffe, C (ed), The challenge of Carl Schmitt, London:Verso, 7–17 Huysmans, J, 2008,The jargon of exception, International Political Sociology, 2, 2, 165–83 Irish Times, 2011, Government for National Recovery Plan 2011–16, www. irishtimes.com/focus/2011/coalition-pact/agreement.pdf Jessop, B, 2014, Repoliticising depoliticisation: Theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 207–23 Kalyvas, A, 1999, Who’s afraid of Carl Schmitt?, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25, 5, 87–125 Keane, J, 2009, The life and death of democracy, London: Schuster Kolbert, E, 2006, Field notes from a catastrophe, London: Bloomsbury Kuhn, T, 1970, The structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Kuzemko, C, 2014, Politicising UK energy:What ‘speaking energy security’ can do, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 259–74 Majone, G, 2001, Non-majoritarian institutions and the limits of democratic governance, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 157, 1, 57–78 Marquand, D, 2004, The decline of the public, Cambridge: Polity Press Mastropaolo, A, 2012, Is democracy a lost cause?, Colchester: European Consortium for Political Research McCormick, J, P, 1999, Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism: against politics as technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press McIntosh, A, 2008, Hell and high water, Edinburgh: Birlinn Meier, H, 1995, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Meier, H, Schmitt, C, Strauss, L, 2006, The hidden dialogue, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Mitchell, T, J, 1991, The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics, American Political Science Review, 85, 1, 77–96 Mouffe, C, 1993, The return of the political, London:Verso Norris, P, 2011, Democratic deficit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ophuls, W, 1977, Ecology and the politics of scarcity, San Francisco: Freeman Ostrom, E, 2000,The danger of self-evident truths, PS: Political Science and Politics, 33, 1, 33–44 Pharr, S, Putnam, R (eds), 2000, Disaffected democracies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Ranciere, J, 1995, On the shores of politics, London:Verso 18

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Roberts, A, 2011, The logic of discipline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rosanvallon, P, 2008, Counter-democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rubin, E, 2012, Hyper-depoliticisation, Wake Forest Law Review, 47, 631–79 Sartori, G, 1970, Concept misformation in comparative politics, American Political Science Review, 64, 4, 1033–53 Sartori, G, 1989, The essence of the political in Carl Schmitt, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1, 1, 64–75 Schmitt, C, 1922, Political theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 Schmitt, C, 1986, Political romanticism, London: Transaction, 2010 Schmitt, C, 2007, The concept of the political: Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Shapiro, I, 2005, The flight from reality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Shearman, D, Smith, J, 2008, The climate change challenge and the failure of democracy, Westport, CT: Praeger Standing, G, 2011, The precariat, London: Bloomsbury Stoker, G, 2006, Why politics matters, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Vibert, F, 2007, The rise of the unelected, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press World Bank, 2000, Bolivia: From patronage to professional state, Report No 20115–BO, World Bank Žižek, S, 2010, Living in the end times, London:Verso

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CHAPTER TWO

Rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental Matt Wood and Matthew Flinders

Introduction If the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democracy, then the first decades of the twenty-first century appear to suggest that something has gone seriously wrong. This is reflected in a raft of post-millennium analyses that focus on the rise of ‘anti-politics’ and the challenges faced by contemporary democratic governance (for example, Rancière, 2006; Rosanvallon, 2008; Keane, 2009). Alongside this tide of rather bleak commentary exist a number of related debates concerning (inter alia) the decline of political participation and the rise of ‘disaffected democrats’ (see Norris, 2011); a shift to technocratic governance and models of decision making (notably in the wake of the global financial crisis) (Davis et al, 2012); and a more subtle set of concerns regarding the essence of democratic politics and the willingness or capacity of politicians to take inevitably unpopular decisions (see Flinders, 2012). These concerns have become crystallised into a set of terms (or clichés) – ‘post-democracy’,‘the democratic winter’,‘the end of politics’,‘the democratic malaise’ – broadly capturing an interpretation of recent developments, but at the same time tending to tell us little about the roots or drivers, the patterns or forms, of these shifts in democratic culture. To an extent, recent literature on ‘depoliticisation’ in the field of governance research has begun to offer a more fine-grained analysis of these tensions and pressures (Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005). It is, however, the argument of this chapter that this literature offers too narrow a conceptual and empirical perspective to fully capture and analyse the complex and nuanced contours of this vast phenomenon that we might term the ‘depoliticised polity’, and that a broader cross-disciplinary framework is required to achieve this goal. Hence, just as Carl Schmitt (2007), whose work is examined in the introductory chapter to this special issue, argued for a broader conception of ‘the political’ going beyond ‘the state’, so we argue in a similar spirit (but in an admittedly very different way) for an expansive approach to studying depoliticisation, going beyond the ‘governmental’ approach predominant in the governance literature. 21

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Although Marsh (2011, 48) highlights ‘depoliticisation’ as one of the most ‘interesting’ emergent concepts for analysing contemporary patterns of governance, scholars have tended to approach the topic through a fairly narrow conceptual lens (for example, Burnham 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005; 2006; Kettell, 2008; Newman, 2009; James, 2010). Depoliticisation, here, is seen as a ‘mode of statecraft’ instituted by politicians to deflect blame and accountability from governments as decision making is placed at ‘one remove’ from the centre.Yet, as will be shown in this chapter, there is a range of cross-disciplinary literature that focuses attention on quite different, yet equally important (and frequently interrelated) pressures operating in the wider public and private spheres of society – what this chapter terms ‘societal’ and ‘discursive’ depoliticisation. These relate to, on the one hand, the role played by (for example) the media, special interest groups and corporations in shifting issues off the agenda of public deliberation – what we term,‘societal depoliticisation’ – and (on the other hand) the ‘speech acts’ of individuals in the private and public arena that make certain issues appear to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ – here labelled, ‘discursive depoliticisation’. The boundaries between these two ‘faces’ is, as we acknowledge, sometimes blurred and contested, but at a broader level we argue that these two forms or modes of depoliticisation are both distinctive, interrelated, and to some extent even parasitical. Moreover, the core argument of this chapter – and to some extent the main argument of this special issue – is that any analysis of depoliticisation that focuses solely on institutions and a narrow conception of ‘the political’ will ultimately produce only largely cosmetic or shallow analyses. Put slightly differently, the aim of this chapter is to dig a little deeper and to begin to acknowledge and trace those deeper social and discursive shifts that frequently buttress or underpin institutional reforms and governmental decisions. The most comprehensive analytical framework in this field is offered by Flinders and Buller (2006) and their dissection of a range of ‘principles, tactics and tools’. This identified three forms or ‘tactics’ vis-à-vis depoliticisation (institutional, rule-based, preference-shaping) and this has subsequently been applied in a range of studies in a range of policy areas (see, for example, Kettell, 2008; Rogers, 2009a; 2009b; Beveridge, 2012; Krippner, 2011, 146; Maman and Rosenheck, 2011, 16–17; Mishra, 2011, 159–63). Our critique of Flinders and Buller’s influential work, however, is that it set in train a form of intellectual path-dependency that overemphasised a governmental state-centric approach, but under-emphasised the less visible but arguably more important discursive and societal dimensions of depoliticisation. As Laura Jenkins notes (2011, 159):

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[d]espite offering some useful analytical pointers, this work is not without weaknesses and omissions… they simply do not provide an explicit conceptualisation of politics and the conception that they seem to rest upon is narrow. The discussion appears statecentred, essentially referring to the extension, concealment, alteration or reduction of state control… Buller and Flinders’ general lack of clarity on their conception of the political is particularly odd, given that the main emphasis in the piece is on definitional clarity surrounding the concept of depoliticisation. The aim of this chapter is therefore to provide a broader analysis of the interrelationships between different conceptual and empirical perspectives on depoliticisation, as a first step towards a more sophisticated account of the ‘depoliticised polity’. This leads to a reappraisal, or at the very least, a reengagement with Colin Hay’s (and later Matthew Flinders’) analysis of forms of both politicisation and depoliticisation as functions, powers and responsibilities flowing between different political spheres across society (Hay, 2007; Flinders, 2008). Such a reappraisal leads to the identification of a conceptual and empirical horizon beyond a fairly narrow state-centric approach, but enables us to grasp how different forms of depoliticisation become almost self-sustaining, even parasitical. It is this broader ecosystem of depoliticising trends and tides which this chapter seeks to bring to the fore. The challenge, however, lies in corralling several large, empirically and conceptually eclectic pools of literature. Put slightly differently, this is clearly a wide-ranging chapter and, like painting on a large canvas, this has required the use of a fairly broad brush and a sharp knife, in both analytical and empirical terms. Nevertheless, it is hoped that by ‘rethinking depoliticisation’ and placing this discussion within the contours of debates concerning the future of the state, this chapter will hopefully stimulate more scholarly interest in this topic, thereby filling in the detail and achieving a more fine-grained understanding (not least within the other contributions in this special edition). With this in mind this chapter is divided into three interrelated sections. The first section draws upon Hay’s Why we hate politics (2007) in order to provide the basis for a new ‘organising perspective’ on depoliticisation. The second and most substantive section then fleshes out this organising perspective by mapping the range of literature on depoliticisation, in order to identify intersections and interrelationships between three ‘faces’ of depoliticisation. The final section then reflects on the broader significance of this mapping exercise for the future study of depoliticisation, with a particular emphasis

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on cross-disciplinary eclecticism, as well as its relevance to contemporary debates concerning governance and the state.

Mapping depoliticisation Any exercise in conceptual, geographical or scientific mapping is concerned as much with creating usable ‘mental models’ as it is with reflecting reality. Harry Beck’s iconic and well-known map of the London Underground provides an exceptional example of this craft, with its simple lines and colours which quickly convey needed and accurate information to the tired and rushed traveller. In essence, the argument of this chapter is that ‘rethinking depoliticisation’ requires the use of a new map or mental model in order to reveal interdependences between at least three primary forms of (or approaches to the study of) depoliticisation. A map, that is, which is sensitive to how ‘depoliticisation’, in the broader literature in political science and beyond, commonly refers to a rebalancing or a shift in the nature of governance relationships that involves not only the displacement of decisions from politicians, but the exercise of power by many non-state actors as well. In this regard Hay’s (2007) analysis of political disengagement provides a canvas on which to map out the contours of a new and more Figure 1: Politicisation and depoliticisation Governmental sphere Realm of neccessity (‘nonpolitical’)

Public sphere

Private sphere

Depoliticization 1 Depoliticization 2 Depoliticization 3

Source: Hay, 2007, 79.

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Politicization 3 Politicization 2 Politicization 1

Rethinking depoliticisation

expansive conceptualisation of depoliticisation, due to his broad approach to politics, defined as ‘the realm of contingency and deliberation’, which he disaggregates into three distinct spheres (see Figure 1). The immediate benefit of this approach is that it identifies forms of both politicisation and depoliticisation as mirror-image developments across a spectrum of public governance. To become politicised in this sense is associated with an issue becoming subject to public deliberation, decision making and contingency where previously it was not. ‘Accordingly, the most basic form of politicisation (Type 1) is associated with the extension of the capacity for human influence and deliberation’ Hay (2007, 81) notes, ‘which comes with disavowing the prior assignment of an issue – or issue domain – to the realm of fate or necessity’. This may involve the questioning of religious taboos or cultural assumptions that were previously held as sacrosanct, or the spillover effects of recent scientific and technological developments that offer new opportunities to control issues that were previously thought beyond human control (that is, fate). Issues may then become further politicised when they develop into the focus of a concerted pattern of public deliberation as if they have suddenly become identified as issues of collective, rather than individual or private, wellbeing.This is a politicisation of Type 2 and it too may take many forms (the consciousness-raising activities of feminists, environmentalists, antiglobalisation protestors or any other such group are essentially attempting to lift an issue into the public domain). This ‘lifting’ or politicisation of an issue may, in turn, propel it into the governmental sphere (Type 3) as it becomes the focus of legislative debates, new laws, the responsibility of government departments and similarly ‘governmental’ processes. What this focus on politicisation reveals is the existence of sociopolitical gradations and historical patterns, in which the boundaries of each sphere have ebbed and flowed according to (inter alia) the government of the day, public attitudes and global trends. The dominant trend in recent decades, if the literature on the ‘unbundling’ of the state is to be believed (Pollitt and Talbot, 2004), has been on the depoliticisation of various formerly governmental tasks through a combination of delegation (Type 1), privatisation (Type 2) and denial (Type 3). Here,Type 1 depoliticisation focuses on the hiving off of functions away from elected politicians towards a complex range of extra-governmental organisations, para-statals and semi-independent bodies (collectively known as the sphere of ‘delegated’ or ‘distributed public’ governance).The conceptual emphasis here is not so much that the issue of concern has become any less political, in the sense of its impact on individuals or society, but that it has been transferred to a less obviously politicised arena. (Hence Flinders and Buller’s (2006) emphasis on ‘arena-shifting’). The next stage of depoliticisation involves a function 25

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or issue being displaced from the public (non-governmental) sphere to the private sphere, in the sense that it becomes a matter of private/ consumer choice. The representation of the issue of environmental degradation or unemployment in such a way that responsibility is seen to lie, not with politicians, business or society at large, but with the behaviour of individuals is, if successful, a form of depoliticisation (Type 2) (see, for example, Weiss and Wodak, 2000; Sharone, 2007). Hay notes that the evolution of societal values may also serve to depoliticise certain issues as, for example, matters of race or sexuality may wane as matters of public interest per se. The final form of depoliticisation (Type 3) revolves around placing issues back within the realm of fate, and in so doing denying the existence of contingency and choice. Such a development would chime with Giddens’ (1994) emphasis on ‘life politics’, and a shift to individualised responses to collective problems instead of collective effort and shared resolve. The imposition of the logic of a divine authority would represent an example of this dynamic, as any fundamentalist position is arguably irreconcilable with a compromise based democratic model of politics. The promotion of ‘the logic of no alternative’ vis-à-vis globalisation and the liberalisation of economies might also be interpreted as an attempt to depoliticise an issue through the politics of denial. This notion of spheres or boundaries, between which issues and functions ebb and flow depending on the social context, resonates with both the language and arguments expressed within Jacques Rancière’s On the Shores of Politics (1995), and most clearly his belief that politics is, at base, a competition between two fundamental and opposed forms of politics: one depoliticising and the other repoliticising. It is in exactly this context that this chapter is making three interrelated arguments across three levels. At the macro and most basic level, even the most cursory analysis of the existing literature on depoliticisation reveals the manner in which it remains not simply an ‘essentially contested’ or ‘fuzzy’ concept, but also one that has generally been the victim of conceptual stretching rather than travelling. Following on from this, the second mid-range argument is that depoliticisation has generally been examined through a fairly narrow state-centric lens which has blinkered scholars to the broader societal and discursive elements of the phenomena. As such, the third and most specific argument of this chapter (and specifically of this section) is that Hay’s (2007) framework (Figure 1, above) provides the intellectual canvas on which to map out a far more rounded and sophisticated account of not only the existence of different forms or modes of depoliticisation but also the interrelationships, contradictions and pathologies between those forms and the pressures for (re)politicisation. More precisely, existing studies have focused almost exclusively on the transition of functions 26

Rethinking depoliticisation

from the governmental to the public (non-governmental) spheres, but have paid far less attention to the more outlying and less tangible forms of depoliticisation that arguably add depth and texture and context to any analysis of ‘Type 1 depoliticisation’. It is for exactly this reason that the next section seeks to ‘rethink depoliticisation’ by exploring not one face but three.

Three faces of depoliticisation This chapter is an exercise in conceptual political analysis. It seeks to impose a degree of analytical order on a hitherto confused and complex intellectual terrain, and in this regard the previous section outlined Hay’s (2007) framework of politicisation and depoliticisation as a starting point for building a more sophisticated organising perspective.That is, one that is aware of the dialectical and iterative relationships between context, agency and structure; one that is sensitive to the existence of gradations and parallel processes of both politicisation and depoliticisation; and one that offers the capacity to more fully understand the relationship between depoliticisation, governance and the state. The aim of this section is to construct that organising perspective by mapping three ‘faces’ or forms of depoliticisation onto Hay’s work or, more specifically, to delineate a link between the demotion of a topic from the public sphere to the private sphere (that is, Type 2, discussed above) with what we term societal depoliticisation, and demotion from the private sphere to the realm of necessity (that is, Type 3) with discursive depoliticisation. While not a panacea for the challenges of political analysis vis-à-vis modern governance, this ‘Hay-plus’ map is distinctive for at least three reasons. First, it suggests the need to broaden the focus of analysis away from an overly state-centric emphasis, and in doing so reveals the relevance of depoliticisation to a vast range of policy areas beyond economic policy. Secondly, this perspective begins the task of pulling together an eclectic and often disconnected range of debates and literatures, but in a manner that retains a sense of normative tension and intellectual diversity. As a result (thirdly), this ‘three-faces’ perspective provides a set of intellectual containers through which to prevent ‘conceptual stretching’ and facilitate ‘conceptual travelling’, while also remaining true to Sartori’s (1970) advice that ‘three slices are sufficient for the purposes of logical analysis’.With this in mind,Table 1 maps out the three-faces approach, and the remainder of this section provides a brief review of each face.

27

Tracing the political Table 1: Three faces of depoliticisation

Type 2 Public (non-govt) sphere to private sphere

Type 3 Private sphere to realm of necessity

Act

Example

The state

DELEGATION of elected politicians from direct control

The hiving Politicians off of functions to arm’s-length agencies, boards and commissions

Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2006

Public deliberation

PRIVATISATION of the issue or function from the (collective) public sphere to the (individualised) private sphere

An important political issue is displaced from the media newscycle

Politicians and citizens

Brändström and Kuipers, 2003; Blühdorn, 2007

Political agency

DENIAL of the capacity for control through ‘speech acts’

Need to cut fiscal deficit presented as ‘common sense’.

Anyone

Gamble, 2000; Jenkins, 2011

‘Weberian’

Conception of ‘the political’

‘Tocquevillian’

Type 1 Govt sphere to public (non-govt) sphere

Essence

‘Gramscian’

Discursive

Societal

Governmental

Face Hay-link

Actors

Key texts

Face 1: governmental depoliticisation

Analyses of governmental depoliticisation adopt a state-centric or institutionalist approach that examines the withdrawal of politicians from the direct control of a vast range of functions, and the rise of technocratic forms of governance. Given that this is the dominant perspective, and that this chapter is concerned with emphasising two associated but quite different and under-acknowledged ‘faces’ of depoliticisation, it is sufficient here to simply highlight three strands of literature and then three tools or examples of this form. In relation to the intellectual history and pedigree of this approach, its Weberian focus on bureaucracy and professionalisation flows into a historical account of the debates concerning the politicisation and depoliticisation of public and civil servants (see Grzymala-Busse, 2003; Meyer-Sahling, 2004; Peters and Pierre, 2005). Couched generally in a distinction between (depoliticised) ‘public appointments’ and (politicised) ‘patronage’, the literature on this topic explores the introduction of institutional and rule-based systems to neutralise the capacity of ministers (and the ways in which elected politicians frequently seek to resist or undermine such limits on their powers).The second strand dovetails with this historical literature, but in a more theoretically driven manner, focusing 28

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on ‘the logic of reason’, non-majoritarian institutions, policy credibility and the merits of depoliticised forms of regulatory governance (Thatcher and Stone Sweet, 2002; Coen and Thatcher, 2005; Landwehr and Böhm, 2011). This is a rational choice inspired body of scholarship that is particularly associated with the work of Majone (for example, 2001), and seeks to counter the short-term incentives of the electoral cycle by limiting the capacity of politicians to interfere with certain decision-making structures for short-term partisan gain. Both the historical literature on the evolution of the state (and the civil service, in particular), and the scholarship on regulatory governance, are imbued with a deep distrust of politicians and, as such, bring with them a centrifugal pressure for the depoliticisation of responsibilities (hence the structural response to the ‘credibility crisis’ (that is, hiving off) creates its own ‘democratic deficit’ as elected politicians gradually become directly responsible for less and less). The third pool of literature, however, brings with it a quite different centripetal dynamic, that almost attempts to politicise the study of governance and the state by drawing attention to depoliticisation as a form of statecraft within an increasingly globalised capitalist economy (see, for example, Bonefeld and Burnham, 1998; Kettell, 2008; Newman, 2009; Krippner, 2011). It is in exactly this vein that Hout and Robison (2009, 4) promote a conceptualisation of depoliticisation as relating to ‘good governance’ or ‘autonomy for technocratic authority from what are seen as distributional (political) coalitions’. This, in turn, provides for a focus on independent central banks, the establishment of various rules-based monetary systems, the ‘judicialisation of politics’, and a broader concern with the rise of a technocratic ‘logic of appropriateness’ that many critical social and political theorists are attempting to challenge in terms of emphasising the existence of some element of macro-economic choice, and by doing so seeking to politicise fiscal policy (for example, Randeria, 2007). If a focus on the history of the state, regulatory governance, and political economy provide the three clearest examples of the dominant governmental approach, then they each in their own ways also demonstrate the existence of three forms of tools of depoliticisation. The first is an institutional response in the form of what we might – for the sake of simplicity – refer to as ‘the politics of ABC’ (that is, agencies, boards and commissions), and the creation of quasi-autonomous bodies through which the explicit ‘political character of decision making’, as Peter Burnham (2001) notes, is placed ‘at one remove’. The second tool revolves around ‘binding the hands’ of politicians through the introduction of new rules and regulations that are designed to limit and constrain their discretion.This may involve monetary policy, the availability of drugs and medicines, immigration rates 29

Tracing the political

or the introduction of recruitment systems that are designed to prevent nepotism, cronyism and corruption in developing countries (Dyson, 2005; Hasnas, 2008). To speak of creating arm’s-length bodies or the strategy of ‘binding the hands’ of politicians, as a way of depoliticising tasks, is hardly original or fresh – Toulmin Smith’s Government by commission: dangerous and pernicious, was published in 1849. Yet, in exploring the creation of complex policy and delivery networks as a strategy of depoliticisation, some scholars have begun to move towards a more distinctive approach to this topic (Eberlein and Newman, 2008; James, 2010). Here, it is suggested that politicians use ‘the problem of many hands’ (that is, the diffusion of responsibility across a range of interdependent actors, see Thompson, 1980) as a way of blurring the accountability space and distancing their own personal responsibility (Papadopoulos, 2007; Kunz, 2011). Such a perspective is evident in studies of policy and network governance in food safety standards (Smith, 1991), policing (Needham, 2009) and care for the elderly (Bode and Firbank, 2009).There is a clear connection here with the broader terrain of multilevel governance, its complex vertical and horizontal components, and its emphasis on the notion of fuzzy or opaque network governance. For now, though, we focus on alternative conceptualisations of depoliticisation and how they relate to and inform the state-centric approaches that have been briefly discussed in this section. It is for exactly this reason that we now turn to our second face and a focus on societal depoliticisation. Face 2: societal depoliticisation

‘Depoliticisation has been defined and discussed in a very narrow way as a “form of statecraft” or a “strategy for governing”’ Blühdorn (2007, 314) argues:‘[but] depoliticisation and delegation are far more than just strategies of government… instead they should be regarded as phenomena which are relevant at all levels of advanced modern society’. Here, Blühdorn is shifting the analytical lens from the political to the social. This shift in focus can clearly be captured within Hay’s (2007) framework (Figure 1, above) as it captures both state and civil society actors or, more specifically, where state-centric approaches focus on elite decision making this approach focuses on the existence (or not) of social deliberation across and between the various ‘spheres of contingency’ (governmental, public and private) that acknowledge the existence of choice. Here, Harder (1996) provides a definition of ‘societal’ depoliticisation as ‘the process by which the social deliberation surrounding a political issue gradually erodes to the extent that it effectively becomes depoliticised in the sense that the existence of choices concerning that issue are no longer debated’.A ‘depoliticised polity’ 30

Rethinking depoliticisation

would therefore exhibit very little public debate about major social issues or political options alongside a very barren political landscape in terms of public engagement and social dynamism. It is therefore not surprising that the intellectual roots of this ‘face’ stem from the focus on civic decline and political disengagement that emerged from the early 1970s onwards. The Trilateral Commission’s report – The crisis of democracy (1975) – therefore provides a notable reference point that led to a surge in research into public attitudes, political behaviour, social capital, cultural decline and the rise of ‘disaffected democrats’ (for a review see Norris, 2011). As a result, the concept of depoliticisation emerged within a wide range of discplines and sub-fields (development studies (Harriss, 2002), sociology (Boggs, 2000), European studies (Hooghe and Marks, 2008), party politics (Pellikan et al, 2003), international politics (Lyons et al, 1977; Sagarika Dutt, 1995), electoral politics (Power, 1991), geography (Shin, 2001), and so on) as a descriptive term, sometimes bordering on little more than a ‘buzzword’, to suggest the decreasing salience of ‘political’ issues among the public, and the emergence of a disinterested democratic culture.Although the literature on this ‘face’ is undoubtedly more diverse and unfocused than that surrounding state-centric approaches, it is possible to identify a strand of internal consistency among and between its component parts, in the form of a conception of politics as very much a participatory and deliberative endeavour. Societal depoliticisation is therefore infused with a ‘Tocquevillian’ lament, a focus on ‘engaged’ and ‘active’ citizenship, and an interest in the drivers of political disengagement.This, in turn, focuses attention not just upon the role of politicians and political institutions, but also on the role and capacity of social actors and institutions – pressure groups, the media, social movements, religious groups, business associations – to fuel political apathy or deny the existence of choice in relation to certain issues. From the ‘shock jock’ but best-selling antipolitical protestations of P, J O’Rourke’s Don’t vote: It just encourages the bastards (2010) through to John Lloyd’s questions regarding What the media do to our politics? (2004), a focus on societal depoliticisation examines the changing nature of sociopolitical relationships, and specifically on the role and power of intermediary institutions that sit between the governors and the governed. It is for exactly this reason that Matthew Flinders frames his Defending politics (2012) by not only emphasising what he terms the rise of ‘the politics of denial’ – a euphemism for societal depoliticisation - but also by revealing the manner in which many social institutions promote a ‘bad faith model of politics’ as part of a strategy for the promotion of sectional rather than public interests. If Edmund Burke’s (1985) emphasis on open, self-organised ‘little platoons’ forms the theoretical and normative core of this ‘face’, then it is 31

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a thread that can be followed through a range of pools of research that add texture and tone to this approach, and in this regard two areas of writing deserve brief discussion. First, the literature on the evolution, role and capacity of political parties provides a fairly focused way of engaging with a form of societal depoliticisation.The evidence of party decline, and the rise of the highly professionalised cartel party, reveals a narrowing in the base, scope and activity of political parties and the use of state funding to limit political competition and ensure their own success (for example, Katz and Mair, 2009).This chimes with Blühdorn’s (2007) argument that societal depoliticisation revolves around a focus on core business, efficiency, and best practice which inevitably tends to depoliticise many of the values and principles that originally informed the organisation (see also Gaynor, 2011). This flows into an upsurge of interest in ‘valence politics’ and evidence that electoral decisions by the public are increasingly made, not on the basis of a recognition of the existence of different political choices, but on an assessment of individual and party competence vis-à-vis specific issues (notably the economy) (see Denver, 2005). Berkhout et al (2012, 5) present a quadrant in which ‘valence politics’ appears in the same half as ‘not politicised’ politics, in which there is ‘agreement/ cooperation’ over an issue.This is opposed to ‘politicised politics’, which involves both high levels of political salience and polarisation; the implication being that a depoliticised polity is also a ‘choice-less democracy’, in which the only questions revolve around who to select to manage a predestined political project (for a similar literature on choice-less democracies in development studies see Ferguson, 1990; Harriss, 2002). It is for exactly this reason that Sim (2006) and Langer (2010) discuss societal depoliticisation from the position that substantive policy debates have generally been replaced by cosmetic personality-based debates that have curiously ‘obliterated the political’ while at the same time ‘politicising the private persona’. The notion of a ‘choice-less democracy’ brings with it the inevitable echo of Francis Fukayama’s (1992) thesis regarding the ‘end of history’ and the triumph of liberal democracy, and therefore raises a set of broader questions concerning the mutation of Burke’s (1985) ‘little platoons’ into ‘ignorant armies’ (Webb, 2006). If the social space for political deliberation and debate has really been closed down, and the existence of many choices denied, then political apathy and disengagement might be interpreted as a rational response. Indeed, Carl Boggs’ The end of politics (2000, 30) promotes such an interpretation of contemporary political behaviour: ‘one of the most visible and easily measurable signs of depoliticisation is sharply fading voter participation’. The second more expansive pool of literature on societal depoliticisation is therefore concerned with political parties, not because of their value as vehicles of public deliberation and engagement, 32

Rethinking depoliticisation

but in regard to their promotion of choice on a broad political spectrum. Empirical studies from this position remain scattered but distinctive. Gunther et al (1988) located declining electoral turnout in Spain as an outcome of the depoliticisation of the party system, and Ruiz-Rodriguez (2005) identifies similar patterns in Chile, while, the research of Pellikan et al (2003) examines what they term ‘the road from a depoliticised to a centrifugal democracy’. Just as the focus on arm’s-length bodies and rule-based systems offered little in terms of originality to the state-centric approach (discussed above), the same could be said of this section’s emphasis on political parties and political choice.A more distinctive approach to the issue of societal depoliticisation is, however, to be found in Jasper’s (1988) analysis of political lifecycles.This identifies the manner in which specific technological issues tend to follow a broadly similar pattern, with issues going from a ‘pre-political’ period of reliance on ‘experts’, politicisation onto the government and public agenda with growing contestation, followed by ‘depoliticisation ’ as government takes action and the issue burns out, and finally a ‘post-political’ period of acceptance and non-deliberation.This political lifecycle with its transitional stages between technocratic governance, politicisation, depoliticisation, and then a shift to an almost post-political stage has been extended to analyse policy failures and ‘blame games’. Brändström and Kuipers (2003, 280) therefore argue that ‘actions and events in public policy become politicised when influential actors in the political arena succeed in framing them as blameworthy violations of crucial public values’. As policy failures come and go, political interest waxes and wanes depending upon the success (or failure) of political actors to ‘name failures and assign blame’, and hence ‘politicise incidents as policy failures’ (2003, 280, 281). Correspondingly, the ‘depoliticisation’ of political failures occurs when, in a similarly dynamic way, influential actors define those events as a concern for the market, or the ‘private’ sphere (2003, 281).As such, this vein of scholarship highlights two critical issues. First, depoliticisation is a dynamic and fluid process in which forms of the various ‘faces’ are rarely independent or distinct, but tend to exist in a Janus-faced manner whereby the transfer of a function away from ministers (that is, governmental depoliticisation) is fuelled, or at the very least facilitated, by a broader process of societal depoliticisation (delegation of decision making goes hand in hand with the decline of issues as salient matters in societal debate). The boundaries of Hay’s (2007) concentric circles are therefore blurred and to some extent overlapping. Secondly, a potential weakness of Hay’s framework (and to some extent Blühdorn’s (2007) approach to societal depoliticisation) is that a continued focus on ‘arenas’ may lead to a still narrow and relatively static conceptualisation of politicising and depoliticising processes. As Greta Krippner (2011, 33

Tracing the political

146) argues, ‘another dimension of depoliticisation is concerned less with the social location of decisions than with their content’.A more dynamic approach therefore shifts the focus of analysis from arenas to discourse, and in so doing facilitates a more dynamic conceptualisation. It is for this reason that the next section focuses on discursive depoliticisation. Face 3: discursive depoliticisation

At first glance, our third face appears remarkably similar to societal depoliticisation, in the sense that it can be initiated both from within and outside the state, it primarily relates to debate and deliberation, and it focuses on the tools through which debates concerning political choice and contingency are closed down.The point of departure, however, lies in discursive depoliticisation’s focus, not on institutions, arenas or actors but on ideas and language. It therefore offers a decentred approach that cuts across conventional boundaries (that is, public/ private) and instead recognises the manner in which any speech act which seeks to form ‘necessities, permanence, immobility, closure and fatalism… concealing, negating or removing contingency’, is itself a powerful tool of depoliticisation (Jenkins 2011, 160). As such, depoliticisation occurs when the debate surrounding an issue becomes technocratic, managerial, or disciplined towards a single goal, and hence changed in content. (A process of discursive politicisation would therefore involve the promotion of a topic as a public issue where competing interpretations exist as choices.) The promotion of an issue, but alongside a single interpretation and the denial of choice would, therefore, create a form of depoliticisation from this discursive perspective. Moral panics, for example, serve to politicise certain issues in an explosive manner, while at the same time tending to depoliticise those issues by focusing attention on specific ‘folk devils’, alongside a grossly simplified narrative that posits a simple solution (constrain, reject, kill the folk devil) to a complex problem. The demonisation of social groups therefore adds a new twist to our understanding of depoliticisation, in the sense that a dominant sociology of knowledge rapidly emerges that tends to create an intense social reaction, while also succeeding in closing down debate and deliberation (see Cohen, 2002). At the centre of this third ‘face’ is therefore what might be termed a ‘Gramscian’ intellectual perspective, with an emphasis on radical thinking and the role of language and culture in relation to political debates.Analyses of the discursive ‘face’ of depoliticisation developed from radical theoretical literature during the post-Cold War period, which highlighted how the dominant ‘anti-political’ culture transcended certain political divisions, thereby creating the illusion of ‘consensus’. Scholars, such as Pierre 34

Rethinking depoliticisation

Bourdieu (2003), Slavoj Žižek (2002), and more recently Chantal Mouffe (2005), argued in favour of new forms of radical democratic action that exposed the existence of antagonism and ‘difference’. Jacques Rancière (1995, 5) sums up the attitude of this literature to the post-Cold War world, arguing that politics ends ‘as a secret voyage to the isles of utopia’ to become ‘the art of steering the ship and embracing the waves, in a natural, peaceful movement of growth’. In other words, grand ideological clashes give way to technocracy and acceptance of neoliberal discourse. The value of identifying the existence of discursive depoliticisation is therefore simply the manner in which it exposes the power and capacity of certain political actors to promote ‘the politics of denial’ but, more importantly, the manner in which it seeks to re-politicise certain issues. Put slightly differently, the scholars who work within this approach tend to be critical social and political theorists who seek to challenge hegemonic interpretations of the ‘end of history’ and seek to promote the existence of antagonism, conflict, difference and choice (see for example Mouffe, 2005).‘Politics’ from this perspective is therefore distinct from ‘the political’, as Žižek (2002, 193) explains: The difference [is] between ‘politics’ as a separate social complex, a positively determined sub-system of social relations… and ‘the political’ [le politique] as the moment of openness, of undecidability, when the very structuring of society, the fundamental form of the social pact, is called into question – in short, the moment of global crisis overcome by the act of founding a ‘new harmony. ‘Politicisation’, in this sense, is a radical act of recognising ‘the political’; the possibility that society can be constituted differently; it is the opposite of fatalism and denial. Discursive perspectives on depoliticisation therefore resonate with Bauman’s In search of politics (1999), in the sense that they are concerned with how language and a careful approach to the ‘framing’ of issues can serve to close down certain options by making any opposition appear almost ‘irrational’.This is an approach that has some traction in the governance literature, informing Rogers’ (2009a, 2009b) analysis of British economic policy making in the mid-1970s, Kerr et al’s (2011) study of David Cameron’s approach to statecraft ,and Flinders and Buller’s (2006) emphasis on discursive ‘preference shaping’ (the weakness of these studies being their exclusive focus on the discourse of politicians). Discursive depoliticisation therefore brings with it a powerful set of methods, theories and insights that reflect an intellectual history, including Habermas’ (1996) analysis of ‘scientism’ and its capacity to depoliticise both language and decision making, not to mention Foucault’s (Burchell et al, 1991) analysis 35

Tracing the political

of the depoliticising capacity of neoliberal ‘governmentality’ (see also Dean, 1999; Lemke, 2001).These meta-theoretical positions have come to inform governance studies in several ways. The ‘interpretive turn’ in political science has, for example, emphasised the role of beliefs and traditions, as well as dilemmas and competing narratives, and how these can politicise certain issues while depoliticising others (for example, Bevir and Rhodes, 2010). Within International Relations, by contrast, constructivist approaches have been deployed to expose the depoliticising power of discourse and language around global governance and international institutions, as illustrated in the work of Widmaier et al (2007) and Schmidt (2010). Drilling down still deeper into this literature, it is possible to briefly highlight three dominant pools of analysis. The first and possibly most obvious pool is that concerned with the ideological content of political discourse, and with the use of technical or managerialist language and terminology to obscure or deny the subjectivity and contestability of political debates or decisions (Jenkins, 2011). In recent years, qualitative analyses in this vein have burgeoned as the ideological underpinnings of ‘common sense’ narratives have been studied, focusing on, for example, free market economic values in the United States (Swanson, 2007), immigration policy in Australia (Pickering, 2001), economic reform in New Zealand (Gregory, 2006), debates concerning unemployment in the European Union (Wodak, 2011; Muntigl, 2002), national responses to globalisation (Watson and Hay, 2004), environmental governance (Swyngedouw, 2011), and even the reform of air traffic management (Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010). More broadly Wodak’s (2011) analysis of the practice of ‘politics as usual’ in the everyday life of politicians in the European Parliament provides some insight, not into institutions or procedures per se, but into the ways in which the behaviour of politicians is conditioned by certain modes of thought that serve to subconsciously depoliticise certain issues. A second and related strand of research draws upon Habermas (1996) to focus more specifically on the use of scientific discourse and the manner in which ‘expertise’ or scientifically determined solutions have changed the nature of democratic governance. Haines (1979), for example, has examined the rise of ‘medicalisation’ (that is, the redefinition of social problems as the purview of doctors rather than politicians). For Haines (1979), drunkenness is often ‘framed’ not as a social problem but as an illness or ‘addiction’ which can be treated through the use of scientifically mandated medical treatments. At once a social problem is demoted to an element of ‘life politics’, to be treated on an individual rather than collective basis. As such, alternative collective ways of dealing with drunkenness as a social problem (taxation, legislation, regulation, and so on) are foreclosed. 36

Rethinking depoliticisation

More recent studies have arrived at similar conclusions in relation to the depoliticisation of dementia, depression, eating disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder, and reveal how cognitive (that is, scientific) claims, as opposed to normative (that is, political) claims are especially conducive to the depoliticisation and enclosure of social problems (see for example Adams, 1998; Edkins, 2002; Howell, 2007; Conrad, 2007). A second and related element of this strand of research focuses not on ‘medicalisation’ in health policy but on the ‘scientisation’ of fiscal policy. In this context Marcussen’s (2006) comparative analysis leads him to the conclusion that central banking has become ‘apolitical’ or ‘scientised’, in the sense that ‘central banking in many ways transcends formal politics’ and is viewed as little more than a scientific exercise in complex econometric modelling. In this conclusion Marcussen can draw upon the complementary research findings of Timmermans and Scholten (2006) in the Netherlands,Abolafia’s (2012) case study of the American Federal Reserve, Roberts’ (2010, ch 2) cross-country comparative analysis, as well as Hoppe (2009), Kinchy (2010), and Beveridge’s (2012) very different analyses of the depoliticising capacity of scientific advice (for a discussion see Watson, 2002). But – to continue a by now familiar pattern – if a focus on technical, managerial and scientific discourses provides a relevant but not particularly original set of insights, then a focus on security, risk and resilience arguably provides a more imaginative and contemporary perspective. Put simply, securitisation theory has in recent years identified a distinct pattern of depoliticisation that tends to involve the identification of an existential threat that requires emergency executive powers, and, if the audience accepts the securitising move, the issue is depoliticised and is considered a ‘security’ issue outside the rules of normal politics (Balzacq, 2005; Salter, 2008; 2011; Salter and Piche, 2011). As such, security studies often regard the politicisation of an issue as representing a form of ‘desecuritisation’ (Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking, 2010; Salter and Piche, 2011). This discursive process may be called ‘securitisation’ in the sense that it makes issues ‘more firmly constrained… decisions about them are taken in technical terms’ (Edkins, 1999, 11). Such an interpretation goes against the influential view of Buzan et al (1998, 120) that securitisation represents a form of hyper-politicisation, due to the manner in which it creates heightened public attention around a social issue (compare Salter, 2011, 120; Buofino, 2004).The theory of moral panics and the concept of a ‘folk devil’, however, provide a way of reconciling these positions. In essence, the creation of an intense political controversy (that is, hyper-politicisation) is little more than a tool through which to then impose a definitive position that closes down political debate (thereby depoliticising the issue). It is in exactly this vein that scholars have examined the ‘war on terror’ (De 37

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Goede, 2008a; 2008b; Balzacq, 2008; Salter, 2011), illegal immigration (Huysmans, 2000; 2006), financial security (De Goede, 2004), fear of crime (Parnaby, 2006), as well as climate change and resource depletion (Carvalho and Burgess, 2005;Trombetta, 2008; Corry, 2012). Possibly the most novel insights delivered by this perspective are the manner in which discursive depoliticisation must engage with different types of audience that each require a specific language type (generally identified as popular, elite, technocratic and scientific), and how the process of securitisation through which an issue is depoliticised is rarely passive or static, but is generally an iterative process between speaker and audience. This, in turn, brings us back to wider issues concerning depoliticisation, governance and the state which in themselves encourage us to engage with Mary Douglas’ (1999) work on the depoliticisation of risk, Ulrich Beck’s (2001) analysis of ‘new’ risks, Frank Furedi’s (2005) writing on the ‘politics of fear’, or even some comment on the link between politicisation and depoliticisation in the context of Bauman’s (2001) ‘liquid modernity’. But for now these temptations must be denied in favour of a more focused account of why this chapter’s attempt to ‘rethink depoliticisation’ actually matters.

Depoliticisation and (re)politicisation The chapter has made three arguments at three levels.At the broadest level it has offered a critique of the existing research literature on depoliticisation, on the basis that it has been constrained by a focus on governmental actors and institutions and a failure to acknowledge important social and discursive elements. As such, the mid-range contribution of this chapter has been to highlight the existence of different forms or stages of depoliticisation (as illustrated in Figure 1, above). The great value of this organising perspective – we do not claim to have offered anything as sophisticated as formal ‘theory’ or ‘model’ – is the manner in which it reveals the existence of both politicising and depoliticising processes. It is therefore possible – and as later contributions in this special edition will reveal in some detail – that specific themes or decisions will be the focus of competing pressures and narratives, as different social groups seek to either politicise, depoliticise or repoliticise certain issues. Rethinking depoliticisation (and our final argument) therefore requires scholars to acknowledge the interplay between at least three forms of depoliticisation:

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•

•

•

Governmental depoliticisation: focuses on the transfer of issues from the governmental sphere to the public sphere through the ‘delegation’ of those issues by politicians to arm’s-length bodies, judicial structures or technocratic rule-based systems that limit discretion Societal depoliticisation: involves the transition of issues from the public sphere to the private sphere and focuses on the existence of choice, capacity deliberation and the shift towards individualised responses to collective social challenges Discursive depoliticisation: involves the transfer of issues from the private realm to the ‘realm of necessity’ in which ‘things just happen’ and contingency is absent. It therefore focuses on the role of language and ideas to depoliticise certain issues and through this define them as little more as elements of fate

Three caveats are worth mentioning at this stage. First, we have avoided the positive pronoun (‘the three faces’) because other students of policy and politics (professors included) may well argue that we have omitted a fourth, fifth or sixth face. We offer a starting point and by no means a definitive statement or final map. Secondly, the value of this perspective is the manner in which it points to the existence, not of isolated or self-standing strategies but to the layering and interdependency of governmental, societal and discursive strategies in a range of policy areas.Therefore (and finally) these three faces of depoliticisation are best characterised and understood as concentric circles with areas of overlap and blurred boundaries. Indeed, it may well be that the most insightful research focuses not on discrete forms of depoliticisation or the conceptual landscape as a whole, but on the intersection and mutual dependency between specific forms. We do, however, hope that by making these arguments, and by surveying the intellectual terrain beyond the ‘governmental’ sphere, that we have made a fuzzy concept slightly clearer, and through this might facilitate a more sophisticated and eclectic account of ‘the depoliticised polity’. References Abolafia, M, 2012, Central banking and the triumph of technical rationality, in Cetina, K, Preda, A (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press Adams, T, 1998, The discursive construction of dementia care, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 28, 3, 614–21 Balzacq, T, 2005, The three faces of securitisation, European Journal of International Relations, 11, 2, 171–201 Balzacq, T, 2008, The policy tools of securitisation, Journal of Common Market Studies, 46, 1, 75–100 39

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Bauman, Z, 1999, In search of politics, Polity: Oxford Bauman, Z, 2001, Liquid modernity, Cambridge: Polity Beck, U, 2001, World risk society, Cambridge: Polity Press Berkhout, J, Sudulich, L, van der Brug,W, 2012, Does party system change matter?, Paper prepared for presentation at the Politicolgen Etmaal, Potsdam, May Beveridge, R, 2012, Consultants, depoliticization and arena-shifting in the policy process: privatizing water in Berlin, Policy Sciences, 45, 1, 47–68 Bevir, M, Rhodes, R, 2010, The state as cultural practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press Blühdorn, I, 2007, The third transformation of democracy, in Blühdorn, I, Jun, U (eds), Economic efficiency-democratic empowerment, Plymouth: Lexington Books Bode, I, Firbank, O, 2009, Barriers to co-governance, Policy Studies Journal, 37, 2, 97–116 Boggs, C, 2000, The end of politics, New York: Guilford Bonefeld, W, Burnham, P, 1998, The politics of counter inflationary credibility in Britain, 1990-94, Review of Radical Political Economics, 30, 1, 32–52 Bourdieu, P, 2003, Firing back:Against the tyranny of the market, London:Verso Brändström, A, Kuipers, S, 2003, From normal incidents to political crises, Government and Opposition, 38, 3, 279–305 Buofino, A, 2004, Between unity and plurality, New Political Science, 26, 1, 23–49 Burchell, G, Gordon, C, Mitchell, P (eds), 1991, The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Burke, E, 1985, Reflections on the French revolution, London: Allen & Unwin, 1790 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3, 2, 127–49 Buzan, B, Waever, O, DeWilde, J, 1998, Security, London: Lynne Rienner Carvalho, A, Burgess, J, 2005, Cultural circuits of climate change in UK broadsheet newspapers, 1985–2003, Risk Analysis, 25, 6, 1457–69 Coen, D, Thatcher, M, 2005, The new governance of markets and nonmajoritarian regulators, Governance, 18, 3, 329–46 Cohen, S, 2002, Folk devils and moral panics, London: Routledge Conrad, P, 2007, The medicalisation of society, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press Corry, O, 2012, Securitisation and riskification, Millenium, 40, 2, 235–58 Davis, K, Fisher, A, Kingsbury, B, 2012, Governance by indicators, Oxford: Oxford University Press Dean, M, 1999, Governmentality, London: Sage 40

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De Goede, M, 2004, Repoliticising financial risk, Economy and Society, 33, 2, 197–217 De Goede, M, 2008a, Money, media and the anti-politics of terrorist finance, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11, 3, 289–310 De Goede, M, 2008b, Beyond risk, Security Dialogue, 39, 2–3, 155–76 Denver, D, 2005,Valence politics, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7, 2, 292–9 Douglas, M, 1999, The depoliticisation of risk, in Douglas, M, Implicit meanings, London: Routledge, 218–31 Dyson, K, 2005, Binding the hands as a strategy for economic reform, German Politics, 14, 2, 224–47 Eberlein, B, Newman, A, 2008, Escaping the international governance dilemma?, Governance, 21, 1, 25–52 Edkins, J, 1999, Poststructuralism and international relations, London: Lynne Rienner Edkins, J, 2002, Forget trauma? Responses to September 11, International Relations, 16, 2, 243–56 Ferguson, J, 1990, The anti-politics machine, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Flinders, M, 2008, Delegated governance and the British state, Oxford: Oxford University Press Flinders, M, 2012, Defending politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2005,The domestic origins of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7, 4, 526–43 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006, Depoliticisation, British Politics, 1, 3, 293–318 Fukuyama, F, 1992, The end of history and the last man, London: Penguin Furedi, F, 2005, Politics of fear, London: Continuum Gamble, A, 2000, Politics and Fate, Cambridge: Polity Gaynor, N, 2011, In-Active Citizenship and the Depoliticization of Community Development in Ireland, Community Development Journal, 46, 1, 27–41 Giddens, A, 1994, Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics, CA: Stanford University Press Gregory, R, 2006, Theoretical faith and practical works, in Christaensen, T, Laegreid, P (eds), Autonomy and regulation: Coping with agencies in the modern state, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Grzymala-Busse,A, 2003, Political competition and the politicisation of the state in East Central Europe, Comparative Political Studies, 36, 10, 1123–47 Gunther, R, Sani, G, Shabad, G, 1988, Spain after Franco, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Habermas, J, 1996, The scientisation of politics and public opinion, in Outhwaite, W (ed), The Habermas reader, Cambridge: Polity Press 41

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Haines, H, 1979, Cognitive claims-making, enclosure, and the depoliticisation of social problems, The Sociological Quarterly, 20, 1, 119–30 Harder, L, 1996, Depoliticising insurgency, Studies in Political Economy, 50, 37–64 Harriss, J, 2002, Depoliticising development, London: LeftWord Hasnas, J, 2008, The depoliticisation of law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 9, 2, 529–52 Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Press Hooghe, L, Marks, G, 2008, A postfunctionalist theory of European integration, British Journal of Political Science, 39, 1, 1–23 Hoppe, R, 2009, Scientific advice and public policy, Poiesis and Praxis, 6, 3/4, 235–63 Hout,W, Robison, R, 2009, Governance and the depoliticisation of development, Abingdon: Routledge Howell, A, 2007, Victims or madmen?, International Political Sociology, 1, 1, 29–47 Huysmans, J, 2000, The European Union and the securitisation of migration, Journal of Common Market Studies, 38, 5, 751–77 Huysmans, J, 2006, The politics of insecurity, Abingdon: Routledge James, S, 2010, The rise and fall of Euro preparations, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12, 3, 368–86 Jasper, M, 1988, The political life cycle of technological controversies, Social Forces, 67, 2, 357–77 Jenkins, L, 2011, The difference genealogy makes, Political Studies, 59, 1, 156–74 Katz, R, Mair, P, 2009, The cartel party thesis: A restatement, Perspectives on Politics, 7, 4, 753–66 Keane, J, 2009, The life and death of democracy, London: Pocket Kerr, P. Byrne, C, Foster, E, 201, Theorising Cameronism, Political Studies Review, 9, 2, 193–207 Kettell, S, 2008, Does depoliticisation work?, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10, 4, 630–48 Kinchy, A, 2010, Anti-genetic engineering activism and scientised politics in the case of contaminated Mexican maize, Agriculture and Human Values, 27, 4, 505–17 Kinnvall, C, Nesbitt-Larking, P, 2010, The political psychology of (de) securitisation, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 6, 1051–70 Krippner, G, 2011, Capitalizing on crisis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

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Kunz, R, 2011, Depoliticisation through partnership in the field of migration, in Kunz, R, Lavenex, S, Panizzon, M (eds), Multilayered migration governance, Abingdon: Routledge Landwehr, C, Böhm, K, 2011, Delegation and institutional design in health-care rationing, Governance, 24, 4, 665–88 Langer, A, 2010, The politicisation of private persona, International Journal of Press/Politics, 15, 1, 60–76 Lemke, T, 2001, The birth of bio-politics, Economy and Society, 30, 2, 190–207 Lyons, G, M, Baldwin, D, A, McNemar, D, W, 1977, The ‘politicization’ issue in the UN specialized agencies, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 32, 4, 81–92 Lloyd, J, 2004, What the media do to our politics, London: Constable & Robinson Majone, G, 2001, Non-majoritarian institutions and the limits of democratic governance, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 157, 1, 57–78 Maman, D, Rosenheck, Z, 2011, The Israeli central bank, Abingdon: Routledge Marcussen, M, 2006, Institutional transformation, in Christaensen, T, Laegreid, P (eds), Autonomy and regulation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Marsh, D, 2011, The new orthodoxy, Public Administration, 89, 1, 32–48 Meyer-Sahling, JH, 2004, Civil service reform in post-communist Europe, West European Politics, 27, 1, 71–103 Mishra, N, 2011, Unravelling governance networks in development projects, Environment and Urbanization Asia, 2, 2, 159–63 Mouffe, C, 2005, On the political, Abingdon: Routledge Muntigl, P, 2002, Politicisation and Depoliticisation: Employment Policy in the European Union, in P. Chiltern and C. Shaffner (eds), Politics as text and talk, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 45–80 Needham, C, 2009, Policing with a smile, Public Administration, 87, 1, 97–116 Newman, P, 2009, Markets, experts and depoliticising decisions on major infrastructure, Urban Research and Practice, 2, 2, 158–68 Norris, P, 2011, Democratic deficit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Oosterlynck, S, Swyngedouw, E, 2010, Noise reduction, Environment and Planning A, 42, 7, 1577–94 O’Rourke, P, J, 2010, Don’t vote: it just encourages the bastards, New York: Atlantic Monthly Papadopoulos,Y, 2007, Problems of democratic accountability in network and multilevel governance, European Law Journal, 13, 4, 469–86 Parnaby, P, 2006, Crime prevention through environmental design, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 48, 1, 1–29 43

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Pellikan, H, Van Der Meer, T, De Lange, S, 2003, The road from a depoliticised to a centrifugal democracy, Acta Politica, 38, 1, 23–49 Peters, G, Pierre, J, 2005, Politicisation of the civil service in comparative perspective:The quest for control, London: Routledge Pickering, S, 2001, Common sense and original deviancy, Journal of Refugee Studies, 14, 2, 169–86 Pollitt, C, Talbot, C (eds), 2004, Unbundled government, London and New York: Routledge Power,T, 1991, Politicised democracy, Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, 33, 3, 75–112 Rancière, J, 1995, On the shores of politics, London:Verso Rancière, J, 2006, Hatred of democracy, London:Verso Randeria, S, 2007, Depoliticisation of democracy and judicialisation of politics, Theory, Culture and Society, 24, 4, 38–44 Roberts, A, 2010, The logic of discipline, Oxford: Oxford University Press Rogers, C, 2009a, From social contract to social contrick: The depoliticisation of economic policy-making under Harold Wilson, 197475, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 11, 4, 634–651 Rogers, C, 2009b, The politics of economic policy making in Britain: A re-assessment of the 1976 IMF crisis, Politics and Policy, 37, 5, 971–994 Rosanvallon, P, 2008, Counter-democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ruiz-Rodriguez, L, 2005, Polarisation in the Chilean party system, Barcelona: Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials Sagarika Dutt, S, 1995, The politicisation of the United Nations specialized agencies, Lewiston, NY: Mellen University Press Salter, M, 2008, Securitisation and desecuritisation, Journal of International Relations and Development, 11, 4, 321–49 Salter, M, 2011, When securitisation fails, in Balzacq, T (ed), Securitisation Theory, Abingdon: Routledge Salter, M, Piche, G, 2011, The securitisation of the US-Canada border in American political discourse, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 44, 4, 929–51 Sartori, G, 1970, Concept misformation in comparative politics, The American Political Science Review, 64, 4, 1033–1053 Schmidt,V,A, 2010,Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’, European Political Science Review, 2, 1, 1–25 Schmitt, C, 2007, The concept of the political: Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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Sim, S, F, 2006, Obliterating the political: One-party ideological dominance and the personalization of news in Singapore, Journalism Studies, 7, 4, 575–592 Sharone, O, 2007, Constructing unemployed job seekers as professional workers: The depoliticizing work–game of job searching, Qualitative Sociology, 30, 4, 403–416 Shin, M, 2001, The politicisation of place in Italy, Political Geography, 20, 3, 331–52 Smith, J, T, 1849, Government by commissions illegal and pernicious, London: S, Sweet Smith, M, 1991, From policy community to issue network: Salmonella in eggs and the new politics of food, Public Administration, 69, 2, 235–255 Swanson, J, 2007, Economic common sense and the depoliticisation of the economic, Political Research Quarterly, 61, 1, 56–67 Swyngedouw, E, 2011, Whose environment?, Ambient y Sociedad, 14, 2, 69–87 Thatcher, M, Stone Sweet, A, 2002, Theory and practice of delegation to non-majoritarian institutions, West European Politics, 25, 1, 1–22 Thompson, D, F, 1980, Moral responsibility of public officials:The problem of many hands, The American Political Science Review, 74, 4, 905–916 Timmermans, A, Scholten, P, 2006,The political flow of wisdom: science institutions as policy venues in the Netherlands, Journal of European Public Policy, 13, 7, 1104–1118 Trombetta, M, 2008, Environmental security and climate change, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21, 4, 585–602 Watson, M, 2002, The institutional paradoxes of monetary orthodoxy, Review of International Political Economy, 9, 1, 183–96 Watson, M, Hay, C, 2004, The discourse of globalisation and the logic of no alternative, Policy & Politics, 13, 3, 289–305 Webb, D, 2006, Little platoons or ignorant armies?, The Review of Politics, 68, 3, 503–06 Weiss, G, Wodak, R, 2000, European Union discourses on employment, Concepts and Transformation, 5, 1, 29–42 Widmaier, W, Blyth, M, Seabrooke, L, 2007, Exogenous shocks or endogenous constructions?, International Studies Quarterly, 51, 4, 747–59 Wodak, R, 2011, The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Žižek, S, 2002, For they know not what they do (2nd edn), London:Verso

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CHAPTER THREE

Depoliticisation, governance and political participation Paul Fawcett and David Marsh

Introduction The study of governance has become almost a growth industry, particularly in public policy discussion and research (Chhotray and Stoker, 2009; LeviFaur, 2012).There has also been an increase, which is clearly not unrelated, in work on political participation, looking particularly at the way in which traditional forms have declined, while new forms have emerged (Dalton, 2008; Bang, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011; Norris, 2011). Both these sets of literature are clearly linked to the growing interest in the putative process of depoliticisation, which is reflected in this volume and elsewhere. For example, governance is often presented as a depoliticised and managerial process in which policy decisions can be reached through networked and collaborative interactions between rational and consensus-seeking policy experts (Torfing et al, 2012). Similarly, declining levels of individual political participation are often taken as evidence of a depoliticised citizenry which presents a major governance problem, reflecting a decline in the legitimacy of government and, thus, problems in developing and implementing policy. Given these three literatures are clearly related, it’s surprising that there had been little attempt to link them.This chapter addresses this omission, arguing that, by juxtaposing these literatures, we can both illuminate important issues in each literature and, crucially, suggest how we can repoliticise processes of governance and political participation. We develop this argument over three substantive sections. The first section reviews the depoliticisation literature, referring particularly to the Flinders and Wood chapter that introduces this volume. Subsequently, the second section focuses on the links between forms of depoliticisation and modes of governance, in essence arguing that a metagovernance approach can make most sense of the ‘evidence’ for depoliticisation and provide a way of understanding both why there has been an increase in depoliticisation and, at the same time, a process of repoliticisation. The final section then addresses the changing nature of political participation, arguing that we are witnessing both depoliticisation and repoliticisation,

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and that both political scientists and governments need to recognise and respond to both of these processes.

Depoliticisation: deconstructing Flinders and Wood We agree with Flinders and Wood that: ‘empirical interest in the topic of depoliticisation has not been matched by conceptual precision’. They respond by identifying three faces of depoliticisation, although they place more emphasis on what they call the societal and discursive faces, because, they argue, the governmental face is: ‘the dominant lens’. We accept that depoliticisation extends beyond the purely governmental face, but suggest that their approach can be developed by focusing on four other issues, which are important for our discussion here: the extent to which depoliticisation is a ‘new’ phenomenon; the deeply normative nature of the discussion on depoliticisation; the narrow understanding of ‘politics’ in the literature; and why, how and in whose interest such depoliticisation occurs. We consider each of these issues in further detail below, but begin by briefly outlining Flinders and Wood’s argument, which we subsequently critique. The three faces of depoliticisation

Flinders and Wood begin by identifying governmental depoliticisation, which they further divide into three separate strands.The first strand reflects longstanding debates and concerns about the appropriate relationship between a politicised political class and a depoliticised, neutral, bureaucracy. Here, the debate is typically about how far bureaucracies have departed from the Weberian ideal and how politicians have used patronage to appoint favoured outsiders into influential positions within government. These developments are typically cast in a negative light as: ‘jobs for the boys’; an attempt by politicians to increase their power base; or a threat to the bureaucracy’s neutrality, impartiality and autonomy. The second, related, strand operates with a similar jaundiced view of politicians, but sees the answer in: ‘depoliticised forms of regulatory governance’. The argument is that regulatory governance structures and institutions can shield policy areas from political interference and decisions that might otherwise be taken for partisan or short-term electoral reasons. In contrast, the third strand views depoliticisation as a type of statecraft. So, politicians and governments pursue a depoliticisation strategy in order to strengthen their position by, for example, shifting blame onto third parties and reducing their own accountability in the process.This strand also has a more critical edge, so it is often concerned with showing that putatively technocratic or managerial decisions are, in fact, highly political and should be subject to 48

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contestation and debate (here, see the chapter by Foster, Kerr and Byrne in this volume, which utilises the concept of governmentality). Flinders and Wood discuss societal depoliticisation at more length. The core argument here is interesting as it is at odds with much contemporary social theory and certainly with the focus on late modernity that underpins much of the recent literature on governance and, especially, discussions of network governance (see below). Flinders and Wood see societal depoliticisation as a process that has ‘hollowed out’ not the state, but, rather, the nature and quality of public debate.As such, this argument relies heavily on putative ‘evidence’ that the public is increasingly disengaged from politics, which is leading to declining levels of political participation, higher levels of political apathy and a uninterested democratic culture.The reasons identified for this disengagement are varied, but arguments typically draw on factors such as: declining levels of duty norms, social capital and membership of political parties and organised interest groups; and the death of ideology and/or the trivialisation of public debate, by either the media or the rise of celebrity politics. However, like governmental depoliticisation, it is government and politicians who are, once again, blamed for their failure to redress declining levels of interest in the political process.While there may be some truth in this claim, we would nevertheless argue that a more significant issue is the way in which the mainstream literature has depoliticised important aspects of political participation.As such, we would argue that critical approaches which focus upon societal depoliticisation need to highlight the inherently political nature of a great deal of citizen engagement/political participation that is currently defined as apolitical.We will return to this point below, but this argument is clearly important as it not only changes the way in which we analyse political participation, but also how it is practiced by politicians and others (for a different, if related, take on the need for a broader conceptualisation of both depoliticisation and politicisation, see the chapter by Bates, Jenkins and Amery in relation to reproductive technologies in this volume). The third face, discursive depoliticisation, is closely related to societal depoliticisation.According to Flinders and Wood, it involves the promotion of a particular position on an issue and the ‘denial of choice’, as seen, for example, in the response to a moral panic. As the name ‘discursive depoliticisation’ suggests, however, the focus is no longer on institutions or actors, but on how ideas and language, and the form that they take, depoliticises certain topics, by making them more or less legitimate, more or less rational and more or less contingent (again, see the chapter by Bates, Jenkins and Amery in this volume). This is achieved by creating a discursive environment in which a complex policy issue is simplified, which then provides the context within which a ‘common sense’ solution 49

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can be promoted to the relative exclusion of all others (see Stevenson and Dryzek, 2012). As such, discursive depoliticisation focuses upon deconstructing the dominant interpretation and promoting the possibility of difference. Of course, this position is clearly linked to deliberative and post-structuralist approaches, although it also appears in arguments about how ideology constrains choice. Here, the key difference concerns the role attributed to interests and how they are constituted. This is an issue that we discuss in further detail below. However, next we address four aspects of the depoliticisation literature which could be used to extend Flinders and Wood’s overview and which are important for our discussion here. Four issues with the depoliticisation literature Is depoliticisation a new phenomenon?

The question of whether depoliticisation is new might appear tangential, but, in our view, it is crucial. The literature typically implies, without demonstrating, that depoliticisation is a relatively new phenomenon.This view is underpinned by a more or less explicit argument that contemporary society has become more complex, which is typically linked with: the transition from government to governance; the replacement of hierarchy by networks (or networks and markets); the ‘hollowing out’ of the state; the emergence of more complex identities, which are no longer rooted in factors such as class, gender and ethnicity; and higher levels of individual self-reflexivity, manifested in declining levels of mainstream political participation and the replacement of ‘duty norms’ by ‘engagement norms’.1 Some of these changes, for example, the development of governance, particularly network governance, are seen as underpinning governmental depoliticisation. In contrast, other changes, notably higher levels of individual self-reflexivity, a growth in identity politics and a replacement of duty norms by engagement norms, are at the core of societal and discursive depoliticisation. However, the main point here is that these changes, often associated with arguments about a shift to ‘late modernity’, are viewed as the proximate cause of the development of, or sometimes the increase in, depoliticisation. As such, the extent to which depoliticisation is a recent phenomenon becomes a crucial issue. In our view, this question remains under-explored because most of the literature starts from the assumption that depoliticisation is a relatively recent phenomenon. For example, Flinders and Buller (2006, 293, emphasis added; see also Burnham, 2001, 128) have argued that: ‘in recent years it [depoliticisation] has become a significant issue for scholars interested in British politics, governance and public policy.’They base their conclusion 50

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on the growing number of disciplines that now use the concept from its first use in economics in 1974 to its current use in more than 13 disciplines, although, it is notable, that the rest of the literature that they cite dates from either the 1990s or 2000s (Flinders and Buller, 2006,Table 1, 294). Although we are willing to accept that the term depoliticisation is recent, at least some of the processes described are as old as politics itself. Indeed, we would argue that depoliticisation, particularly governmental depoliticisation, has always been a common tactic used by governments; only the terminology has changed. As such, any assessment of whether depoliticisation is increasing needs to consider its various techniques and pseudonyms, rather than merely considering the number of times that ‘depoliticisation’ as a concept has been deployed. This would require a detailed empirical analysis that is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here we can only offer more modest evidence that challenges the novelty of depoliticisation as a form of governmental statecraft.We do so by pointing to the work of political theorists and the actions of politicians respectively. Machiavelli saw governmental depoliticisation as a crucial aspect of statebuilding; a tool to be used when necessary. For example, when discussing statecraft, he addresses the way in which Cesare Borgia used his subordinate, Remirro de Orco, to subdue disobedience in the newly captured province of Romagna. Borgia put Remirro in charge of Romagna and Machiavelli (cited in Deutsch and Fornieri, 2009, 201, emphasis added) asserts: In a short time Remirro reduced it to peace and unity, with the very greatest reputation for himself. Then the duke judged that such excessive authority was not necessary, because he feared that it might become hateful…And because he knew that past rigors had generated some hatred for Remirro, to purge the spirits of that people and to gain them entirely to himself, he wished to show that if any cruelty had been committed, this had not come from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having seized this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied. Clearly a case of governmental depoliticisation! Moving on a few centuries, the 400-plus UK Royal Commissions established during the nineteenth century provide additional evidence of government-driven depoliticisation. Almost by definition, Royal Commissions are prima facie examples of depoliticisation, providing a way for government to incorporate external 51

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expertise into policy making, while both remaining at arm’s-length from any deliberations and retaining control over any policy decisions. Indeed, as Lauriat (2010, 25) has argued, many Commissions: ‘exist adjacent to, but outside, government; they have no legislative function and little if any control over what is done subsequently with their reports’. The Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws, which was established in 1832 and was, perhaps, the most important Royal Commission of the nineteenth century, provides a particularly good example of how this can work in practice. This is because it allowed the Whig government to stay one step removed from the policy making process, while always in the knowledge that the Commission, in general, and Nassau Senior, the Commission’s Chair, in particular, were, like the government, supporters of Bentham and utilitarianism. Indeed, Rees (2001) argues that Senior had written the report before the evidence was collected, with much of it having appeared in his earlier report on combinations and strikes. Things change, but much remains the same! We can extend the same argument to societal and discursive depoliticisation. For Flinders and Wood, societal depoliticisation revolves around the issue of declining political participation and a consequent impoverishment of political debate. We shall contest this assertion below, but our point here is narrower and concerns the way in which political participation has always ebbed and flowed over time. To make an easy point, in the UK, women over the age of 21 have only enjoyed the same voting rights as men since 1928, and those aged between 18 and 21 since 1969. Similarly, while turnout has declined in UK parliamentary elections, it has never been high in sub-national elections. So, Rallings and Thrasher (2003, 700) argue that: ‘Historical data from Birmingham and London shows that ever since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1919 local electoral turnout has rarely risen above 40%.’ Of course, none of this is to say that things haven’t changed in terms of forms of political participation, but it is a plea for some historical perspective. Our argument is much the same for discursive depoliticisation. If moral panics are a key aspect of this process, then they are not a recent phenomenon, indeed the list is almost endless and would include events such as: the witch-hunts of Renaissance Europe; anti-Semitic pogroms; the Stalinist purges; and various red scares, notably McCarthyism. More recently, subjects as varied as Satanic ritual abuse and paedophilia have also generated their own moral panics.

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The normative view of politicians

Our point here is simple. In essence, all three faces of depoliticisation see politicians, and politics, as, at least, a large part of the problem; in our view, this is part of a broader trend towards the demonisation of politics and politicians. We recognise that this is a strong term, but suggest that reversing the process by which politicians and the state have come to be criticised in many advanced liberal democracies is one of the key normative challenges facing modern governance. Of course, there are differences within the literature on depoliticisation about why politicians have come to be demonised. So, the first two strands of governmental depoliticisation see it as a largely positive development that curtails governments and politicians from exercising excessive power.2 This is achieved by a variety of measures, such as: introducing new rules that attempt to protect the bureaucracy from political interference; limiting the number of political appointees and their functions; and/or imposing new regulatory regimes that limit ministerial autonomy in certain policy areas.The criteria here for evaluating depoliticisation is opaque, along with the reasons why such depoliticisation takes place, although most accounts appear to assume that it is because politicians act in their own self-interest. In contrast, the third strand sees governmental depoliticisation as a problem and a highly questionable development at the normative level. This is because it often involves government using broader engagement, with experts and/or citizens, as a way of legitimising its decisions and/or distancing itself from blame if things go wrong. In other cases, depoliticisation occurs because the state and politicians are responding to the material interests of powerful groups in society (see Burnham, 2014). So, the reason for depoliticisation varies, but, in all these cases, it is politicians who are demonised, because they are self-interested actors who seek re-election, strategic actors who want to avoid blame or complicit actors who do not stand up and ‘take on’ big business. The societal and discursive faces also see depoliticisation as a bad thing, although the attention obviously shifts to other areas. In the case of the societal face, the quantity and quality of political participation and political debate is reduced. As discussed above, this leads to lower levels of civic engagement and reduced democratic input into the political process, which may, ultimately, threaten the state and its democratic legitimacy. The overall response from within this perspective is to look at ways to encourage greater levels of participation by either promoting greater public engagement, on the grounds that this will lead to greater civic activism (a more ‘bottom up’ perspective), or through institutional reforms to the electoral system, parliaments, party organisations and existing power 53

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sharing arrangements, which will change political elite behaviour, by altering the incentive structures within which they operate (a more ‘top down’ solution). In the case of the discursive face, the existence of a dominant discourse/ narrative restricts choice and again impoverishes political debates and political inputs. Often, the implication is that this results from the government manipulating moral panics towards its own ends or acting to perpetuate neo-liberal policies. Conversely, politicians and the state may be inactive, failing to stand up to those who either manipulate moral panics or promote neo-liberal ideas. As such, there are variations between the three faces, and between the strands within the governmental face, but they share one crucial thing in common; they tend to be highly critical of politicians and politics, at least as it is currently practiced. This an issue to which we will return. A narrow understanding of ‘politics’

The three faces also share a narrow conception of ‘politics’, which is both underpinned by, and shapes, the demonisation of politicians. By this we do not mean that the literature fails to deconstruct the divide between the public and private spheres, indeed Flinders and Wood’s chapter does this admirably. Rather, we would argue that the literature has concentrated on the way in which mainstream forms of political participation (voting, party membership, trade union membership, and so on) have declined, while failing to recognise that new forms of political participation are growing apace (Norris, 2011). In large part, this reflects the way in which most of the literature concentrates on the input, rather than the output, side of politics. Both perspectives are clearly crucial, but they raise different issues. The input side of politics is concerned with what Bang (2009a, 123) has called a politics-policy approach, which places a priority on ensuring that: ‘conflicting interests (and identities) acquire free and equal access to, and recognition in, political decision-making processes’. In contrast, the depoliticisation literature hardly discusses the output side of politics.3 This means that it makes a distinction between administration, on the output side, and politics, on the input side, but, crucially, the output side is seen as almost ‘extra-political’. Here, Bang makes the fairly obvious point that politics occurs on both the input and the output side and, indeed, argues that, in late modernity, we are moving from an era of politics-policy, to one in which policy precedes politics; in which output politics is becoming more important. We can see the importance of this point if we briefly consider recent developments in political participation. We, like Bang, would emphasise 54

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that groups like Occupy are not directed towards the input side of politics, but rather to the output side (Bang and Jensen, 2013). Many of those involved, whom Bang calls ‘everyday makers’, do so because they want to make a difference on policies which directly affect them; as Bang (2010), and Dalton (2008), argue, they have engagement norms, not duty norms. The point here is that we need to focus on politics on the output, as well as the input, side. To emphasise then, the main issue for the depoliticisation literature is that it has tended to focus on only the input side, which has meant that it has used a restricted definition of the political that sidelines those new forms of political participation that are more output-oriented. Given that perspective, they have also, almost inevitably, seen politicians as a problem, if not the problem, because they are failing to engage citizens, and concentrated on ways to either change incentive structures within the formal political system or introduce reforms that would promote greater civic engagement. However, both approaches work within an input frame that is concerned with how citizens can get their voice or interests heard, rather than an output frame, that is much more about belonging to a political community and taking part in concrete action to address pressing problems in the ‘here and now’. This means that how we define what we mean by ‘the political’ is a key problem, not only in the literature on depoliticisation, but also in the political science discipline more broadly. Whose interests are served by depoliticisation?

It is revealing that, although the depoliticisation literature focuses on the input side of politics, and, thus, on how interests are represented and responded to within government, they don’t address the question of whose interests are served by the processes that they identify. Indeed, most of the depoliticisation literature is, unsurprisingly, deeply politicist; albeit with a narrow understanding of ‘politics’. There is no consideration of the way in which politics, on both the input and the output side, is shaped, but not determined, by structural inequalities. For example, an emphasis upon discursive depoliticisation is most often associated with a post-structuralist position which contends that there is no extra-discursive realm; so, material factors have no causal power. Elsewhere, material interests are introduced, but only utilising a narrow rationalist logic which contends that politicians and civil servants engage in depoliticisation out of self-interest (the relationship between depoliticisation and material relations is developed in Burnham’s contribution to this volume). In contrast, we would suggest that acts of depoliticisation are affected by the structural context within which these decisions are taken. This suggests that the depoliticisation 55

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literature would benefit from further examination of how material factors interact with ideas, which is an argument that one of us has developed at further length elsewhere (see Marsh, 2009). This brief engagement with the literature on depoliticisation raises at least two significant issues that we develop below. The first issue concerns the relationship between depoliticisation and changing modes of governance. So, governmental depoliticisation raises immediate questions about how governments govern, particularly given the shift towards more market and networked based approaches. In contrast, societal and, to an extent, discursive depoliticisation, have focused on the input side of politics and, particularly, on how depoliticisation is linked with declining levels of citizen engagement and political participation. For this reason, the next section focuses on the putative relationship between depoliticisation and the changing nature of governance, while the final section examines the relationship between depoliticisation and changing forms of political participation.

Modes of governance and depoliticisation In our view, the literature on governance has two main lessons, one negative and one positive, to offer anyone interested in depoliticisation: first, it shares many of the problems that characterise the depoliticisation literature; second, more recent developments in the metagovernance literature offer a potential way in which to deal with some of these problems. As such, in this section, we advance and defend three claims about the relationship between the literatures on governance and depoliticisation. First, we argue that each of the three faces of depoliticisation tends to privilege one mode of governance over another when explaining depoliticisation. Second, we contend that processes of depoliticisation are actually often metagoverned, which, in our view, means that much depoliticisation takes place in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’.Third, we argue that the state is the most likely, but not the only, metagovernor. An unnecessarily narrow view of governance

In our view, the three faces of depoliticisation see the articulation between hierarchy, markets and networks very differently, but, nevertheless, tend to privilege one mode of governing over another in explaining the origins and processes of depoliticisation. This is interesting because the governance literature has increasingly recognised how modes of governing are embedded within one another, rather than on seeing one mode of governing operating in isolation from another. This argument has 56

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resonance with Flinders and Wood’s observation that the three faces of depoliticisation ‘are rarely independent or distinct’, but are more likely to be in ‘a dynamic and inevitably fluid’ relationship with one another. We begin, in this section, by outlining the connections that exist between the three faces of depoliticisation and hierarchy, markets and networks, as three modes of governance, before we develop the argument that processes of depoliticisation actually take place in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ (Scharpf, 1999). As we have already established, the first two strands of the governmental face are clearly sceptical towards government and politicians and identify depoliticisation as a putative solution to problems within the state. However, their response is not so much to reject hierarchy as a mode of governing, but, rather, to create more dispersed forms of hierarchy, through institutional reforms that either break up the state or impose new rules and regulations within previously unregulated spheres of political, social and economic life. These processes and their outcome have been contested in the literature on governance. One interpretation argues that governmental depoliticisation has led to a decline in the state’s capacity to steer, due to the increasingly delegated environment within which policy making and service delivery now takes place (Rhodes, 1997). This interpretation stresses networks as a mode of governing. An alternative interpretation, based on a more state-centric approach, argues that depoliticisation has actually strengthened state capacity, because it frees the state from certain obligations (Offe, 2009).This latter interpretation is closer to the position which sees governmental depoliticisation as a form of statecraft, suggesting that depoliticisation has become a key tool in the state’s armory. It is also possible to see how different views about the nature of governance are embedded within the two other faces of depoliticisation, although, as we shall see below, the focus of these faces has been more on citizen engagement/political participation, rather than governance. Here, arguments regarding societal depoliticisation are underpinned by the putative ascendancy of the market mode of governing and the associated critique of hierarchy and networks. For example, Hay (2007) has argued that rising levels of public disillusionment and distrust towards politics reflects a broader neo-liberal discourse, within which the state has been constantly sidelined, and characterised as a ‘second best’ alternative to markets. There are also parallels between current debates taking place within governance theory and the discursive face of depoliticisation, most clearly in the ‘interpretive turn’ within governance studies, which places a particular emphasis on agency, ideas and discourses in explaining how, 57

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and why, governments act (Rhodes, 2007; Bevir and Rhodes, 2010).Thus, according to Bevir and Rhodes (2010), governance becomes a negotiated, deliberative and decentred process in which traditions play a weak mediating role in shaping a situated agent’s understanding of the problem at hand, as well as any putative solutions that s/he may develop. As such, the focus is on networks, although differences exist between interpretivists, who are deeply pessimistic about whether networks can be steered, and others, who point to the role that can be played by story-telling, shared meanings and persuasion (Sørensen, 2006; Bevir, 2010). These arguments relate back to discursive depoliticisation, given its interest in analysing and decentring the ‘everyday’ performance of governance (Rhodes, 2012). In our view, this approach is very useful for identifying the role played by the construction of narrative and meaning in processes of governance and depoliticisation, but it lacks a sufficiently well-developed notion of material interests. The metagovernance of depoliticisation

The three faces of depoliticisation are therefore underpinned by different positions on governance and, in our view, this has led them to operate with an unnecessarily narrow view of governance. Here, we would argue that the literature on metagovernance provides a more sophisticated understanding of how different modes of governance interrelate and that this could, in turn, help to develop a more advanced and complete understanding of depoliticisation, given the connections that we have established above (for another view on the importance of metagovernance, see Jessop, 2014). The literature on metagovernance is diverse (compare, for example: Baker and Stoker, 2012; Bell and Hindmoor, 2009; Jessop, 2004, 2011; Klijn and Edelenbos, 2006; Kooiman and Jentoft, 2009; Meulemann, 2008; Sørensen, 2006; Sørensen and Torfing, 2006;Torfing et al, 2012, chapter 7; Torfing, 2012), but there is broad agreement that it refers to ‘the governance of governance’, which is defined by Jessop (2004, 70) as: the organization of the conditions for governance (involving) the judicious mixing of market, hierarchy, and networks to achieve the best possible outcomes from the viewpoint of those engaged in metagovernance. In this sense it also means the organization of the conditions of governance in terms of their structurally inscribed strategic selectivity, that is, in terms of their asymmetrical privileging of some outcomes over others. (see also Jessop, 2011)

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While metagovernance is concerned with articulating the links that exist between the three modes of governing (Meuleman, 2008), there are crucial differences within the literature, particularly on the role played by interests. For example, Sørensen and Torfing (2006; Sørensen, 2006) largely view metagovernance as an issue about discursive and, to an extent, societal depoliticisation. To them, power is not something exercised by individuals or groups and, because there is no extra-discursive space, there are no interests driving the actions of the state, or, indeed, other agents.4 So, for them, the question of in whose interest depoliticisation operates is a deeply problematic one. Rather, power is inscribed in institutions, processes and, indeed, people. So, citizens live within a context that is inscribed by the three faces of depoliticisation, although societal and discursive depoliticisation remain the most important ones, particularly given the trend towards governance. In contrast, for Jessop (2004, 2011), almost the defining feature of metagovernance is the shadow of hierarchy. So, it is the state that usually decides on the balance between, and to a large extent the operation of, the three modes of governance. As such, there is a clear link between this approach towards metagovernance and arguments concerning statecraft as a form of governmental depoliticisation. It is interesting that Jessop has not discussed at any length in whose interest metagovernance works. However, his separate work on cultural political economy suggests that he would see metagovernance as a process that takes place within, and, in large part, is shaped by, the broader power relations that exist in society (Jessop, 2010). Here, we would want to go further to suggest that metagovernance reflects the patterns of structural inequality in society and that this is an issue that needs to be explored further. Depoliticisation in the shadow of hierarchy

This leads directly to our third point; the argument that processes of depoliticisation take place in the shadow of hierarchy, with the state being the most likely metagovernor. In our view, this approach addresses existing weaknesses in some strands of the depoliticisation literature, particularly, perhaps, the societal and discursive strands, in which it almost seems as though depoliticisation is a process without an agent. Here, we briefly develop this point by addressing the relationship between positions on governance and theories of power. Subsequently, we argue that, while the relationship between governmental, societal and discursive depoliticisation may be a dynamic and fluid one, depoliticisation, as a process, usually takes place in the shadow of statecraft, as a form of governmental depoliticisation.

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We can begin to examine these issues by starting with those positions that stress hierarchy. Here, the state is often viewed as the dominant actor, although, of course, that leaves open the question of the extent to which the state serves a particular interest, a question which takes us into one of the most contested areas in political science, namely theories of power and the state. So, one might argue, as is clear in the first two strands of Flinders and Wood’s governmental depoliticisation, that politicians and/or bureaucrats forward their self-interest, or, as is evident in the third strand, that the state forwards the interests of some particular elite within society. This third strand would reflect a more elitist or Marxist position. In contrast, the network governance argument would seem to point more towards an elite pluralist position, with the state acting in concert with a variety of experts, who represent various interests in society, in order to produce the policy outcomes that are necessary to cope with the complexities associated with the late modern era; so network governance often has a strong managerialist tone. Here, the issue becomes a question about what the relationship is between the network and ordinary citizens, at least from a more input-oriented perspective. Of course, what the depoliticisation literature is suggesting is that ordinary citizens are being depoliticised, if not as a result of deliberate actions by the state, then as a result of societal or discursive processes, although, often, as argued earlier, this is a process that takes place without a clearly identifiable set of agents. In all these cases, it seems that it is the interests of the network that are served. In a system where markets are dominant, then the most likely argument is that it is economic interests that are served, although, of course, there would be those who would see the interests of the market, and the dominant economic interests in society, as synonymous with the national interest. Hay’s (2007) argument clearly falls into the former category, as he suggests that societal depoliticisation takes place because the dominance of neo-liberal ideas has led inevitably, and understandably, to declining levels of interest and participation in politics. In our view, the three faces of depoliticisation are actually embedded in one another, with depoliticisation, in its various different forms, often occuring in the shadow of statecraft as a specific form of governmental depoliticisation. This is similar to the argument in the metagovernance literature that suggests that actors usually negotiate under a shadow of hierarchy that sets broad parameters and limits on the way in which markets and networks operate (Scharpf, 1999; Börzel, 2010; Meuleman, 2008). If we accept that this is the case, then we would argue that it is the state which is the most likely metagovernor. The state may be a metagovernor, involved, at least in part, in depoliticisation, but that doesn’t mean, as much of the literature claims, that 60

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contemporary polities are marked by a decline in political participation and growing levels of depoliticisation. Rather, as we argue in the next section, politics is changing and the current era is marked as much by processes of repoliticisation, as by those of depoliticisation.

Politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation As we emphasised, we have very significant issues with the literature on declining levels of political participation, which is crucial to arguments about societal and discursive depoliticisation. It operates, like the depoliticisation literature more broadly, with a very narrow definition of ‘politics’ that focuses on the input side. In contrast, as Bang argues, the new forms of political participation which are clearly emerging mean that what is occurring is not depoliticisation, or rather not just, or even mainly, depoliticisation, but, rather, depoliticisation, repoliticisation and, most of all, the remaking of politics (see Norris, 2011; Bang, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011; Bang and Sørensen, 1999; Bang and Esmark, 2009; Dalton, 2008; Marsh and Vromen, 2012). So, individuals are only being depoliticised to the extent that ‘political scientists’ and the discipline ‘at large’ are operating with a narrow, and Bang would say out-of-date, understanding of politics and ‘the political’. As such, to Bang, the problem is not about politicisation or depoliticisation, and the role of the government in that process, but, rather, about why politicians and government are blamed, in fact ‘othered’, when they nevertheless remain crucial to the policy process and the output side of politics. So, the governance problem for Bang revolves around how we can convince citizens that government and politicians are necessary, while, at the same time, persuading governments that they need to be ‘honest’ about the problems that they face and, in particular, about the politics of necessity involved in dealing with these problems. This, in turn, requires a shift from a focus solely on input politics to a greater focus on output politics. Here, we want to argue two points. First, it is important to reassert the importance of politics and argue that the demonising of it is one of the most dangerous features of the debates on depoliticisation. Second, and of course relatedly, we need a repoliticisation which goes far beyond calls for institutional reform. In separate books, Hay (2007) and Stoker (2006) argue for the importance of politics, an argument which we wholeheartedly endorse. However, their focus is largely on societal and discursive depoliticisation and on input politics. Here, we briefly consider the arguments of both before focusing on Bang’s work. 61

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Stoker’s (2006, p. 4) has a broadly mainstream understanding of politics: Politics is constructed in order to express conflicts and allow different interests to shape our collective endeavours. So, politics is about trying to get what you want for yourselves, or alongside others, for a common cause. Politics is also ultimately something to do with rule, with the ordering of our societies. Politics is about reaching a compromise, and finding ways for those who disagree to rub along with each other. Here, politics is about conflict and compromise between interests, within bounds, and with a consensus about the ways in which differences will be resolved by a legitimate authority.Three other points are crucial. First, interests are pre-constituted; they are the building blocks of politics, not the outcome of politics. Second, this is, in essence, an arena, rather than a process, definition of politics.Third, this definition deals with input politics, rather than output, politics. Hay’s (2007, 61–70) discussion of politics is more sophisticated. He identifies 12 senses in which the word ‘politics’ is used (Hay, 2007, 61–2). Hay (2007, 65–70) contends that all 12 of these definitions share four features: choice; the capacity for agency; (public) deliberation; and a social context. As such, while Stoker has a fairly narrow definition of politics, Hay’s is broader.At the same time, he doesn’t see interests as pre-constituted, but, rather, to a large extent, as constituted by, and through, the discourses of neo-liberalism and globalisation, in a ‘political’ process that works by depoliticising large spheres of activity. Nevertheless, his focus is still on input, rather than output, politics. Bang’s (2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011) understanding of politics is more challenging. As already indicated, he traces a move from politics-policy to policy-politics, which he associates with the increased complexity, risk and reflexivity that has emerged with the transition to late-modernity. In Bang’s view, this leads to a crucial change in the nature of democracy and ‘the political’ more broadly construed. In the politics-policy mode, the focus was on the demand-side of politics or input politics. So, to Bang, this is the model within which Stoker is operating, given his concerns with how pre-constituted political agents, individuals, but also classes, gain access to, and recognition in, the political process. In contrast, policy-politics focuses on the supply-side, or output politics, concentrating on how political elites from the public, private and voluntary sectors are networking in order to produce and deliver the policies wanted by the more reflexive individuals characteristic of late modernity.

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For Bang then, the old politics was an input-based politics, while the new politics is an output-based politics. More specifically, Bang, like Hay and many others, doesn’t see interests as pre-constituted, rather they are constituted through politics and are ever-changing. In addition, in a sense, Bang reverses the feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’, because he sees the political as personal; so, citizens’ political identities are project identities, not identities rooted in a political party or in class, gender or ethnicity.This means that, unlike Hay, he doesn’t see identities as constituted through the discourse of neo-liberalism, or the process of globalisation, but, rather, through the actions of agents in a political community, albeit a ‘thin’ political community, characterised by interactions through social media, rather than face-to-face. So, Bang (2009b, 104–5) argues that ‘identity politics’ doesn’t relate to input politics: but rather reflect[s] an engagement with a variety of governance projects that attempt to produce good governance on the output side. Such citizens place concerns for good governance before worries over democracy, because they rate their concrete and ethical involvement in particular political actions higher than the abstract…and ideologically-driven form(s) of participation. From this perspective, there is both depoliticisation, to the extent that citizens are not involved in formal politics, and repoliticisation, given that many citizens are now more likely to be involved in ‘re-making’ politics on their own terms, but only when they think that they can influence the outputs generated by the political system as members of a broader political community. To put it most clearly, while the decline in participation in input politics is evident, there is not a decline in the willingness of citizens to become involved in output politics. So, what is the problem? For Hay, a key part of the problem is academic economics, with its commitment to positive economics and, for the most part, neo-liberal policies. In contrast, Bang thinks that part of the problem is mainstream political science, particularly in the political participation field, but also in the depoliticisation literature, because, in his view, most of this literature concentrates on input politics and reduces the output side to questions about whether administration is efficient and effective. From this perspective, political scientists need to turn their attention to output politics and the role that citizens can, and do, play in that process. At the same time, political communication between political authorities and citizens needs to be improved. Here, for Bang, there are three crucial factors. First, political authorities need to acknowledge that most citizens 63

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are not apathetic, rather their involvement is on their own terms, not on terms dictated to them by political authorities. Indeed, for Bang (2009b, 102), it is the:‘identification of “big” politics with hierarchy and domination that explains why more and more reflexive, and anti-authoritarian, laypeople abandon “big” politics in order to participate elsewhere’.As such, political authorities need to listen and engage, not impose solutions onto complex policy problems and expect citizens to obey out of a sense of duty; particularly given that duty norms are in decline, while engagement norms are becoming more important. Second, and relatedly, because problems are complex in late modernity, politics is not simple, rather it is, and must be, constituted in, and through, the actions of citizens in a reflexive political community that must be recognised and nurtured. Within this political community, citizens are capable of recognising the complexity of politics and the importance of difference. As such, it is not a community based on the possibility of generating consensus, but, rather, on the necessity of recognising and accepting difference. It is crucial that both citizens and political authorities acknowledge and accept the need to foster such a political community. For this reason, and finally, political authorities must speak the truth to citizens. Unless this happens, and citizens are made aware of the problems that politicians and others face in dealing with complex problems, then a key basis of the political community is undermined.

Conclusion The literature on depoliticisation is important, but we suggest that it has a number of clear weaknesses. In particular, four issues need more attention. First, the literature over-emphasises the novelty of depoliticisation, which has always been present in politics. Second, the literature tends to demonise politicians and the state; this is a major problem because politicians are essential to ensure good governance. Third, and relatedly, the literature focuses on input politics and ignores output politics, which is problematic, because citizens are increasingly involved in new forms of political participation that are more orientated to the output side, rather than the input side, of politics. Fourth, the literature has little or no conception of how interests are reflected in inputs, let alone outputs. Here, we part company with Bang, given that we think that interests and the structured inequality which characterises society is crucially reflected in both the input and output side of politics. In essence, this is what draws us to a metagovernance approach. For us, while all three modes of governance are evident in most, if not all, governance arrangements, the relationship between them is often, if not 64

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usually, metagoverned, often by the state, although not always successfully. So, metagovernance can be successful or unsuccessful and to say the state has the capacity to metagovern is not the same as saying it always ‘gets it right’. It is also important to emphasise that, while the state is an important actor in achieving metagovernance, it is not the sole one. At the same time, we would also argue that this process is affected by the broader structural inequalities present in society. This is one reason why we have drawn particular attention to Jessop’s work on cultural political economy, which highlights the way in which the structured inequalities in society are reflected in both the form and the policies of the state (see also his contribution to this volume). Of course, that argument is the subject matter of another chapter. In addition, although we would argue that this is what is happening in many political systems, this is not to say that this is the case everywhere, let alone that this will remain the case over time.5 Finally, we argue that the depoliticisation literature should not distract us from processes of repoliticisation in which people’s understanding of politics and the form of political action that they take is changing. Politics is being remade by both the governors and the governed, but without sufficient articulation between the two ‘visions’. In essence, the point is that politics is, or rather should be, about a two-way communication between authority and community. Most of the current depoliticisation literature contends that government/politicians do not listen to citizens and that this leads to a democratic deficit. We do not disagree. However, there is also a need for citizens to listen to government, which does not happen, only, in part, because of the behavior of politicians. A re-politicisation of this process would involve both a re-articulation of the relationship between government and citizens and a re-articulation of the relationship between leadership and democracy. However, any such attempt would need to start from an acknowledgement that, while politicians may be part of the problem, they are certainly not the only problem. Acknowledgements Thanks to Matthew Flinders, Matthew Wood, Mark Evans, the anonymous referees and the participants of the ANZSIG Governance Research Forum at the University of Canberra for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Particular thanks to Henrik Bang for being so generous with his input. In addition, Rick Kuhn pointed us in the direction of the Royal Commissions and Nikola Regent was our guide through Machiavelli; thanks to them both. This chapter was written with funding from the Australian Research Council (DP120104155).

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Notes 1 All these features are contested, at least by some in the governance literature, but, in our view, they still reflect the core of the mainstream argument about governance. 2 Of course, it could be argued that extreme politicisation might also be problematic – associated with either totalitarianism or ‘permanent revolution’. 3 Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t identify depoliticisation on the output side, for example in the way in which New Public Management ideas have led to a focus on the efficiency of policy delivery, rather than on the distributional effects of policy.The point is that the depoliticisation literature has not focussed on the output side. 4 Although they take a rather different line in a book co-authored with Peters and Pierre who are not constructivists (Torfing et al, 2012). 5 For example, Bang would argue that the shadow of hierarchy is much more evident in the UK or Australia, than it is in Denmark. He would also contend that, given both the increased complexity involved in governing and the increased reflexivity of citizens, metagovernance by the state, even if is occurring, will inevitably decline over time. References Baker, K, Stoker, G, 2012, Metagovernance and nuclear power in Europe, Journal of European Public Policy 19, 7, 1026–51 Bang, HP, 2009a, ‘Yes we can’: Identity politics and project politics for the late-modern world, Urban Research and Practice 2, 2, 1–21 Bang, HP, 2009b, Political community: The blind spot of modern democratic decision-making, British Politics 4, 1, 100–16 Bang, HP, 2010, Everyday markers and expert citizens: Active participants in search for a new governance, in J Fenwick, J McMillan (eds) Public management in the postmodern era: Challenges and prospects, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,163–91 Bang, HP, 2011,The politics of threats: Late-modern politics in the shadow of neoliberalism, Critical Policy Studies 5, 4, 434–48 Bang, HP, Esmark, A, 2009, Good governance in network society: Reconfiguring the political from politics to policy, Administrative Theory and Praxis 31, 1, 7–37 Bang, HP, Jensen, MJ, 2013, Occupy Wall Street: A new political form of movement and community?, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 10, 4, 444–461 Bang, HP, Sørensen, E, 1999, The everyday maker: A new challenge to democratic governance, Administrative Theory and Praxis 21, 3, 325–41 Bates, S, Jenkins, L, Amery, F, 2014, (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 243–58 66

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Beeson, M, 2010, The coming of environmental authoritarianism, Environmental Politics 19, 2, 276–94 Bell, S, Hindmoor, A, 2009, Rethinking governance: The centrality of the state in modern society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bevir, M, 2010, Democratic governance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Bevir, M, Rhodes, RAW, 2010, The State as cultural practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press Börzel,TA, 2010, European governance: Negotiation and competition in the shadow of hierarchy, Journal of Common Market Studies 48, 2, 191–219 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3, 2, 127–49 Burnham, P, 2014, Depoliticisation: Economic crisis and political management, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 189–206 Chhotray,V, Stoker, G, 2009, Governance theory and practice:A cross-disciplinary approach, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Dalton, R, 2008, Citizenship norms and the expansion of political participation, Political Studies 56, 1, 76–98 Deutsch, K, Fornieri, J, 2009, An invitation to political thought, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006, Depoliticisation: Principles, tactics and tools, British Politics 1, 3, 293–318 Foster, EA, Kerr, P, Byrne, C, 2014, Rolling back to roll forward: Depoliticisation and the extension of government, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 225–41 Gilley, B, 2012, Authoritarian environmentalism and China’s response to climate change, Environmental Politics 21, 2, 287–307 Guardian, 2010, James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change, 29 March, www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/jameslovelock-climate-change Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Jessop, B, 2004, Multi-level governance and multi-level metagovernance: Changes in the European Union as integral moments in the transformation and reorientation of contemporary statehood, in I Bache, M Flinders (eds) Multi-level governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press,49–74 Jessop, B, 2010, Cultural political economy and critical policy studies, Critical Policy Studies 3 (3–4), 336–56 Jessop, B, 2014, Repoliticising depoliticisation: Theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 207–23

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Jessop, B, 2011, Metagovernance, in M Bevir (ed) The Sage handbook of governance, London: SAGE, 106–23 Klijn, E-H, Edelenbos, J, 2006, Meta-governance as network management, in E Sørensen, J Torfing (eds) Theories of democratic network governance, Houndmills: Palgrave, 199–214 Kooiman, J, Jentoft, S, 2009, Metagovernance:Values, norms and principles, and the making of hard choices, Public Administration 87, 4, 818–36 Lauriat, B, 2010, The examination of everything: Royal commissions in British legal history, Statute Law Review 31, 1, 24–46 Levi-Faur, D (ed), 2012, The Oxford handbook of governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press Marsh, D, 2009, Keeping ideas in their place: in praise of thin constructivism, Australian Journal of Political Science 44, 4, 679–96 Marsh, D, Vromen, A, 2012, Everyday makers with a difference? Contemporary cases of political participation, Paper presented at the Australian Political Science Association Conference, September 2012, Hobart Meulemann, L, 2008, Public management and the metagovernance of hierarchies, networks and markets, The Hague and Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag Norris, P, 2011, Democratic deficit: Critical citizens revisited, Oxford: Oxford University Press Offe, C, 2009, Governance:An ‘empty signifier’, Constellations 16, 4, 550–62 Rallings, C, Thrasher, M, 2003, Local electoral participation in Britain, Parliamentary Affairs 56, 4, 700–15 Rees, R, 2001, Poverty and public health 1815–1949, London: Heineman Rhodes, RAW, 1997, Understanding governance, Buckingham: Open University Press Rhodes, RAW, 2007, Understanding governance:Ten years on, Organization Studies 28, 8, 1243–64 Rhodes, RAW, 2012, Everyday life in British government, Oxford: Oxford University Press Scharpf, F, 1999, Governing in Europe: Effective and democratic?, Oxford: Oxford University Press Sørensen, E, 2006, Metagovernance: The changing role of politicians in processes of democratic governance, American Review of Public Administration 36, 1, 98–114 Sørensen, E,Torfing J, (eds), 2006,Theoretical approaches to metagovernance, in E Sørensen, J Torfing (eds) Theories of democratic network governance, Houndmills: Palgrave, 169–82 Stevenson, H, Dryzek, JS, 2012, The discursive democratisation of global climate governance, Environmental Politics 21, 2, 189–210 Stoker, G, 2006, Why politics matters, Basingstoke: Palgrave 68

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Torfing, J, 2012, Governance networks, in D Levi-Faur, The Oxford Handbook of Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 99–112 Torfing, J, Peters, BG, Pierre, J, Sørensen, E, 2012 Interactive governance: Advancing the paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press

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CHAPTER FOUR

Depoliticisation: economic crisis and political management Peter Burnham

Introduction Over the last decade or so there has been an explosion of interest in the idea of ‘depoliticisation’ in relation to state policy and restructuring. Often, as Wood and Flinders (2014) point out, characterisations of depoliticisation have been cross-cutting and imprecise. Even within political science usage has varied from simple notions of depoliticisation as the ‘absence of politics’ or ‘quangoism’ to more complex understandings of depoliticisation as a process whereby state managers may seek to place at one remove the politically contested character of governing and in so doing paradoxically enhance political control. This chapter focuses on exploring this latter interpretation and suggests that there are a number of productive ways in which depoliticisation as a governing strategy can be developed from a limited number of relatively straightforward assumptions. In this respect the chapter offers both a refinement and a further extension of the notion of depoliticisation illustrating the explanatory power of the concept when applied to governing and in particular to crisis management. While the chapter may therefore be located in terms of its contribution to the study of the ‘governmental face of depoliticisation’ (as identified by Wood and Flinders, 2014), it nevertheless offers a framework that problematises Weberian conceptions of governance highlighting the crisis-ridden character of capitalist development and thereby political management. It will be suggested that by linking depoliticisation to the crisis avoidance strategies of state managers, the concept scores highly in terms of meaning, clarity and precision over more expansive uses that often lack a cutting edge and result in the rather bland assertion that ‘depoliticisation is everywhere’.1 The first part of the chapter emphasises the contribution of Marx, Habermas and the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) state theory tradition to contemporary understandings of depoliticisation. It then outlines three distinct ways in which the theory can be developed – as a simple account of off-loading or arm’s-length management, as a characterisation of an entire regime of governing, and third, as part of an account of the methods chosen by state managers to externalise the 71

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imposition of discipline/austerity on social relations. The final section of the chapter develops this latter interpretation looking in particular at how in the wake of financial crisis the British state has deepened its commitment to depoliticisation strategies. Depoliticisation is however no panacea for governing and as the European experience shows if such strategies attenuate the liberal democratic character of the state they risk politicising social relations thereby revealing the class character of the state potentially undermining the rule of capital. In this sense, depoliticisation as a governing strategy may encompass analysis of the ‘tools, mechanisms and institutions through which politicians can attempt to move to an indirect governing relationship’ (Flinders, 2008, 238), but as a concept it is rooted in a much broader social theory and conceptualisation of power within capitalism. To provide this broader contextualisation it is important to begin with a discussion of the social theories that been influential in the development of depoliticisation when applied to the political management of economic crisis. This will involve, first, a review of Marx’s analysis of the emergence of capitalism and in particular his discussion of how the demise of feudalism produced an apparent differentiation of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres; second, the early thoughts of Jurgen Habermas on how modern politics has been oriented towards the solution of technical problems; and third, the contribution of theorists of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) with their emphasis on ‘restructuring’ and crisis and specifically the suggestion that state officials seek not to resolve economic crisis but rather take action to prevent the development of a political crisis of the state.

Capital, crisis and the state The fullest account of Marx’s thought on the emergence of capitalism and its implications for state form are to be found in his early work (see Corrigan and Sayer, 1985; Clarke, 1988; Rosenberg, 1993; Meiksins Wood, 1995; Burnham, 1995). Here he argues that in early medieval Europe the elements of civil life – property, the family, the mode of labour – were directly political. The abstraction of the state as such, he suggests, belongs only to modern times – ‘the abstraction of the political state is a modern product’ (Marx, 1975a, 32; also see Marx, 1975b, 165). In characteristically sweeping terms Perry Anderson (1974, 19–34) summarises this view noting that in medieval feudalism the social institution of serfdom fused economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion at the molecular level of the manor/village. Personal dependence characterised the social relations of material production as much as it did the other spheres of life based on that production, with the result that ‘every private sphere has a political 72

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character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too’ (Marx, 1975a, 32; see also Marx, 1976, 170). In this sense Marx (1975a, 32) characterises the Middle Ages as the ‘democracy of unfreedom’ since in a context where trade and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution also did not yet exist in an undifferentiated form. The long struggles which led to the emergence of capitalism abolished the directly political character of civil society and created the conditions for the emergence of the modern state form – ‘the establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals…is accomplished by one and the same act’ (Marx, 1975b, 167). The ‘moment of appropriation’ now appears purely economic in form (not determined by extra-economic sanction) and institutionally separate from the ‘moment of coercion’ – even if the former rests on the latter through its monopolisation, however incomplete, of legal, political and repressive apparatus. The state now appears as an ‘independent form’ divorced from private interests,‘Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their common interest, the latter is asserted as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them… in the form of the state’ (Marx, 1975c, 46–7; also see Clarke, 1988, 124). The key point here is that for Marx the institutional existence of the capitalist ‘state’ as a ‘political’ sphere presupposes the ‘depoliticising’ of civil society. The power of the capitalist state, expressed in social theory as the monopolisation of the use of force and the rule of law and money, now stands at one remove from the material reproduction of society governed not by ties of personal dependence but by individual private labours and, in the sphere of circulation, ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man’ (Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham) (Marx, 1976, 280). However, Marx’s account of the ‘differentiation’ of the economic and the political in capitalism underscores the notion that the ‘separation’ of state and civil society is an institutional illusion – an aspect of the fetishism produced by generalised commodity production which gives rise to the view that the state is a ‘thing’ standing aside from other things (the economy) rather than an aspect of a historically determined form of particular social relations. It is for this reason that Meiksins Wood (1995, 30) argues that within capitalism the ‘economic’ rests firmly on the ‘political’ despite their ‘differentiation’. The monopolies and privileges of feudalism are replaced by the ‘divine power of money’ and man as a ‘juridical person’ receives freedom to own property and engage in business while the state guarantees the market and thereby the property relations upon which rest the generalised commodity form.

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In many respects therefore Marx’s analysis of the emergence of capitalism is a study of the struggles surrounding the differentiation of economic and political forms and as such can be read as an account of the politicisation/ depoliticisation dynamic. Furthermore in this account it is clear that the ‘depoliticisation’ of ‘civil society’ could only be achieved through ‘bloody legislation against the expropriated’ – producing a class ‘free’ from the means of production and ‘free’ to sell labour power – a process that could not in essence be more political (Marx, 1976, 896). Many of the issues raised by Marx (including the inherently political character of depoliticisation and the focus on the apparent separation of the political and the economic) are pertinent to broad theories of depoliticisation and some concerning ‘form and content’ will be revisited in the conclusion. A second significant influence is drawn from the work of the Frankfurt critical theorists – specifically Jurgen Habermas. In the essay, Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’, Habermas (1971, 101) suggests that since the late nineteenth century the state in advanced capitalist countries has adopted ‘permanent regulation of the economic process’ as a ‘defence mechanism against the dysfunctional tendencies, which threaten the system, that capitalism generates when left to itself ’. State intervention to ‘secure the system’s stability’ destroyed in practice the ‘root ideology of just exchange, which Marx unmasked in theory’ (Habermas, 1971, 100–1). Economic policy now ‘stabilises the business cycle’ and as a consequence the ‘institutional framework of society is repoliticized’ (Habermas, 1971, 101). Politics, in this view, is no longer ‘only a phenomenon of the superstructure’ since ‘the “base” has to be comprehended as in itself a function of governmental activity and political conflicts’ (Habermas, 1971, 101). Since, according to Habermas, the economy is now operating under political control legitimation can no longer be derived from the ‘unpolitical order’ constituted by the relations of production. Hence the ideology of free exchange is replaced by a substitute programme focused on expounding the benefits of government action designed to compensate for the dysfunctions of free exchange. In short, Habermas suggests that a type of Keynesian–Beveridge ideology constitutes the new programme of legitimation structured around stabilising growth, maintaining employment, social security and the opportunity for upward mobility. This requires latitude for ‘manipulation by state interventions that, at the cost of limiting the institutions of private law, secure the private form of capital utilization and bind the masses’ loyalty to this form’ (Habermas, 1971, 102 – italics in the original). In a key passage, Habermas emphasises that in these conditions, politics takes on a peculiarly negative character – ‘oriented toward the elimination of dysfunctions and the avoidance of risks…not, in

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other words, toward the realisation of practical goals but toward the solution of technical problems’ (Habermas, 1971, 102–3 – italics in the original). A similar conclusion had been reached by Offe in 1968 who argued that politics had degenerated into actions that followed ‘numerous and continually emerging “avoidance imperatives” restricted to administratively soluble technical problems’ (quoted in Habermas, 1971, 103). In short, ‘old-style politics’ defined in part by discussion of what constituted the ‘good life’ had now been replaced by a programme aimed exclusively at ‘the functioning of a manipulated system’ (Habermas, 1971, 103).The solution of technical problems was not dependent on public discussion (in fact, was at odds with democratic decision-making processes) therefore the ‘new politics of state interventionism, was accompanied by a ‘depoliticisation of the mass of the population’ (Habermas, 1971, 104). The elimination of ‘practical substance’ from politics and the re-orientation of governing towards the solution of technical problems opened the door to the legitimation of power through the ideology of technology and science articulated as ‘technocratic consciousness’ (Habermas, 1971, 104–5). The powerful insights of Habermas and Offe are presented within a framework limited by an unconvincing reliance on systems theory and an unsophisticated view of Marx as a crude base/superstructure theorist. At the time, Habermas could see only one challenge to the stranglehold of technocratic consciousness – student protest. Embodying the spirit of 1968 he argued that student protest could permanently destroy this ideology and thus ‘bring down the already fragile legitimating basis of advanced capitalism, which rest only on depoliticization’ (Habermas, 1971, 122). By the early 1970s his agency-centred hopes for social change were dashed but systems theory functionalism prevailed in his attempt to develop a typology of crisis-tendencies within advanced capitalism (Habermas, 1976). In terms of the theory of depoliticisation, Habermas distinguishes between political crisis tendencies that can be sub-divided in terms of their form of appearance into output (sovereignly executed administrative decisions) and input (mass loyalty) crises (Habermas, 1976, 46). An output crisis, Habermas (1976, 46) notes, takes the form of a rationality crisis when an administration fails to reconcile and fulfill the ‘imperatives received from the economic system’. In this sense it is a ‘displaced systemic crisis’ which takes the place of an economic crisis and therefore displaces the ‘contradictory steering imperatives from market commerce into the administrative system’ (Habermas, 1976, 47). A rationality deficit in public administration would therefore occur when the state is unable to develop coherent policies to steer the economy. Rationality crises are expressed in part by the ‘disorganization of the state apparatus’ which may be converted into a generalised withdrawal of legitimation. An input crisis, 75

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by contrast, takes the form of a legitimation crisis when the state fails to secure a requisite level of mass loyality while the ‘steering imperatives taken over from the economic system are carried through’ (Habermas, 1976, 46). A ‘legitimation crisis’ is directly an identity crisis and results from the ‘fact that the fulfillment of government planning tasks places in question the structure of the depoliticized public realm and, thereby, the formally democratic securing of the private autonomous disposition of the means of production’ (Habermas, 1976, 46). A legitimation deficit would exist when it was ‘not possible by administrative means to maintain or establish effective normative structures to the extent required’ (Habermas, 1976, 47). Habermas’s overall conclusion is that advanced-capitalist societies are increasingly susceptible to economic, administrative, legitimation and socio-cultural system (action-motivating) crises. It may be objected that despite the value of the questions raised, the lack of clarity in determining the relationship between the different forms of crisis and the rather idiosyncratic concentration on actor motivation ultimately limits the contribution Habermas makes to unpacking the idea of depoliticisation. In addition his unremitting commitment to a form of systems theory functionalism restricts the attractiveness of his overall approach. Habermas, however, makes an important contribution in two key areas. First, he suggests that economic crises are shifted into the political system through the ‘reactive-avoidance activity of the government in such a way that supplies of legitimation can compensate for deficits in rationality and extensions of organizational rationality can compensate for those legitimation deficits that do appear’ (Habermas, 1976, 93). This notion of the displacement of crisis from the economic to the political (from the market to the administrative system) and the implications it has for the perceived competence of the administration is important for many theories of governmental depoliticisation. In addition, he leaves the future open by suggesting that while past crisis tendencies may already have been processed administratively others may appear ‘as a movement not yet adequately controlled administratively’ (Habermas, 1976, 93). Second, despite the somewhat dubious framework indicating a simple shift from laissez-faire to state intervention (and its associated implications for legitimation programmes), Habermas’s early thoughts on the elimination of practical substance from politics and the turn towards the solution of technical problems also resonate in later approaches to depoliticisation as crisis management. The debates on the state conducted by members of the Conference of Socialist Economists in the 1970s provide a direct link between some of the more abstract notions discussed above and politicisation/depoliticisation dynamic as applied to governing and crisis. In brief, the pivotal essay 76

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by Holloway and Picciotto (1977) emphasised that the state was to be understood as an ‘aspect of the social relations of production’, a fetishised form of capital, involved in and itself subject to, a constant process of restructuring and reorganisation to enhance the accumulation of capital (see also Clarke, 1991). The state, as a differentiated form of the social relations of production, derived its ‘power’ from its ability to reorganise labour–capital relations within (and often beyond) its boundaries to enhance the accumulation of capital both domestically and globally. The concept of ‘restructuring’ included the idea of political and ideological restructuring alongside the broader reorganisation of capitalist social relations (Clarke, 1983). In this sense attention was drawn to the various ways in which ‘the objectives, criteria and rules of operation’ of state agencies shifted as part of this wider restructuring of the social relations of exploitation (CSE State Apparatus and Expenditure Group, 1979). This argument was developed further by Simon Clarke (1983, 132; see also Clarke, 1988) who emphasised restructuring as a key component of crisis management. O’Connor and others drawing on Habermas, had indicated that an economic crisis could become a political crisis of the state itself if fiscal, monetary and financial pressure began to undermine the legitimacy of the existing form of the state.The response to this crisis situation, argued Clarke (1990), was usually not the seizure of state power by one class or another but rather the restructuring of the state and of wider class relations. The driving force behind this restructuring, Clarke (1990, 27) emphasised in a key passage, ‘is not so much the attempt to provide a resolution of the economic crisis, as the attempt to resolve the political crisis of the state by trying to disengage the state politically from the economy so as to de-politicise economic policy formation’. In Clarke’s view this was achieved in the West through the adoption of monetarism but the detailed mechanisms by which the state could disengage itself from economic crisis were left largely unexplored.The CSE contribution to understanding restructuring and the state drew directly on Marx and indirectly on Habermas to provide a basis on which a more detailed theory of depoliticisation as governing could be constructed. Three important issues had now been raised by the foregoing literature. First, Marx had indicated how the differentiation of the economic and the political could be viewed as an apparent differentiation resting on the social power of the commodity form.The depoliticisation of civil society in this sense was both inherently political and historically specific. Second, Habermas and Offe had raised key questions about the objectives of state managers in the context of the rise of technocratic governance effectively depoliticising the mass of the population through the elimination of practical substance from politics. However questionable their account of 77

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economic management in the nineteenth century, and their rather time bound analysis of state intervention in the post-1945 period, their concerns were reflected in the more productive stance adopted by the CSE tradition in the 1970s. The third set of issues therefore focused on how the state could seek to disengage itself from the management of the economy in an effort to depoliticise policy formation. By what mechanisms could this be achieved and what more could be said about the rather nebulous notion of the ‘political crisis of the state’?

Depoliticisation as governing strategy From the foregoing analysis it is clear that the separation of the political and the economic in capitalism is best theorised as an ‘apparent’ separation which should not be taken at face value. It would be both inconsistent and rather naive therefore to suggest a definition of depoliticisation as the removal/evacuation of the political. To capture the inherently political nature of depoliticisation as a contingent process it is suggested that it is usefully understood as the ‘the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’ (Burnham, 2001, 128). This formulation emphasises three important points: first, the political character of decision making has been placed at one remove but is not absent – it is not being suggested for example that the management of the economy could ever be non-political; second, understood as a governing strategy it is implicit in the analysis that depoliticisation can enhance political control – control exercised by state managers – while giving the appearance of having transferred elements of that control; and third, the most beneficial consequence of the process for state managers in terms of realising policy objectives is achieved by the appearance of having transferred responsibility for policy. In terms of this last point it is suggested that depoliticisation as a process benefits politicians in office by creating distance between them and difficult supporters/opponents (whether from the ranks of labour or capital) through arm’s-length management or invoking the language of external constraints. The problem of ‘untrustworthy governments’, not ‘fit to govern’, could also be addressed by enhancing the credibility of policy and the competence of management through the adoption of rulesbased strategies and the re-assignment of tasks. This strategy would also enable governments to play the ‘politics of blame attribution’ – shifting responsibility for the management of difficult issues, for example, the delivery of public services (see Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002). In a broader sense, depoliticising strategies also potentially shield governments from the consequences of adopting anti-inflationary policies or imposing austerity measures inasmuch as international regimes could be invoked (the Gold 78

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Standard, the ERM) which draw attention away from the choices made by government ministers. Finally, it is recognised that by re-assigning key areas of policy to quasi-state agencies (for example, in the UK monetary policy to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank or more recently, financial policy and crisis management to the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank) depoliticisation from the point of view of state managers involves a potential politicisation process on the part of the receiving institution/organisation. This has the potential for undermining the core executive’s control of policy and also for creating unintended, and unwanted, consequences (such as in the economic sphere enhancing the credibility of the Bank to the extent that it becomes a vocal and respected critic of government policy). From this set of ideas the governmental politicisation/depoliticisation dynamic can be used in a number of ways. First, at the least productive end of the spectrum it can be detached from its social theory origins and used to identify, and often justify, forms of responsibility shifting. Drawing on examples particularly from New Public Management literature this approach sees depoliticisation as simply offering a guide in ‘how to manage’ (whether in universities, the health service, transport, even in the private sector). The emphasis here is on shifting blame and creating obfuscatory bureaucratic practices to enhance managerial control.This may correspond to populist and journalistic usage of depoliticisation but should not be confused with the academic use of the term which as Flinders (2008, 239) correctly notes emphasises the notion of an ‘indirect governing relationship’. In short, depoliticisation is not any form of ‘arena shifting’ or responsibility evasion but refers more precisely to processes which place at one remove the political character of governing and which may result in state officials no longer being held directly responsible for ‘a certain issue, policy field or specific decision’ (Flinders 2008, 238). Flinders (2008, 238) therefore correctly asserts that as a concept depoliticisation refers to a very specific interpretation of ‘the political’. This, I would argue, gives the concept greater clarity, meaning and precision than more expansive definitions that tend to reduce depoliticisation to the practice of ‘dupes and tricks’ in any social setting. It is, however, important to be aware that ‘the political’, in the framework adopted in this chapter, is not to be equated simply with the institutions of ‘representative democracy’ but rather with the state understood as ‘politically organised subjection’ (Abrams, 1988, 63; see also Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, 7–9).The apparent solidity of the state and its historically specific character masks its existence as a contradictory form of social relationship. As Abrams (1988, 76) suggests in abstract terms the state is a ‘message of domination’ – an artefact ‘attributing unity, structure and independence to the disunited, structureless and dependent 79

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workings of the practice of government’. The cardinal activity of the state – to present class rule as disinterested, legitimate domination – is therefore conducted not only through its historically specific institutions, ideologies and activities of channelling social relations into non-class forms (citizens’ rights, consumer rights, and so on) but extends to how the ‘claim to legitimacy’ encompasses a range of state practices (including the idea of representative democracy).The significance of this point will be developed in the conclusion in terms of discussions of the ‘political crisis of the state’. Second, and with a greater degree of sophistication, the concept has been applied to analyse the methods chosen by state managers to externalise the imposition of discipline/austerity on social relations. This framework has been developed explicitly by Marxist and other writers interested in crisis theory and political responses to the current financial meltdown (see Holloway, 2010; Krippner, 2011; Burnham, 2011a). Far from crisis being seen as a ‘malfunction’ of the market leading to a ‘systemic breakdown’, this approach in general emphasises a political reading of crisis stressing for example the ‘capitalist use of crisis’ as a means for the ‘violent and decisive reassertion of the fundamental class relation’ (Negri, 1988, 68). Economic crisis is therefore seen to play an important role in re-establishing the law of value and does not necessarily indicate a generalised crisis of capitalism. In Negri’s (1988, 77) view, ‘capital’s ability to reorganise, in global and collective terms, the network of power relations that constitutes its material base’, is dependent on state managers being able to present ‘correction’ measures as necessary and legitimate without prompting widespread resistance. The tightrope state managers have to walk in this situation is how to intervene in crucial areas to restore profitable accumulation (recapitalisation, nationalisation, quantitative easing) while simultaneously withstanding demands to intervene in other areas to the advantage of particular groups (manufacturing industry, low paid workers, the unemployed). In the emergency stage of the current crisis for example, this potential was seen in debates, particularly in the UK, about the morality of the banking system, the role of money and the willingness of the state to recapitalise banks while seemingly allowing manufacturing industry to fail. In these circumstances one of the central issues for state managers is how to re-establish the law of value while placing other key areas of policy beyond direct political contestation – in terms familiar to critical Marxists of the 1970s, how to prevent an economic crisis becoming a political crisis of the state itself (Habermas, 1976; O’Connor, 1973). Attempts by state managers to off-load responsibility for the imposition of recession and foreclose debate on the nature of the political economy of capitalism have tended to take one of two forms in the last century. First, efforts have been made to find an anchor (and justification) for policy by linking 80

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deflation strategies to an international regime – usually an international monetary regime. Second, there is the strategy of attempting a domestic reorganisation of the administrative system of governing tying policy to statute or clearly identifiable (and therefore constraining) targets (Burnham, 2001; Buller and Flinders, 2005; Flinders, 2008). The decision to resurrect the Gold Standard in the 1920s and the operation of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in the 1990s are both examples of how to impose recession while seeking to avoid political crisis by linking to an international regime (Kettell, 2004; Bonefeld and Burnham, 1998). Attempts to organise recession but avert political crisis through domestic target seeking or statute linking are very much ‘secondbest’ strategies (particularly in terms of credibility) but have nevertheless been employed with some ‘success’ in the guise of granting central banks a greater degree of independence and following strategies of money supply targeting. Thatcher’s ‘Medium Term Financial Strategy’ adopted in 1980 is an example of the self-denying ordinance of supply targets with Nigel Lawson later clarifying that it ‘was intended to be a self-imposed constraint on economic policy making’ – a domestic equivalent of the Gold Standard (quoted in Grant, 2002, 35). Not all such strategies of course are successful and many domestic regimes have resulted in exacerbating conflict and political crisis (for example, Heath’s Industrial Relations Act, 1971 and the Callaghan government’s ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978). In terms of the current crisis, state managers around the world have struggled to find a credible depoliticisation strategy beyond articulating the need for a new ‘cuts-machine’ justified by the discourse of the sovereign debt crisis (Hay, 1999). Although the IMF (2011) has clearly sanctioned the discourse of cuts, there is no credible international monetary regime which could serve as an anchor and justification for recessionary policies. Moreover, the uneven international impact of the financial crisis reinforces the view that depoliticisation is viable currently only through a secondbest form of domestic legitimation.The weakness of this strategy, however, is shown by the organised resistance that has arisen in response to the imposition of recession (for further detail on examples from Europe see Burnham, 2011a; Macartney, 2013). In this respect, as Krippner (2011, 147) notes, depoliticisation strategies may offer an answer to policy makers facing contradictory imperatives in terms of regulating the economy while deflecting attention away from their active role in guiding economic outcomes but the unintended consequence of increased politicisation is ever present. A third way in which the politicisation/depoliticisation dynamic can be developed is to characterise entire regimes of economic and political management. As noted above, if the framework is used to analyse policy 81

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in Britain from 1900 onwards it becomes clear that at certain moments depoliticisation strategies have formed the lynchpin of economic policy (the return to the Gold Standard in 1925, the Heath government’s introduction of the Industrial Relations Act 1971, the introduction of the Minimum Lending Rate in 1972; the Medium Term Financial Strategy in the early 1980s; the ERM in the early 1990s; the politics of New Labour; and the politics of austerity since 2008). At other times a more interventionist politicised approach has tended to dominate the policy-making agenda (most obviously 1945–70). If, however, a depoliticised strategy confers certain benefits on state managers, under what circumstances would a politicised approach be adopted? Early attempts to refine the framework focused on the UK experience suggested that the oscillation between politicised and depoliticised strategies was best explained in terms of the internal dynamics of working-class organisation, the character of British capital and the precarious external economic position of the British state (see Buller and Flinders, 2005; Burnham, 2006). For example, the British state in 1945 opted for a high level of direct control over the economy as a response not only to seemingly intractable balance of payments problems but also to the problem of rising wages and the threat of rampant inflation. Throughout the postwar period institutionalised processes of bargaining and consultation, indicative planning and formal and informal incomes policies were all employed as a means whereby ‘the national interest’ could be brought to bear on wage negotiations. The adoption of these politicised solutions, however untenable in the long-term, reflected state managers’ perceptions of the balance of class forces as expressed in the (dis)organisation of capital and the actions of union leaders and, from the 1960s onwards, the shop stewards movement. By the mid-1970s the Treasury had acknowledged the failure of politicised approaches but was seemingly powerless to develop alternative dominant strategies until a number of disparate trends (mass unemployment in traditional sectors, increased work in non-unionised sectors, promotion of new forms of unionism) provided a context for the emergence of a reorientation that could capitalise on the changes in the international political economy associated with the deregulation of finance. Rather than conceptualising a simple transition from politicised to depoliticised forms of management it is likely to be more productive to analyse statecraft regimes in terms of the co-existence of forms with the dominance of one form over the other at any particular juncture. This approach has the potential to deepen historical understanding of specific aspects of government policy and resist the teleological tendency to see all policy resulting inexorably in depoliticisation. For example, in respect of monetary policy in Britain it seems that despite the well82

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publicised ‘nationalisation’ Act of 1946, interest rate policy continued to be determined by the Bank of England at least until the early 1960s (see Burnham, 2007). Similarly, the introduction of the Minimum Lending Rate in October 1972 as a depoliticisation strategy to marketise the Bank rate – which lasted until 1978, problematises simplistic views of Heath and Wilson/Callaghan governments operating an unambiguous form of politicised management (Burnham, 2011b). This approach also focuses attention on the contradictions and tensions inherent within each form. To varying degrees there will always be a tension between active direct state intervention and arm’s-length strategies of governing. Although a central aim of depoliticisation strategies is to convince key actors that state managers are, to an extent, disengaged from policy making and delivery, the reorganisation of class relations periodically calls for the substantive and public intervention of the state. The current crisis provides a good illustration of the co-existence of politicised and depoliticised strategies and of the tensions implicit in attempting to maintain depoliticisation as the lynchpin while seeking to restructure capitalism on national, regional and global levels. An analysis of the management of monetary and fiscal policy in the wake of the crisis in Britain will highlight this theme.

Depoliticisation strategies in Britain before, during and after the financial crisis Accounts of governmental politicisation/depoliticisation under Tony Blair emphasised three principal strategies: reassignment of tasks to quasi-state bodies; preference for rules rather than discretion; and an increase in the accountability, transparency and external validation of policy (Burnham, 2001).The intensification of the financial crisis since autumn 2008 has been accompanied not by the British state’s abandonment of depoliticisation as the lynchpin of policy but by a concerted attempt to consolidate all three of the elements developed under New Labour. In many respects the focal point of the reassignment of tasks under Blair was the granting of operational independence to the Bank of England. The Bank of England Act 1998 was widely seen as a ‘new departure in economic policy making’ (HM Treasury, 2002, 85), and was justified principally on three grounds: first, that independent central banks deliver low inflation; second, that the move would improve transparency and enhance the credibility of policy making; and finally, that independence would end political interference in monetary policy making (Treasury and Civil Service Committee, 1993; HM Treasury, 2002, chapters 1, 3 and 6). In contrast to the period following the Secondary Banking Crisis 83

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of 1973/74 – when the Treasury took back control of interest rates from the Bank – operational independence in the wake of the current crisis has of course been maintained (see Reid, 1982; Moran, 1984). The New Monetary Policy Framework introduced in the Bank of England Act 1998 remains in force with the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) committed to achieving the government’s inflation target of 2 per cent. Since March 2009 interest rates have been held at 0.5 per cent and the attention of the MPC has focused on the policy of asset purchases financed by central bank money – so-called quantitative easing (for an overview see Joyce et al, 2011). The Asset Purchase Facility, set up in January 2009, essentially provides an additional tool for the conduct of monetary policy. Aimed at improving liquidity in credit markets through the purchase of assets financed by the issue of Treasury Bills – and later directly through central bank money – quantitative easing represents a shift in the instrument of monetary policy (towards the quantity of money provided rather than its price) but not in the underlying objective of policy. To date, some £375 billion of assets have been purchased in an effort to restore confidence and provide a monetary stimulus to the economy (Bank of England, 2012). The limited amount of evidence currently available suggests that the policy may have had some positive effect (mainly in terms of shoring up external credibility) but most studies conclude that ‘there is considerable uncertainty around the precise magnitude of the impact’ (Joyce et al, 2011, 211). In short, since the financial crisis, the Bank has used the quantity of reserves (in addition to the rate earned on them at the Bank) directly as a tool of monetary policy (Bank of England, 2010). This represents an extension of the Bank’s powers and, while sanctioned by the Treasury, is operationalised by the MPC.The framework for the conduct of monetary policy has therefore survived the financial crisis.This element of continuity has been accompanied by a revolutionary expansion of Bank powers and responsibilities in the area of financial stability. In October 1997 the government established a tripartite framework (involving the Bank, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority) for regulation and financial stability in the UK. The Bank was initially responsible for the stability of the system while the FSA had responsibility for the supervision of individual banks and other financial organisations. In 2006 a Memorandum of Understanding further clarified this emerging relationship indicating that the role of the Bank was to ‘maintain a broad overview of the system as a whole’ and limit the risk of problems in particular institutions spreading to other parts of the financial system (Bank of England, 2006). However, as the financial crisis showed, responsibility without power in the financial field left the Bank unable to act in accordance with the 1997 and 2006 agreements – hence the creation of 84

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a new regime in the 2009 Banking Act which extended the role of the Bank placing its financial stability responsibility in statute. In July 2010 the Cameron government deepened the Bank’s responsibilities in the financial field finally unveiling a new framework for financial regulation in 2012 (HM Treasury, 2012). The plan recognised the ‘failings’ of the tripartite system in respect of protecting financial stability and responded by placing the Bank ‘firmly in charge not only of preserving financial stability, but also leading the response when a crisis threatens stability’ (HM Treasury, 2012, 7). In essence the Cameron government’s response rests on two pillars: first, ‘returning responsibility to the Bank of England for regulating the stability of the financial system’, and second, setting up three new bodies, ‘each with clarity of responsibility, a focused remit, appropriate tools and the flexibility to use them as they see fit’ (HM Treasury, 2012, 6–7). From 2013 current FSA responsibilities for banking supervision will move to a new regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), established as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bank of England. Remaining FSA responsibilities for consumer protection and conduct of business will fall under the remit of the new Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Most significantly of all, a new Financial Policy Committee (FPC) is to be established within the Bank of England to set ‘macro-prudential policy’ with powerful macro-prudential tools at its disposal approved by Parliament. While the creation of the PRA and the FCA are important indicators of government confidence in the Bank, it is the FPC that, in the words of Paul Fisher (2012, 3) (Executive Director of the Bank) is ‘truly ground-breaking’. Currently an interim body (awaiting legislation), it operates in a manner organisationally similar to the MPC with 11 voting members (five from the Bank and chaired by the Governor) with the intention to reach consensus on decision making, publish minutes and record dissent (Fisher, 2012, 4). The responsibility of the FPC is extremely wide and relates: to the identification of, monitoring of, and taking of action to remove or reduce, systemic risks with a view to protecting and enhancing the resilience of the UK financial system – systemic risks include, in particular, risks attributable to structural features of financial markets, such as connections between financial institutions; systemic risks attributable to the distribution of risk within the financial sector; and unsustainable levels of leverage, debt or credit growth. (Financial Services Bill, 2012) Macro-prudential policy is, as Fisher points out, both complex and ‘still novel to policy makers, financial market participants and the general 85

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public’ (Fisher, 2012, 3). Of particular interest are the tools and levers that might affect financial stability and here the FPC seem to favour those that first, affect balance sheets of financial institutions (capital or liquid asset ratios), second, those that affect the terms and conditions of loans (loan to value ratios), and third, those that influence market structures (obligations on derivatives contracts) (Fisher, 2012, 8). The objective of maintaining financial stability is considerably wider than the MPC’s commitment to meeting inflation targets and for that very reason the government is clear that the decisions of the FPC must be ‘taken independently of undue political influence; indeed, this is why the FPC has been given responsibility for macro-prudential supervision of financial services sector as an expert body in the Bank, independent of the Treasury’ (HM Treasury, 2012, 14). In summary therefore the FPC has operational responsibility for financial stability (and crisis management). As with the MPC, issues of accountability and transparency are high on the agenda of the FPC and place the committee at one remove from the Chancellor and the Treasury whose roles, respectively, are to decide on the use of public funds and keep the public informed (HM Treasury, 2012, 110). The continuation of UK Financial Investments Ltd (UKFI) – set up by the Brown government in November 2008 – is yet further evidence of the commitment to extending the strategy of depoliticisation in the midst of financial crisis. Although the ‘nationalisation’ of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley would appear at first glance to contradict the tenets of depoliticisation, the manner of the acquisition and the subsequent organisation and management of the shares concerned is perfectly consistent with the theme of the reassignment of tasks. Rather than centralise control in the hands of the Treasury,Alistair Darling established UKFI as an independent company to ‘manage government investments in financial institutions at arm’s-length and on a commercial basis’ (UKFI, 2009, 9). The principal objective of the company is to: develop and execute an investment strategy for disposing of the investments in an orderly and active way through sale, redemption, buy-back or other means within the context of an overarching objective of protecting and creating value for the taxpayer as shareholder, paying due regard to the maintenance of financial stability and to acting in a way that promotes competition. (UKFI, 2009, 9) The government has no intention of being a permanent investor in UK financial institutions and on completion of activities UKFI will be wound 86

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up (UKFI, 2010, 14). In terms of operation, UKFI is prohibited from intervening in the day to day affairs of the investee companies and the Framework Documents emphasise that the Treasury will not interfere in the operational and commercial matters of UKFI.The role of the Treasury therefore is largely limited to monitoring UKFI’s performance against the objectives it has been set and reporting performance to the Chancellor and Parliament. Consistent with its principal strategy to dispose of investments as soon as conditions allow, UKFI announced on 23 July 2012 that it had received £820 million from the sale of Northern Rock plc to Virgin Money with a further £465 million expected from the sale of Northern Rock (Asset Management) to the same company (UKFI, 2012). In respect of a preference for rules-based strategies and deepening the commitment to external validation, various steps have been taken in the field of fiscal policy that build on the Fiscal Responsibility Measures outlined by Darling in November 2009. Recognising that Blair’s ‘fiscal rules’ lacked robustness (given the suspension of those rules in November 2008 and the introduction of a ‘temporary operating rule’ allowing greater flexibility) Darling pushed through the Fiscal Responsibility Act in February 2010 which placed upon the Treasury a statutory duty to meet targets for the reduction of government borrowing and debt (Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2010). The targets specified that borrowing should be reduced in each financial year 2010–15, that borrowing in 2013/14 should be no more than half the level recorded in 2009/10, and that government debt should be lower in 2015/16 than in 2014/15, measured as a percentage of GDP (Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2010).This rules-based approach with binding targets represents, in principle, a much tougher framework than the Code for Fiscal Stability introduced in 1998. In addition to targets that cannot be amended without new legislation, the Act also requires the Treasury to report to Parliament in the Budget and in Pre-Budget Reports and to provide an explanation if the targets are missed. In this respect the UK now joins Australia and New Zealand in terms of establishing a ‘gold-standard’ fiscal responsibility law as opposed to less rigorous ‘fiscal responsibility-type laws’ such as those that exist in the United States and Japan (Lienert, 2010). Complementing the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the Coalition government set up an official independent fiscal watchdog in form of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in May 2010.The OBR is not operational independence applied to fiscal policy. It is, however, key to enhancing the fiscal credibility of the government with the roles and responsibilities of the OBR exceeding those laid down by the IMF (and those of many other independent fiscal institutions in for example the United States, Japan or Canada) (HM Treasury, 2010a). In essence the OBR provides ‘forecast and 87

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commentary’ with a commitment to demonstrate ‘transparency, objectivity and impartiality’ in its assessment of public finances and the economy (HM Treasury, 2010b). In setting up the OBR, Osborne clarified its three principal functions: to boost credibility and confidence in the UK’s fiscal framework; to ‘tie the Chancellor’s hands’ and take away the temptation to ‘fiddle the figures’; and to be at the cutting edge of international best practice in terms of scrutiny, transparency and accountability. In an almost scripted characterisation of a depoliticisation strategy Osborne emphasised that in establishing the OBR he had ‘created a rod for his back down the line…that is whole the point’ (HM Treasury, 2010c). In short, it is plausible to suggest that there is a significant degree of continuity in the form of economic management followed before, during and after the immediate financial crisis of 2008/09. Both in terms of ideology and practice, governments have maintained and in many cases deepened their commitment to depoliticised governing principles even when appearing to take measures characteristic of earlier politicised forms of management. In Europe, as in Britain, the political response to financial crisis – financial socialism for the few and austerity for the many (Bonefeld, 2013, 249) – has been an intensification of depoliticised governance. State managers have increasingly sought to address the economic dimensions of the crisis through coercive, rules-based responses that at times threaten the basis of the liberal democratic state form itself. Macartney (2013, 47–55) shows persuasively how against the background of the crisis in Europe, a more ‘disciplinary and depoliticised institutional apparatus’ has developed focused on reinforcing the Stability and Growth Pact, enhancing economic surveillance mechanisms and setting up new permanent crisis resolution machinery.

Conclusion: the limits of depoliticisation and the political crisis of the state It would be naive to assert that by depoliticising economic policy state managers can avoid the emergence of political unrest. Habermas’s observations on the displacement of economic crisis into the administrative system suggest that while past expressions of crisis may have been successfully processed by the state, there is no guarantee that state officials will achieve administrative control over future manifestations of crisis (Habermas, 1976, 93).The unfolding of the financial crisis in Britain may not have resulted in a ‘rationality crisis’ (a paralysis of the administrative system and a realisation that it is unable to steer the economy) but elsewhere in Europe state managers have experienced elements of rationality and nascent legitimation crises (most obviously in terms of the meltdown of 88

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the Greek economy and the appointment of technocrat managers to head temporary national governments). Moves have been made to make the ‘administrative system independent of the formation of legitimating will’ (Habermas quoted in Macartney, 2013, 78) notably in the form of military or appointed technocratic governments. However, such moves represent not the logical extension but rather the failure of depoliticisation strategies and result in the immediate politicisation of social relations escalating further the likelihood of conflict. The politicisation of social relations calls into question not only the content of policies but the separation of state and civil society that Marx understood as constitutive of capitalism.Whereas changes in policy content (for example, from Keynesianism to monetarism or from one variety of monetarism to another) may determine the fate of individual governments, a crisis of the political form is a more fundamental crisis of capitalist social relations. A political crisis of the state is not simply a rationality or legitimation crisis experienced by a particular party in office or group of state officials but is rather a crisis of the capitalist form of ‘the political’.This is the significance of Marx’s distinction between the politicised, dependent relations of feudalism and the ‘freeing’ of individuals, the privatisation of property and the creation of a seemingly ‘autonomous’ realm of the politics associated with the emergence of capitalism. The establishment of the ‘independent’ political state (the general or communal interest) and the formal depoliticisation of ‘civil society’ (into abstract individuals whose relations depend on law) characterises capitalism and for Marx, ‘is accomplished by one and the same act’ (Marx, 1975b, 167 – italics in original; and see Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, 185–7). Understood in these terms, the separation of the state from civil society sets limits to what constitutes ‘legitimate’ politics and embodies ‘highly restricted notions of representation’ (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, 206). The ‘independent’ and ‘alien’ form of the state both ‘individualises’ social power and channels collective expression of that power into attenuated forms of representation – most notably in a historical sense for the working class into demands for ‘pluralist’ and ‘corporatist’ representation (Clarke, 1983, 128). Collective action that threatens the exclusive realm of ‘the political’ and that seeks to directly politicise ‘civil society’ threatens that very basis of the capitalist order. Corrigan and Sayer emphasise that this is what Marx recognised in his discussion of the Paris Commune of 1871 when he argued that social change be directed not against this or that constitutional or republican state power but against ‘the state itself…this supernaturalist abortion of society’ to produce ‘a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’ (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985, 207–8).

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Contrary to many interpretations, Marx did not see the demise of capitalism simply in terms of ‘economic crisis’ but rather saw a change in social form premised on overcoming the separation between the state and civil society – ‘only when man has recognised and organised his “own powers” as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished’ (Marx, 1975b, 168 – italics in original). The ‘economy’ – as Bonefeld (2013, 249) usefully reminds us – has no independent existence. Economy is always a political economy and ‘economic crises are crises of political economy’ (Bonefeld, 2013, 249) ultimately representing a crisis of class rule. It is in this sense that state managers seek not to necessarily resolve economic crisis but rather prevent economic crisis from becoming a crisis of political economy and thereby a political crisis of the state. In so doing, depoliticisation strategies remain an important, yet inherently contradictory, element in the armoury of state managers both in terms of the preservation of individual governments and, in principle, of the capitalist form of the state itself. Note On the notion of ‘state managers’ see Block 1987, 81–96.

1

References Abrams, P, 1988, Notes on the difficulty of studying the state, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1, 1, 58–89 Anderson, P, 1974, Lineages of the absolutist state, London:Verso Bank of England, 2006, Memorandum of Understanding between HM Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, June, www. bankofengland.co.uk/financialstability/Documents/mou.pdf Bank of England, 2010, Extract from the Red Book:The Bank’s current operations in the sterling money markets, December, www.bankofengland.co.uk/ markets/Documents/money/publications/redbookqe.pdf Bank of England, 2012, The distributional effects of asset purchases, 12 July, www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/news/2012/nr073.pdf Block, F, 1987, Revising state theory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press Bonefeld,W, 2013, Adam Smith and ordoliberalism: on the political form of market liberty, Review of International Studies, 39, 2, 233–50 Bonefeld W, Burnham, P, 1998, The politics of counter inflationary credibility in Britain 1990–1994, Review of Radical Political Economics, 30, 1, 32–52 Buller J, Flinders, M, 2005,The domestic origins of depoliticisation in the area of British economic policy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7, 4, 526–43 90

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Burnham, P, 1995, Capital, crisis and the international state system, in W Bonefeld, J Holloway (eds) Global capital, national state and the politics of money, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 92–115 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticization, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3, 2, 127–49 Burnham, P, 2006, Depoliticisation: a reply to Buller and Flinders, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 8, 2, 303–6 Burnham, P, 2007,The politicisation of monetary policy-making in postwar Britain, British Politics, 2, 3, 395–419 Burnham, P, 2010, Class, capital and crisis: a return to fundamentals, Political Studies Review, 8, 1, 27–39 Burnham, P, 2011a,Towards a political theory of crisis, New Political Science, 33, 4, 493–507 Burnham, P, 2011b, Depoliticising monetary policy: the minimum lending rate experiment in Britain in the 1970s, New Political Economy, 16, 4, 463–80 Clarke, S, 1983, State, Class struggle and capital reproduction, Kapitalistate, 10/11, 122–3 Clarke, S, 1988, Keynesianism, monetarism and the crisis of the state, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Clarke, S, 1990, Crisis of socialism or crisis of the state?, Capital and Class, 42, 19–29 Clarke, S, (ed), 1991, The state debate, London: Macmillan Corrigan, P, Sayer, D, 1985, The great arch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell CSE State Apparatus and Expenditure Group, 1979, Struggle over the state, London: CSE Books De Brunhoff, S, 1978, The state, capital and economic policy, London: Pluto Press Financial Services Bill, 2012, Amendments as of 30 November 2012: www. publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2012-2013/0060/20130060.pdf Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2010, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/3/ contents Fisher, P, 2012, Policy making at the Bank of England: the FPC, 12 March: www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/ speech550.pdf Flinders, M, 2008, Delegated governance and the British state, Oxford: Oxford University Press Grant,W, 2002, Economic policy in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Griffiths, P,Weir, K, 2011, Osborne – Euro zone crisis shows debt dangers for UK, Reuters, 7 April, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/04/07/ uk-britain-economy-osborne-idUKTRE7362LO20110407 Habermas, J, 1971, Toward a rational society, London: Heinemann 91

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Habermas, J, 1976, Legitimation crisis, Cambridge: Polity Hay, C, 1999, Crisis and the structural transformation of the state, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1, 3, 317–44 HM Treasury, 2002, Reforming Britain’s economic and financial policy, London: Palgrave HM Treasury, 2010a, Chancellor announces policies to enhance fiscal credibility, Treasury Press Release, www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellorannounces-policies-to-enhance-fiscal-credibility HM Treasury, 2010b, Government response to the House of Commons Treasury Committee 4th Report of Session 2010–11: OBR, Cm 7962, www.officialdocuments.gov.uk/document/cm79/7962/7962.pdf HM Treasury, 2010c, Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon George Osborne MP, on the OBR and spending announcements, 17 May, www.gov. uk/government/speeches/speech-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequerrt-hon-george-osborne-mp-on-the-obr-and-spending-announcements HM Treasury, 2012, A new approach to financial regulation: securing stability, protecting consumers, London: HMSO, Cm 8268 Holloway, J, 2010, Crack capitalism, London: Pluto Press Holloway, J, Picciotto, S, 1977, Capital, crisis and the state, Capital and Class, 2, 76, 76–101 IMF, 2011, Shifting gears: tackling challenges on the road to fiscal adjustment, Washington: IMF Joyce, M, Tong, M, Woods, R, 2011, The United Kingdom’s quantitative easing policy, Quarterly Bulletin Q3, www.bankofengland.co.uk/ publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/qb110301.pdf Kettell, S, 2004, The political economy of exchange rate policy-making, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Krippner, G, 2011, Capitalizing on crisis, London: Harvard University Press Lienert, I, 2010, Should advanced countries adopt a fiscal responsibility law?, IMF Working Paper WP/10/254, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ wp/2010/wp10254.pdf Macartney, H, 2013, The debt crisis and european democratic legitimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Marx, K, 1975a, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in K Marx, F Engels (eds) Collected works,Vol 3, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 3–129 Marx, K, 1975b, On the Jewish Question, in K Marx, F Engels (eds) Collected works,Vol 3, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 146–74 Marx, K, 1975c, The German Ideology, in K Marx and F Engels (eds) Collected Works,Vol 5, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 19–540 Marx, K, 1976, Capital, volume one, London: Pelican

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Meiksins Wood, E, 1995, Democracy against capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Moran, M, 1984, The politics of banking, London: Macmillan Negri, T, 1988, Revolution retrieved, London: Red Notes O’Connor, J, 1973, The fiscal crisis of the state, Basingstoke: Macmillan Reid, M, 1982, The secondary banking crisis, 1973–1975, London: Macmillan Rosenberg, J, 1993, The empire of civil society, London:Verso Sullivan, H, Skelcher, C, 2002, Working across boundaries, Basingstoke: Palgrave Treasury and Civil Service Committee, 1993, The role of the Bank of England: volume one, first report, London: HMSO UKFI, 2009, An introduction: who we are, what we do, and the framework document which governs the relationship between UKFI and HM Treasury, www.ukfi.co.uk/releases/UKFI%20Introduction.pdf UKFI, 2010, UKFI framework document October 2010 UKFI, 2012, Press release, 23 July, www.ukfi.co.uk/releases/UKFI%20 Press%20Release%202012073_FINAL.pdf Wood, M, Flinders, M, 2014, Rethinking depoliticisation: Beyond the governmental, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 151–70

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CHAPTER FIVE

Repoliticising depoliticisation: theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises Bob Jessop

Introduction ‘Depoliticisation’ and cognate concepts need disambiguation. Relevant questions include whether these processes are intended outcomes of deliberate action or unintended, possibly unacknowledged, effects of societal trends, other processes, or practices with other goals. Depoliticisation is also a relational term: it demands specific reference points in past and present political space-time against which to establish its occurrence. This means that politics and, a fortiori, politicisation are polyvalent, context-dependent concepts. As Kari Palonen notes: There are no naturally political questions, but only questions that have been politicised. Issues arise only in response to moves or processes of politicisation, and only when they are thematised as contingent and controversial topics. Each of them has its own different temporal layers and contextual indexes that indicate when, how, and where they have become politicised. We may always ask whether they still carry any kind of political weight in a current situation, or whether they have been devaluated in favor of more recently politicised questions (2005, 44). Recognising this polyvalence helps to avoid three theoretical and analytical pitfalls: 1. A pan-politicism that conflates politics and power, sees them everywhere, denies the specificity of the political field, and treats depoliticisation as a mere change in the mode in which and/or site where (political) power operates. This can be avoided by specifying a referent for politics, for example, open class conflict, political partisanship, issues falling within the authority of a territorial state,

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decisions made by those with official roles in a given political sphere, and so on. 2. A sur-politicisme (overly political interpretation of politics) that adopts a broad definition of politics, restricts the scope of its ‘other(s)’, and so limits the space for politicisation. However, if one sees the demarcation between the political and non-political as meta-political, then reand de-politicisation can be defined as equivalent meta-political acts despite their substantive differences. 3. A crypto-normativity that treats one form of politics as genuine and others as inauthentic. Examples include the equation of politics with an antagonistic friend-enemy politics (Schmitt, 1993), an agonistic politics of disagreement oriented to reaching and revising consensus on the common good (Rancière, 2005; Mouffe, 2000), a mode of freedom opposed to the state’s police power (Arendt, 1960; Castoriadis, 1991), the technocratic administration of things (utilitarianism), and so on. To move beyond these pitfalls one can build on the well-known distinction between polity, politics, and policy (for example, Heidenheimer, 1986; and, for global politics, Lipschutz, 2005). This conceptual triplet can be read as highlighting the ontological depth of the political and, hence, different levels where depoliticisation occurs; or, following Palonen (2000), as indicating changed meanings over centuries of the concept of the political. Choosing the first reading, I consider the entanglement of three levels of depoliticisation.The constitution of the polity (constitutive politics) affects unevenly capacities to engage in politics (to influence, as Lasswell (1936) put it, ‘who gets what, when and how’), and this in turn constrains the range of feasible policies (policy making as an art of the possible).Yet some policies transform constitutive politics (witness the depoliticising aim of neoliberal policies or the politicising effects of the feminist claim that the personal is political) and reshape political practices (for example, changing the balance of forces and stimulating new political claims and movements). Polity (from the Greek politeia) is a spatial concept. It contrasts the sphere of society in which political activities occur with other, nonpolitical spheres, such as religion, the economy, law, education, or science. Relevant spatial metaphors here include: sphere, domain, realm, field, area, arena, stage, scene, and site (Palonen, 2000). ‘Polity’ covers the institutional architecture of the political field, including its boundaries and boundary-maintenance vis-à-vis non-political spheres, and the asymmetric effects of this architecture on political practice. Key issues include the institutional specificity of the polity (its disembedding from society and/ or its particularisation vis-à-vis other institutional orders), the separation of powers, the distinctiveness of political rationality and calculation, the 96

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structuring of the political field in normal states and exceptional regimes, differences among these regimes, and issues of scale (for example, parish government vs global governance). Politics refers to formally instituted, organised or informal practices that are directly oriented to, or otherwise shape, the exercise of state power. In contrast to the presumed relative stability of the polity as an instituted space, politics refers to dynamic, contingent activities that take time.They may occur within the formal political sphere, at its margins, or beyond it. Relevant political activities range from practices to transform the scope of the political sphere, define the state’s nature and purposes, modify the institutional integration and operating unity of the state, exercise direct control over the use of state powers, influence the balance of forces inside the state, block or resist the exercise of state power from ‘outside’, or modify the wider balance of forces that shapes politics as the art of the possible. Key issues include the forces involved in different political activities, which issues get thematised as legitimate topics of state action and political mobilisation, who defines the conditions for declaring a state of exception, and shifts in the political conjuncture. Policy concerns the overall strategic line of the state, the changing responsibilities of branches and tiers of government, specific modes and fields of state intervention and non-intervention, the aims and content of particular decisions and non-decisions, and so on. All three Ps have institutional (structural) and practical (strategic) features that also interact (on the underlying approach adopted below, see Jessop, 2002, 2007). The following remarks explore re- and de-politicisation at each level of analysis and their interactions. Table 1 summarises these remarks. Depolitisation and the polity

The identity of the polity involves material and discursive boundaries between the state qua institutional ensemble and other institutional orders or ‘civil society’. At stake is the construction of the political sphere as the reference point for political projects and activities. The ‘public-private’ distinction is a key, socially constituted dividing line here but is also problematic (for example, the claim that the personal is political). Polities are nonetheless articulated to other institutional orders, civil society, and informal social practices.

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Institutional separation and articulation of the polity

A distinct site of specific (political) relations and action

Secondary modes: wide range of ways to shape policy making, from framing issues as political or politically relevant, agenda-setting, advocacy coalitions, log-rolling, force-fraud-corruption, and so on

Government, governance, and collibration as sites of policy and its coordination

Altering forms and modes of policy making and changing policy lexicon and semantics

A specific mode of political action, mediated by state and governance

Altering forms and modes of political action and/or political lexicons and semantics

Primary mode: construing problems or issues as proper (or improper) targets of official policy and, given this, seeking to shape, implement, or block these policies

Secondary modes: wide range of ways to steer inherently open-ended, contingent subjects and objects of antagonistic and/or agonistic politics

Front- vs back-stage of the political scene

Politicisation and cognates

Primary mode: defining some problems or issues as proper, others as improper, themes of political mobilisation. NB: identifying and naming them is itself a political act

Politicalisation and cognates

Structuring the world of states

Secondary: relocating functions and tasks in a given polity (for example, forum shifting, rescaling, de- and re-territorialisation) to alter the forms and stakes of politics together with their structurally-inscribed strategic selectivities

Primary mode: drawing and redrawing lines of demarcation between the polity and its other(s)

Some different modes

POLICY

A complex ensemble of contingent, contestable, contentious political practices

POLITICS

Politisation and cognates

POLITY

Different forms of political inclusion and exclusion

Key processes

Level

Table 1: Modes of de- and re-politicisation

Benign indifference expands realm of freedom for exercise of legal, political, and social rights without harming others. Malign indifference ignores crisis tendencies and negative externalities (harms) that result from unregulated systems

Policy making includes not having a policy, that is, policy of indifference

Decision making includes the decision not to make a decision (non-decision making).

Political forces cannot deal with all conceivable political issues in same placetime: issues must be allocated to diverse political spaces with different capacities and/ or prioritised and sequenced. Intended or not, this is an inherently political process

Politics depends on separation between front- and back-stages of politics. This enables movement between open and covert political action as one form of re- and depoliticalisation

The political sphere is never completely closed because political struggles overflow its boundaries and because its operations are materially interdependent with those of various non-political spheres

The always contingent separation of the political from non-political sphere implies there are constitutive outside(s) (unmarked or marked) as a precondition of political practice

Structural paradoxes

Limiting politics to restricted choice of policies (ignoring the ties of policy problems to wider structural or strategic problems, including basic contradictions or potential blowbacks) can politicalise and politicise them – at risk of eventual policy failure

Policies have particular manifest and/or latent substantive and symbolic aims but are also typically formed, adopted, or modified in the light of their implications for overall balance of forces and societal cohesion

Oriented to the impossible reconciliation of particular interests with the general interest: this depends on hegemonic practices that necessarily exclude some particular interests and that are open to contention

Mutual self-restraint as a precondition for an agonistic politics versus contingent political benefits of controversialisation, polarisation, partisanship, theatricality, and so on

Key strategic questions: who has the right to declare a state of emergency; and which forces, if any, have the power to demand, resist, or block the exercise of this right?

Self-limitation on redrawing lines of demarcation and redesigning the political sphere occurs via (temporarily depoliticalised) constitutions that provide for their own suspension or transformation in defined conditions.

Strategic paradoxes

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Repoliticising depoliticisation

For example, from an institutionalist perspective, Mitchell proposes: [t]he state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organisation, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society. The essence of modern politics is not policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by the other, but the producing and reproducing of this line of difference. (1991, 95) These processes also divide the globe into different states and societies, creating a segmented and stratified inter-state system in an emerging world society.This is more complicated than suggested by conventional accounts of the traditional Westphalian national territorial state. This is visible in the variable coincidence of different boundaries, borders or frontiers of action and the changing primacy of different scales of political action. This involves in turn various multi-spatial government and governance arrangements. It also invites reflection on whether the three Ps denote and connote the same in foreign, trans-, supra- or inter-national politics as they do in the sphere of domestic, internal politics. Likewise, from a governmentality perspective, Foucault notes: it is likely that if the state is what it is today, it is precisely thanks to this governmentality that is at the same time both external and internal to the state, since it is the tactics of government that allow the continual definition of what should or should not fall within the state’s domain, what is public and what private, what is and what is not within the state’s competence, and so on. So, if you like, the survival and limits of the state should be understood on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. (2008, 109) This poses important issues of statecraft understood not just as the exercise of sovereign power (its conventional referent) but as the complex art of ‘governance of governance’ within and beyond the (changing) formal boundaries of the state. Foucauldian scholars study problem definition, power asymmetries, domination and the political effects of specific modes of calculation, institutional assemblages, and social practices. A key aspect of governmentality is how it (re-)defines some issues as private, technical or managerial, removing them from overtly political decision making and contentious politics (Miller and Rose, 2008). Repoliticisation could also be seen in terms of governmentality. Lastly, from his distinctive Marxist perspective, Gramsci remarked that: 99

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the general notion of the State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that the State = ‘political society + civil society’, in other words, hegemony armoured with coercion’). (1971, 263) Gramsci studied the state as a complex social relation that articulates state and non-state institutions and practices around particular economic, political, and societal projects and strategies. He emphasised the centrality of private institutions, organisations, and movements in state power, the formation of political alliances, and disorganisation of subaltern forces. ‘Civil society’, a domain of ostensibly ‘private’ associations, was an integral part of the state and, a fortiori, of politics and policy. This insight has been extended to ‘global civil society’ and its role as a vector of de- and re-politicisation in global governance practices such as development aid. Combining Foucauldian and Gramscian perspectives, and mindful of Mitchell’s remark that the essence of modern politics is the reproduction of the inherently flexible boundary between state and society, I suggest that ‘the state in its inclusive sense’ can be defined as ‘government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy’. Thus the exercise of state power involves both state capacities unique to the state (for example, its constitutionalised monopoly of organised coercion, tax powers, and legal sovereignty); and modes of governance or governmentalisation that operate beyond the state. Government and governance are often linked through contested practices of collibration, that is, the rebalancing of forms of governance both within and beyond the state. Such practices involve not only specific political and/or policy outcomes in particular political and policy fields but also their broader effects on state capacities. They modify the available mix of government and governance techniques and change the balance of forces. Those engaged in meta-governance may redraw the inherited publicprivate divide, alter the forms of interpenetration between the political system and other functional systems, and modify the relations between these systems and civil society in the light of their (perceived) impact on state capacities.While collibration is one of the state’s main meta-political activities, an activity where it has a privileged strategic position, it is often hotly contested because of competing meta-governance projects. And, as neoliberalism indicates, these projects can originate outside the state, even if state action is needed to realise them. For the polity, then, a key aspect of re- and de-politicisation is the redrawing of the ‘lines of difference’ between the political and one or more ostensibly non-political spheres – whether the latter are defined as an unmarked residuum in terms of their location outside the political sphere (for example, state vs society, public vs private) or as marked spheres with 100

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their own institutional order, operational logics, subjects, and practices (for example, the religious, economic, legal, educational, or scientific fields). Thus politicisation extends the frontiers of the polity (penetrating or colonising the non-political as an unmarked sphere or one or more marked spheres and subordinating it/them to political factors, interests, values, and forces), depoliticisation rolls these frontiers back, and repoliticisation reintegrates depoliticised spheres into the political. For terminological clarity, in line with the three Ps, I will describe these processes in terms of politisation. This involves constructing a division between the political and non-political spheres and locating social relations and/or sets of social issues on one or another side of this divide. This creates space for various kinds of depolitisation, for example, sacralisation, marketisation, juridification, scientisation (expertise) or, in Foucauldian terms, governmentalisation and self-responsibilisation through disciplinary or governmental practices. However, as Mitchell, Foucault, and Gramsci, in their different ways, emphasise, this dividing line is not natural, even if it is sometimes taken-for-granted: it must be policed and can be repoliticised. Thus depolitisation would backfire if it provokes controversies and contention about the demarcation of the political and non-political spheres and what properly belongs on the unmarked side or in given, positively demarcated, non-political sphere. A secondary aspect of depolitisation is the reorganisation of the division of political labour within the polity. This can occur through institutional differentiation, de-differentiation, adding new tiers or scales, or moving particular topics across its branches and departments. The ‘normal’ forms of politics vary across branches of government: for example, partisan and adversarial politics in legislatures, concern with the ‘national interest’ – if only as a legitimation – in the political executive, rational-legal administration in bureaucracies, formal legal reasoning in courts, and constitutional interpretation in supreme courts. The resulting checks and balances and countervailing powers may contribute to depoliticalisation by setting limits to politics as the art of the possible and/or introducing frictions and delays into the political process when major changes are sought. These very checks and balances can also be means of overt or covert politicalisation. This can occur when administrative or judicial offices or key positions on quangos are allocated through a spoils system or, again, when bureaucrats do not act as good, Weberian officials sine ira et studio (without anger or enthusiasm) but have their own personal, partisan, or sectional political agendas (Peters and Pierre, 2004). Likewise, for regulators, the coproduction of regulation with input from the regulated can create regulatory capture or willing submission to sectors that might offer lucrative future employment. 101

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More generally, moving issues across branches can change the form of politics, involving both de- and re-politicisation, diminishing the significance of the prior form and boosting the importance of the stakes and practices associated with the branch to which deliberative and/or decision-making powers are transferred. Jumping scale can also produce politicisation if it removes issues from a contentious to non-contentious arena or, at least, one where the stakes and balance of forces are different. Overall, this secondary aspect, in its various guises, sometimes involves politisation of previously non-political spheres (for example, education, gender relations, science), sometimes reallocates political responsibilities across government branches, and sometimes shifts their scale (for example, from local to national to trans- or supra-national). Adjusting the polity’s variable geometry need not modify the forms of politics but may simply alter its forms, terrains, or temporal horizons. A key issue here is the territorialisation of political power. If statehood is defined in part in territorial terms (as many traditional state theories claim), then depoliticisation can refer to destatisation and/or depolitisation. The former removes issues from the purview of a territorial state – whether in the guise of electoral politics, legislative deliberation, executive decision, bureaucratic administration, or judicial determination – and moves them into an ill-defined political sphere where ‘stakeholders’ or ‘social partners’ deliberate and negotiate about societal steering in areas of mutual interest.This preserves a space for ‘politics without (official) policy making’. Destatisation is also described as a movement from government to governance.This trend may reflect demands by social forces dissatisfied with state and market failure and/or initiatives by state managers to supplement or replace more traditional forms of top-down government to better serve relevant ‘publics’. In this sense, governance straddles the conventional public-private divide and may involve ‘tangled hierarchies’, parallel power networks, or other linkages across tiers of government and/or functional domains. However, just as markets and the state fail in their own ways, governance networks have their forms of failure.This opens space for the re-entry of the state as a political subject charged with meta-governance responsibilities. However meta-governance is also failure-prone, thanks to the ‘wicked complexity’ of some governance problems and the inevitable triple politicisation of the state qua institutionally-mediated material condensation of a shifting balance of forces (Meuleman, 2008; Jessop, 2011). Depoliticalisation and politics

If politics refers to formally instituted, organised or informal practices that are directly oriented to, or otherwise shape, the exercise of state 102

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power, then politicisation refers to the thematisation of some issues as appropriate topics for state action. In general terms, politics refers to the forms, aims, and objects of political practice. It includes contention over the institutional architecture of the state and political sphere and struggles at a distance from the state that modify political calculation and/or views on the nature and purposes of state power. Important here is Poulantzas’s point that the state’s particular functions – techno-economic, narrowly political (that is, concerned with reproducing the state apparatus and its institutional unity), and ideological or ethico-political – are all exercised in the light of its general task to maintain social cohesion in a class- and otherwise-divided society (Poulantzas, 1973). Depoliticisation in all three senses is crucial to these efforts to maintain social cohesion. For clarity, we could refer to depoliticisation in regard to politics as depoliticalisation. However, whereas the polity provides a rather static, spatial referent, politics is an inherently dynamic, open-ended, and heterogeneous ensemble of political practices. Thus depoliticalisation has several meanings. Relevant issues concern: (1) the forms and stakes of normal and/or exceptional politics; (2) the thematisation of issues as controversial, negotiable, or consensual; (3) the subjective identity as well as material and ideal interests of political agents; (4) their location within, on the margins of, or at a distance from the state’s institutional architecture; and (5) their positioning relative to the front- or back-stage of the political scene. Because space constraints prohibit an extended list of relevant dimensions of depoliticalisation, I will provide five different examples. First, if one regarded class interests as the key stake in politics, an important mode of depoliticalisation would maintain the separation between an economy subordinate to the logic of profit-oriented, marketmediated accumulation and a political sphere that makes decisions about the national or national-popular interest. For this dethematises antagonistic class interests and disorganises class forces in favour of negotiable interests rooted in economic-corporate or non-class interests.This requires, as Marx noted for an earlier period, a specific compromise. Subaltern classes should not advance from political to social emancipation; conversely, the dominant classes should not seek to return to the political status quo ante by restoring the Ancien Régime but be content that their social power has been restored (1978, 77). More generally, stable liberal bourgeois democratic politics depends on the self-limitation of what political forces thematise as political. If this institutionalised, depoliticalising compromise breaks down, there is the legal or factual possibility of declaring a state of economic or political emergency, suspending the rule of law, and limiting the forms, forums, spaces, and methods for expressing political resistance. In these conditions, the alleged demands of national security and/or economic recovery take 103

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precedence over ‘normal’ democratic politics. For national security, this can take a police-military form (military dictatorship), one-party rule (for example, fascism), a government of national unity (suspending normal party politics), or multi-party support for emergency measures taken by the incumbent government. For economic crisis, we observe governments of national unity, rule by ‘technocrats’ (for example, Spain and Greece in the Eurozone debt crisis), and externally-imposed economic, financial, and fiscal measures as the quid pro quo for outside assistance. States of emergency also provide cover for open or covert action to weaken various political forces that oppose crisis-induced or, at least, crisis-legitimated policies. In addition to the recent neoliberal exploitation of crisis to cut entitlements (rather than, say, defense expenditure), this opportunity was taken in the handling of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its offshoots elsewhere, where measures were taken to delegitimate it, treat it as a terrorist organisation, arrest its leaders, disrupt its activities, and block supportive media coverage. Notwithstanding such treatment, Occupy succeeded in politicising the management of the financial crisis and popularising the issue of growing inequality around the populist slogan of the 99% against the 1% (for analysis of the Occupy movement and its role as a ‘constituent moment’ in US politics, see Tarrow, 2011; Chomsky, 2012; Gitlin, 2012). Second, and relatedly, the self-limitation of democratic politics can also be secured through constitutional law, which depoliticalises the economic, political and social interests that were dominant at the inevitably highly politicised conjuncture in which a constitution is established, and also consolidates this material condensation of the balance of forces by requiring special procedures to alter the now depoliticalised constitution. The separation of powers and guarantees of fundamental political, economic, and social rights contribute to this depoliticalisation and, once the constitution has been taken-for-granted, it is hard to contest the strategic biases inscribed in this separation and in the specific content of fundamental rights.This is seen in the granting of significant autonomy to central banks to set interest-rate and exchange-rate policy within market constraints (mediated via forecasting based on neoclassical models, bond markets, credit-rating agencies, and so on), rather than being subject to overtly political pressures, whether from government, parties, social partners, or social movements.Analogously, a ‘new constitutionalism’ (Gill, 1995) is creating super-protection for capital as neoliberalism is rolled out globally. This is seen in the re-scaling of quasi-constitutional protections for capitalist enterprises and their activities to the international level (removing them from the more contentious field of national politics), and the allocation of adjudication over disputes (including with states) 104

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to private tribunals, experts, lawyers, and other ostensibly non-political forums and/or figures. Third, more modestly but sometimes as effectively, when the goal is to depoliticalise a political issue, state managers or other political agents may seek information, policy recommendations, or even decisions from ostensibly non-political figures (recruited from ‘civil society’), retired politicians, elder statesmen and stateswomen, technocrats, allegedly bi- or multi-partisan commissions, or quasi-non-governmental organisations. Whether or not figures are considered ‘above politics’ depends, of course, on whether or not the politics-non-politics divide is accepted. One benefit of this tactic is that it can create cooling-off periods for controversial decisions. This is why the role of commissions of inquiry is sometimes described as taking minutes and lasting years. Corporatist arrangements may also serve to depoliticalise issues. They were often introduced to address long-term economic and social issues where complex, reciprocal interdependence requires long-term cooperation – thereby placing the relevant policy areas outside the short-term time horizons of electoral cycles and parliamentary in-fighting, in the expectation (whether cognitive or normative) that the organisations involved (or at least their leaders) would act in ‘non-political’ ways to implement policies in the ‘national interest’ (for example, wage restraint in the case of tripartite bodies).And, most recently, public-private partnership arrangements have been established to deliver policies in an efficient, effective, and economical manner (for example, private health trusts or charter schools as a case of public-private partnerships), and ostensibly (but not genuinely) free from state interference. Fourth, depoliticalisation can be fostered through governmentalisation, that is, creating the conditions for technocratic decision making and/ or the self-responsibilisation of individuals, groups, organisations, or whole ‘stakeholder groups’ through adoption of specific technologies of government that rely on scientific expertise, consultants, expert systems, algorithms, metrology, ratings, benchmarking, contingent rewards for approved behaviour, and so on (on expertise, see Fischer, 2009; on metrology, Barry, 2002; on credit rating agencies, Sinclair, 2005; on governmentalisation, Miller and Rose, 2008). These techniques are sometimes justified in terms of reducing government overload, but they also have affinities with the neoliberal project of a lean state, which depends on flanking and supporting mechanisms to soothe the political sting of austerity politics (on the rollback, rollout, and blowback phases of neoliberalism, see Peck, 2010).This approach can be read as a form of ‘passive revolution’: a process of transformation, absorption, and incorporation that translates contentious issues into bureaucratic or technical questions (Gramsci, 1971, 115, 291). It aims to enhance the efficiencies of economic, 105

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political, and social domination via micro-management that penetrates the pores of an increasingly complex and intransparent social formation. It may also turn potential sources of resistance or obstruction into selfresponsibilised agents of their own subordination. Although they would reject the Gramscian gloss given to these practices, Anglo-Foucauldian scholars and those interested in social studies of science have provided many examples (compare Barry, 2002; Miller and Rose, 2008). Fifth, following Husserl and Heidegger, we can refer to ‘sedimentation’ as a more semantic mode of depoliticalisation that also applies to policies. This covers all forms of routinisation that lead to a forgetting of the contested origins of political discourses, structures and processes. This gives them the form and appearance of objective facts of life. Building on this phenomenological claim, two critical discourse analysts have posited a cyclical logic that moves from politicisation to sedimentation (depoliticisation) to repoliticisation as the contested origins of the takenfor-granted are exposed and a new round of contestation begins. Seen thus, repoliticisation is a form of politicalisation that refers to all forms of challenge to such objectivation, aiming to denaturalise the semiotic and material (extra-semiotic) features of what has become sedimented. Sedimentation and depoliticisation are not confined to a specific ‘political’ domain (separate from others, however differentiated); they are contingent aspects of all forms of social life (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). This thesis risks a latent pan-politicism avoidable only by stressing the discontinuous rhythms of alternating phases of sedimentation and (re-)politicisation.This would highlight the shifting frontiers of the polity, the sedimentation and repoliticisation of various features of the social world as accepted facts of life or as ripe for political action and, analogously, as suitable subjects of active policy making rather than policy inertia. Depoliticisation and policy

Whereas politics concerns the overall strategic direction of the state and its, division of ‘policy labour’, policy denotes specific fields of state intervention and abstention, decisions and non-decisions, modes of intervention, and so on.Their depoliticisation occurs in the context of the results of earlier depolitisation and depoliticalisation. In particular, many of the modes for removing issues from open political contention can also be found in the formation of specific policies, policy making, policy taking, and policy mplementation. Sedimentation is a key mechanism here because it removes many taken-for-granted themes from the political field, from the scope of contentious politics, or from policy considerations. Supplementing this is thematisation of some issues as non-political and some policies as non106

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negotiable. Conversely, and paradoxically, the highlighting of a restricted set of policy choices can also produce depoliticalisation. As Wolff (2010) noted for the early stages of the NAFC, if political debate focuses on a restricted choice of policies, it implies that the crisis (or other problems) are due to previous poor policy choices. The problem then becomes to identify the correct policy, and this diverts attention from broader issues of governability, continuing contradictions, and so on.

Politics and economics in the North Atlantic Financial Crisis Space constraints prevent a detailed analysis of the genesis, aetiology, and course of the NAFC. Instead I discuss two cases of depoliticisation to hint at some interrelations of the three levels of depoliticisation and their limitations. The NAFC comprises a complex nexus of crises with technological, economic, financial, political, geopolitical, social, and environmental aspects. Nonetheless its label is justified because it was triggered by accumulating problems generated by a hypertrophied financedominated economy in which fictitious money, fictitious credit, fictitious capital (and, increasingly, fictitious profits derived from control fraud) played an increasingly autonomous role outside the circuits of profitproducing capital. This was facilitated by four decades of neoliberalism that had depolitised monetary policy, interest rate policy, and regulatory policy by making central banks independent of direct government control, and extending neoliberal policies that all point in the direction of depoliticisation (Jessop, 2013). The typical neoliberal policy set comprises: (1) liberalisation to promote greater market competition; (2) deregulation, based on belief in the efficiency of markets and the prudential, self-preserving instincts of companies and financial institutions; (3) privatisation to roll back the frontiers of the polity in favour of the profit-oriented, market-mediated economy; (4) the introduction of market proxies in the residual state sector to favour efficient, effective, and economical delivery of public services, thereby reducing the scope for non-market logics in the public sector, especially when combined with budget cuts; (5) reductions in direct taxation on corporate income, personal wealth, and personal income – especially on entrepreneurial income – in order to encourage innovation and allow market forces rather than the state to determine national output; and (6) promoting internationalisation to boost the free flow of goods and services, profit-producing investment, and interest-bearing capital and assist completion of the world market. Each of these measures involves a paradoxical form of depolitisation. They involve active state intervention to reset the boundaries between 107

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the political and the non-political. In this case, however, the latter is not an unmarked residual (society) but a deliberately expanded marked sphere (profit-oriented, market-mediated economic activities). Another paradox, often remarked but always explicit in the Freiburg rather than Chicago version of neoliberalism, is the coupling of an expanded ‘free market’ with a ‘strong state’. Ordo-liberalism would interpret the latter more in terms of robust regulation of market forces and a lean but solidaristic welfare state. In contrast, for the Chicago School, the strong state involves weak regulation for capital, a mean social security state, and a growing domestic security apparatus to pre-empt, control and punish dissent. Moreover, whenever the naïve belief in the principle of efficient markets is confounded by experience, neoliberals pragmatically endorse a state of economic emergency that authorises state action and the creation of fiat money, issuing of public debt, or resort to more technical manoeuvres to rescue financial institutions deemed too big and/or too systemically interconnected to be permitted to fail or, indeed, simply too well-connected to be required to fail. In short, policies recently deemed improper and even reckless and, therefore, beyond the politically acceptable repertoire of government action, are redefined as essential to the national and, indeed, global interest in ‘timely, targeted, and temporary’ (but by no means token) measures to recapitalise failing financial institutions, renew business confidence, and restore capital accumulation. The fiscal cliff debate

The USA is the economic and political space where conditions favouring a severe financial crisis were nurtured (albeit not with this result in mind) and where it surfaced, initially unremarked on the political stage, then occupying centre stage (Rasmus, 2010; 2012). The US crisis passed through stages: credit crunch, liquidity crisis, some financial insolvencies, a generalised financial crisis, a recession that risked becoming an epic recession or even great depression, and, most recently, a ‘public debt’ crisis. The associated shifts in crisis-management and the symptoms of a ‘crisis of crisis-management’ (Offe, 1984) exemplify the paradox of a political stagecraft that manufactures crises or controversy around some issues and thereby diverts political attention from other, perhaps more fundamental, themes, problems, and crises (which are depoliticalised by default). The roll-out phase of neoliberalism contributed in this regard to the depolitisation of economic processes and policy decisions that were once vital to the state’s capacity to govern the capitalist economy.Two examples are: (1) the deregulation of banking and finance, because, allegedly, rational economic actors would always act prudently; and (2) official indifference 108

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to growing private debt even though this eventually contributed more to the US financial crisis than the supposed evil of growing public debt (cutting which intensifies the economic crisis when private debt is already being deleveraged). Example two is entwined with the depoliticalisation of key parts of the federal budget, namely, defence plus subsidies and tax breaks for the corporate sector, such that mainstream political debate and mass media comment focus on the neoliberal bête noire of entitlement programmes. These features of the political scene shaped the surreal fiscal cliff debate. This rested on cumulative and wide-ranging efforts over decades to restrict the policy options so that the need for entitlement reductions to lower public spending was naturalised. It also saw political theatre around discussion of these limited options following the visible economic fear and political panic in November 2008. The fiscal cliff drama began its two-year run in 2011, produced by business lobbies, directed by fiscal hawks, and favourably reviewed by mainstream media. The script gave a key role in depoliticalisation to an official commission.The leading players in the bicameral, bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the Bowles-Simpson Commission) were recruited on both sides from known deficit hawks. Unsurprisingly, its blueprint for deficit reduction stoked the fiscal hysteria without ever examining cuts in defence spending, ending unfunded wars, halting subsidies to a broad spectrum of corporate interests (often with large reserves, often held offshore), or restoring tax rates on the rich to Reagan era levels, even though wages have stagnated for 20-plus years and wealth inequalities match those of the roaring ’twenties. Although it did not achieve the internal votes needed to become an official report (in part because some members deemed it insufficiently radical), the blueprint fed into a carefully stage-managed drama on the well-illuminated political stage that focused on deficits and later used the widely accepted metaphor of ‘fiscal cliff ’ to frame public debate. Meanwhile, back-stage dealings and plotting continued with a view to cutting entitlement programmes further and implementing yet more corporate tax breaks.The benefits for the rich of the latter will substantially exceed the ‘harm’ caused by individual tax hikes. The spurious debate on the ‘fiscal cliff ’ reveals an odd but powerful combination of: 1. The sedimented depolitisation of a crisis-prone, deregulated, profitoriented, market-mediated economy that is regarded as the only economic option (with all of its implications for the scope of normal politics)

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2. political theatricalisation of an adversarial play at the front of the political stage, which is applauded by a complicit mass media that has largely adopted unquestioningly the wilfully misleading fiscal cliff narrative, which serves the political occultation (depoliticalisation) of the actions of a bipartisan parallel power network, representing the dominant fractions of capital, that has worked behind the scenes to facilitate cuts in entitlement programmes, roll-back the residual welfare state, and extend more tax benefits to big corporations and the richest individuals and families 3. the depoliticisation of mainstream debate on the fiscal crisis by confining it to policy choices favoured by interest-bearing capital and transnational profit-producing capital, which are less likely to prevent a triple dip recession or great depression than the excluded options, rather than considering other, feasible policy options that might regenerate the economy, enhance competitiveness, improve conditions for the ‘squeezed middle’, and renew the war on poverty Depoliticisation is enabled because state managers and those close to the state’s inner sancta do not contest the ‘free market’ ideology of neoliberalism. Even the Obama Administration, with its strong electoral mandate(s) for change and the potential political resource of public anger, rejected a popular, populist attack on ‘banksters’, bailed out financial institutions, and pursued fiscal austerity to protect corporate tax cuts and defence spending.With many dramatis personae recruited from the financial sector (notably from investment banks), the Obama Administration followed the fiscal cliff script, contributing to bipartisan and bicameral immobilism. The last minute enactment, on 2 January 2013, of modest tax hikes and deeper spending cuts, allowed the federal government to maintain normal operations temporarily, setting the scene for renewed negotiations with higher economic and political stakes as the sequester approached.Yet the borrowing limit imposed on the Treasury that provides the background to this drama does not derive from the Constitution but is a recent convention promoted by fiscal conservatives and now so thoroughly depoliticalised that leading economic and political forces and the mainstream media accept it as the basis for the high-stakes fiscal debate. Following political deadlock, Budget Control Act (2011) provisions triggered sequestration cuts of 10% on 1 March 2013. Despite earlier doom-laden forecasts, the US economy is slowly recovering (although commentators doubt its robustness) and, as of August 2013, the federal budget deficit is falling, contrary to deficit scaremongering. This suggests that the deficit hysteria was staged to pressure Congress in an election period to lock in bigger cuts before quantitative easing produced a (weak) 110

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recovery, and that Obama collaborated for his own political ends. His proposed budget for 2014 (for approval in September 2013) confirms the obfuscated Obama-Republican remit to maintain the Bush tax cuts and defence spending, at the expense of reducing Medicare and Medicaid (rejecting a modest payroll tax increase to cover prescription drugs or acting to limit their escalating, monopolistic pricing), cutting other discretionary social spending, and postponing pensions and reducing their real value. This is a major success for strategies of removing key issues from the political agenda. The Eurozone crisis and the fiscal compact

The European sovereign debt crisis (or Eurozone crisis) that became visible in 2008–09 and intensified in 2009–12 led via a series of failed crisis measures to the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (or Fiscal Compact) signed by all but two member states in March 2012. When fully implemented, it will set binding limits (0.5% of GDP) on the structural deficits in the annual budgets of individual member states, and thereby constrain national sovereignty in the field of economic policy. This illustrates another set of political strategies for depolitisation, depoliticalisation, and depoliticisation. Depolitisation occurred stepwise during the formation of the European Union as powers were transferred to the executive at national and federal level and, notably, scale-jumping and arena-shifting moved crucial economic and financial powers to the European Commission with its close ties to economic and financial interests and well-known ‘democratic deficit’. This trend was reinforced with the founding of Economic and Monetary Union and a European Central Bank which, while formally accountable to member states, is independent of democratic political control and concerned primarily with price stability rather than wider economic issues. The Fiscal Compact continues this approach (including its neglect of public opinion) by removing budgetary policy from national control, establishing technical rules set by experts but premised on theoretically flawed neoclassical economic reasoning, and triggering sanctions if the limits are broken. Precedents for this debt brake include Switzerland (2001– ) and Germany (2009–), although these show that it is hard to measure structural deficits, operate the brake, and avoid political manipulation. Scientific validity and technical feasibility issues apart, this measure will prevent active fiscal policy along Keynesian lines. By extending disciplinary neoliberalism, it constitutionalises and entrenches the power of capital, limiting states’ political autonomy and transforming budget making into 111

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a more technocratic process subject to legal sanctions as well as market pressures. Depoliticalisation was reinforced when the unexpected (in official circles) financial crisis was transformed in turn into several sovereign debt crises and contagion risks rooted in deeply interconnected European credit markets. This created the space for technocratic governance in southern member states, whether through EU and ECB-inspired coups d’état (Greece and Italy) or through de facto or formal governments of national unity (Spain, Portugal). These governments are running states of economic emergency that authorise big spending cuts and neoliberal structural reforms.Yet the depth of the crisis and the impact of austerity have prompted growing resistance in the periphery from the unemployed, the poor, the marginalised, savers, and so on, with a likely spread northwards. This requires careful modulation of conditionalities to keep the electorates of ‘donor’ states on side, and to temper popular unrest that would destabilise the governments of economic emergency in the indebted states. Yet this tends to hide from public view (especially in donor countries) that bailout monies largely return from the PIIGS to financial institutions in Northern Europe. Depoliticisation depends on the TINA (There is no alternative) mantra that delimits the feasible set of economic, political, and social policies.This proved unappealing in Southern Europe (outside the current set of state managers) and is contested by post-Keynesian economists, diverse think tanks, and several major political parties when in opposition.The tipping of the Eurozone into a deepening double dip recession, which has triggered second thoughts in the International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, growing popular unrest, including right-wing populist reaction and xenophobia, and popular reaction against the European Central Bank attempt to renege on deposit insurance in Cyprus all indicate the limits of depoliticisation even when depolitisation is still firmly entrenched. This suggests that the validity of Deutsch’s dictum (1963, 111) that power means not having to learn from one’s mistakes may vary across polity, politics, and policy.

Conclusions I identified three levels of politics and linked them to different modes of politicisation, depoliticisation, and repoliticisation. Given this issue’s focus, my remarks largely addressed depolitisation, depoliticalisation, and depoliticisation, which correspond respectively to efforts and/or outcomes that (1) reconfigure the space of politics (the polity) to the benefit of its unmarked ‘other’ (society) or specific marked spheres (notably the profit112

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oriented, market-mediated economy); (2) change the sites and stakes of political practices (the field of politics); and (3) thematise some issues as inappropriate for political policy making. With consolidated neoliberal regime shifts or, at least, the ratchet-like advance of neoliberal policy adjustments in the last 30–40 years and the recent imposition of neoliberal conditionalities on the indebted PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) economies, all three forms of depoliticisation have favoured economic neoliberalism nolens volens by redrawing the boundaries, limiting the stakes, and restricting the allegedly feasible set of policy choices in the political field. This extends capital accumulation as an organisational principle towards the expanding horizon of the world market and world society. This modifies the line between the polity and its other(s), the nature and purpose of politics, and the policies that are acceptable and feasible vis-à-vis the problem-generating capacity of a self-expanding economic sphere.The extension of real and proxy markets; of commodification; the fictitious commodification of nature, labour power, money and credit, and knowledge; liberalisation and regulation aimed at market completion; and lower taxation – all these render the political sphere indifferent to market outcomes, removing decisions and actions with major societal repercussions from a public domain where they can be subject to contingent, contentious, and contested political practices.This was already inscribed in the institutional separation between the market economy and the state, with only the latter, if at all, subject to democratic control, but it is certainly reinforced by these trends. It is tempting to focus on the aims of the social forces seeking to transform the polity, modify political practices, and pursue some rather than other policies. But this would mean neglecting the adequacy of their political, non-political, or apolitical construals to the social and material challenges that these forces seek to resolve.There are basic contradictions and crisis tendencies that are incompressible and do not disappear simply because handling them is no longer deemed to fall within the political sphere, to be a proper theme of political practices, or to belong to a legitimate range of policies.As Poulantzas argued, whether or not the state intervenes, the contradictions of capitalism are inescapable (1978, 167–72). This gains credence from the eventual outbreak of the crisis of regulated, finance-dominated accumulation manifest in the NAFC, forcing the repoliticisation of the market economy, the re-thematisation of economic issues as appropriate objects of political practice, and active policy making rather than studied indifference.

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Acknowledgement Research was aided by an ESRC professorial fellowship (RES-051-27-0303). The usual disclaimers apply. References Arendt, H, 1960, Freedom and politics, Chicago Review, 14, 1, 28–46 Barry, A, 2002, The anti-political economy, Economy and Society, 31, 2, 268–84 Castoriadis, C, 1991, Philosophy, politics, autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press Chomsky, N, 2012, Occupy, Harmondsworth: Penguin Deutsch, K, 1963, The nerves of government, New York: Free Press Fischer, F, 2009, Democracy and expertise, Oxford: Oxford University Press Foucault, M, 2008, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Basingstoke: Palgrave Gill, S, 1995, The global panopticon? The neoliberal state, economic life and democratic surveillance, Alternatives, 20, 1, 1–49 Gitlin, T, 2012, Occupy nation: The roots, the spirit, and the promise of Occupy Wall Street, New York: HarperCollins Glynos, J, Howarth, D, 2007, Logics of social explanation, London: Routledge Gramsci, A, 1971, Selections from the prison notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart Heidenheimer,AJ, 1986, Politics, policy and policey as concepts in English and Continental languages, Review of Politics, 48, 1–26 Jessop, B, 2002, The future of the capitalist state, Cambridge: Polity Jessop, B, 2007, State power:A strategic-relational approach, Cambridge: Polity Jessop, B, 2011, Metagovernance, in Bevir, M (ed), Handbook of governance, London: Sage Jessop, B, 2013, Credit money, fiat money and currency pyramids, in Pixley, J, Harcourt, G, (eds), Financial crises and the nature of capitalist money, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Lasswell, H, 1936, Politics:Who gets what, when, and how, NewYork: Meridian Lipschutz, R, 2005, Global civil society and global governmentality, in Baker, G, Chandler, D (eds), Global civil society, London: Routledge Marx, K, 1850,The class struggles in France, in Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW), 10, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978 Meuleman, L, 2008, Public management and the metagovernance of hierarchies, networks and markets, Heidelberg: Springer Miller, P, Rose, N, 2008, Governing the present, Cambridge: Polity Mitchell, TJ, 1991, The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics, American Political Science Review, 85, 1, 77–96 Mouffe, C, 2000, The democratic paradox, London:Verso 114

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Offe, C, 1984, Contradictions of the welfare state, London: Hutchinson Palonen, K, 2000,Two Concepts of Politics,Two Histories of a Concept?, Paper presented at European Consortium for Political Research joint sessions of workshops, Copenhagen 15–21 April Palonen, K, 2005, The politics of conceptual history, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 1, 1, 37–50 Peck, J, 2010, Constructions of neoliberal reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press Peters, BG, Pierre, J (eds), 2004, The politicisation of the civil service in comparative perspective, London: Routledge Poulantzas, N, 1973, Political power and social classes, London: New Left Books Poulantzas, N, 1978, State, power, socialism, London:Verso Rancière, J, 2005, Disagreement: Politics and philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Rasmus, J, 2010, Epic recession: Prelude to global depression, London: Pluto Rasmus, J, 2012, Obama’s economic recovery: Recovery for the few, London: Pluto Schmitt, C, 1993, The age of neutralisations and depoliticisations, Telos, 96, 130–42 Sinclair,TJ, 2005, The new masters of capital American bond rating agencies and the politics of creditworthiness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Tarrow, S, 2011, Occupy Wall Street is not the Tea Party of the left, Foreign Affairs, October 10, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136401/sidneytarrow/why-occupywall-street-is-not-the-tea-party-of-the-left Wolff, R, 2008, Policies to ‘avoid’ economic crises, MR Zine, 6 November, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/index061108.html

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CHAPTER SIX

Rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government Emma Ann Foster, Peter Kerr and Christopher Byrne

Introduction This chapter approaches the concept of depoliticisation from a broadly Foucauldian perspective. It aims to re-conceptualise depoliticisation as central to the rolling out of new forms of power and regulation associated with neo-liberal governmentality. In doing so, our aim is to synergise the available scholarship on neo-liberal governmentality and depoliticisation to formulate an analytical framework which, we believe, offers a more robust understanding of the relationship between politicisation, depoliticisation and contemporary rationalities of government. Hitherto, apart from a couple of exceptions (Foster, 2008; Tosa, 2009; Kerr et al, 2011; Oksala, 2011; Byrne et al, 2012), the literatures on depoliticisation and neo-liberal governmentality have remained distinct from one another despite the fact that they are discussing different aspects of the same political project and therefore work in a complementary fashion. To demonstrate the synergy between both concepts this chapter is separated as follows. The first two sections discuss some of the potential problems thrown up by the scholarship on depoliticisation (Burnham, 2002, 2007, 2011; Flinders and Buller, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Flinders, 2008, Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2010; Kettell, 2008; Wood and Flinders, 2014, 151–70). We argue that the relationship between depoliticisation is often characterised, misleadingly, as producing a contraction of both government and the space within which politics is played out. Sections three and four review the work on neo-liberal governmentality (Lemke, 2001, 2002; Rose, 1996; Rose and Miller, [1992] 2010; Rose et al, 2006), and recent chapters which have used the term depoliticisation, to highlight a potential, yet underdeveloped, synergy with the scholarship on governmentality (Oksala, 2011; Tosa, 2009). Section five then attempts, tentatively, to provide a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between politicisation, depoliticisation and neo-liberal governmental rationality, based on a Foucauldian reading of power and contemporary governance. Overall, we argue that depoliticisation creates the ostensible façade of rolling back the state, while governmentality allows the insidious rolling forward of the 117

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state’s agenda through the buying in (or buying off) of other organisations or the normalising of populations to be good neo-liberal citizens. Thus, the argument presented here is that the guise of ‘rolling back’ the state, bound up in discourses of neo-liberal governance, marks an era whereby state intervention has actually never been so pervasive. However, the pervasion of state intervention is rendered covert through the operation of both depoliticisation and governmentality.

Depoliticisation: bringing government back in The concept of depoliticisation is emerging as one of the most, if not the most, important devices for understanding contemporary patterns of governance throughout advanced industrial democracies. Its explanatory purchase is increasingly evidenced by the multiplicity of applications it has received over a broad range of literatures and disciplines.Yet, when it comes to pinpointing what is precisely implied by depoliticisation, it appears that, with each new application, the term only succeeds in becoming increasingly amorphous and frustratingly elusive of any established definition. Its use has been stretched from describing a relatively simple form of statecraft to the widespread foreclosure of political debate and the disengagement of citizens from formal political arenas. Flinders and Wood’s opening salvo in this issue (2014, 135–49) helpfully illustrates this explosion, not only of recent interest in depoliticisation, but also of the range of alternate, and sometimes contradictory, definitions and applications. What seems clear is that depoliticisation appears to be a process which is far easier to pin down empirically than conceptually; in that sense, we all agree that it is happening, we’re just not entirely agreed on what precisely is happening As such, the utility of the term threatens to become undermined by the fact that it signifies so many meanings and applications as to render it largely empty of any substantive meaning. This potentially raises the question of whether we should embrace the diversity of definitions on offer – thus celebrating the equivocal nature of the term – or attempt to rein in what we precisely mean by depoliticisation. Here, we argue that it would be fruitful to err towards the latter. As such, our attempt is to reorient the discussion back onto a more precise and focused application of the term. For us, working from within a broadly Foucauldian framework, depoliticisation is a process inextricably bound up with the practice of government and the management of populations; it is an act which is central to the functioning of contemporary governmental rationality and one which has become an important tool for the operation of new forms of power and regulation essential to neo-liberal governmentality. Thus, de-politicisation is, to us, at all times an inherently political act, involving 118

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an extension rather than a retraction of political space. It is on this point that we depart from much of the available scholarship; for although the inherently political nature of de-politicisation is sometimes directly acknowledged within the literature (Burnham, 2002; Flinders and Buller, 2005, 2006a; Jenkins, 2010), the relationship between depoliticisation and the ‘political’ is disappointingly often largely by-passed, or under developed. Although the term de-politicisation has been conceptually stretched to the point of embracing a plethora of meanings, we can note at least two very broad ‘umbrella’ definitions of the term, under which there are a variety of different types of application. These two broad definitions are by no means mutually incompatible or exclusive; in fact they overlap significantly, though they do vary qualitatively in terms of the emphasis they place on the nature of depoliticisation. The first definition is sometimes referred to as a narrow definition – though here we refer to it, in line with Wood and Flinders (2014, 151–70), as a ‘governmental’ definition. Governmental based applications are largely the focus of Flinders and Bullers’ earlier review of the literature and take as their basis Burnham’s definition of de-politicisation as the process of ‘placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’, or indeed, Flinders and Bullers’ own definition as:‘the range of tools, mechanisms and institutions through which politicians can attempt to move to an indirect governing relationship and/or seek to persuade the demos that they can no longer reasonably be held responsible for a certain issue, policy field or specific decision’ (2006b, 295–6). These types of governmental definitions are concerned, primarily, with the re-assignment of blame, responsibility and the transaction costs of policy making via a variety of different methods and strategies.They refer to de-politicisation specifically as a tool of government and one which relates primarily to the deliberate exercise of statecraft and attempts at crisis avoidance. The second definition offers a more ‘expansive’ conceptualisation of the term.This understanding of depoliticisation encapsulates a number of diverse definitions but tends generally to refer to a much broader (albeit related) process describing the expansion or contraction of the available space within which ‘politics’/political agency can occur. This definition moves the debate beyond the idea of de-politicisation as a form of statecraft and, instead, places as its central concern (often for normative reasons) an exploration of the relationship between processes of depoliticisation and (re)politicisation. In this context, depoliticisation is defined as the near polar opposite to politicisation. Whereas, ‘politicisation’ refers to the opening up of political space, de-politicisation refers to attempts to close off public deliberation on a number of issues. Therefore, ‘politicisation’ 119

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and ‘depoliticisation’ are viewed as two opposing tendencies that reside at either end of a continuum. For many scholars, what distinguishes depoliticisation from politicisation is respectively either the removal or the insertion of choice, deliberation, contingency and agency around an issue. While politicisation opens up the capacity for actors to ‘make a difference’ (Hay, 2007: 66), depoliticisation ‘entails forming necessities, permanence, immobility, closure and fatalism and concealing/negating or removing contingency’ (Jenkins, 2010: 160). In this type of definition, depoliticisation is often viewed as not necessarily or exclusively an activity or tool of government; rather, it is often viewed in a much broader sense as a societal/socio-political ‘problem’. For us, this more expansive use of the term throws up a number of potential questions which are rarely addressed or resolved within the literature. First and foremost is the manner in which the relationship between depoliticisation and the ‘political’ is often conceptualised. Such applications of the term often directly link the definition of depoliticisation to a fairly precise and potentially restrictive notion of the political. For such authors (Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2010;Wood and Flinders (2014, 151–70), depoliticisation is viewed as the reverse of ‘politics’ – as ‘anti-politics’ or the ‘end of politics’ – a process which intrinsically pushes politics out of our reach. Thus, this definition of depoliticisation relies on a particular reading of what we mean by ‘politics’; a reading which dislocates the study of politics from a concern primarily with relationships of power and, instead, re-focuses our attention more towards notions of collective action, deliberation, choice and the capacity for agency. This type of definition of the political is arguably historically and geographically specific, in that it equates ‘politics’ very closely with some type of (albeit limited) democratic pursuit or a pluralistic process in which decision making largely becomes a relatively open arena, dominated by the potential for contingency and change. Thus, ‘politicisation’ becomes almost akin to a type of ‘democratisation’ of an issue. This largely optimistic view of the political surely throws up the troublesome implication that depoliticisation – although always acknowledged as a political act in itself – produces in its wake some type of political vacuum in which politics is no longer present (or at the very least is less present), even though the exercise of power and the preservation and reproduction of existing power relations are still very much at work and held in check by the depoliticisation process itself. A related potential problem with this type of definition of the political, is that it is possible to ascertain that (given the limited nature and duration of democracy) throughout the history of political activity, indeed, throughout the current global political world, it is surely generally an absence of politics (if defined in relation to ideas of choice, deliberation, collective action 120

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and agency) rather than ‘politics’ which becomes the norm, with the ‘politicisation’ of issues being a fairly rare historical occurrence. Unless one assumes the existence of an historical golden age of choice, contingency and deliberation which, insomuch as one could have ever existed (which is highly doubtful), could surely only have been an historical ‘blip’ rather than the norm. In other words, it seems pertinent to ask the question, does the general absence of democratic process, which characterises the contemporary ‘condition’ amount to a general absence of ‘politics’ per se? Much of the literature on de-politicisation tilts the discussion towards this implication, even though there is sometimes an effort by such scholars to emphasise that this is not what is being argued. A third concern for us is to question the extent to which issues are ever really either simply ‘opened’ up or indeed ‘foreclosed’ to deliberation or whether they are, as is noted in the case of the first type of ‘governmental’ depoliticisation literature, merely displaced from one arena to another. In the expansive definition, depoliticisation occurs when an issue is either displaced to the realm of fate or the contingent is rendered a necessity, as in the case of certain aspects of macro-economic policy (Gamble, 2000; Hay, 2007).Yet, it is difficult to identify many contemporary issues which are truly consigned to the realm of fate; similarly, where the contingent has been rendered a necessity, the extent to which these areas were ever open to a great deal of ‘contingency’ in the first place is questionable. Here, certain aspects of macro-economic policy provide a good example. Whereas contemporary de-politicisation strategies (such as central bank independence or recourse to the ‘no alternative’ discourse of globalisation) may appear to offer up less contingency and openness than more ‘politicised’ forms of direct governmental control over the economy in the postwar period (such as institutionalised bargaining processes or incomes policy), many of these latter strategies were merely utilised by post-war governments to provide the same broad policy objective of foreclosing contingency through disciplining and constraining the autonomy of various interests, particularly the labour movement. In terms of outcomes, the qualitative difference between the two types of approach to managing economic affairs is seen by Burnham (2002) as relatively marginal, though the benefits (to state managers) of a de-politicised approach can be viewed as quite considerable.Thus, our aim here is to question the extent to which the key distinguishing feature between a ‘depoliticised’ and ‘politicised’ environment is the extent to which the latter opens up the potential for either greater pluralism or increased input or deliberation over policy. None of this is to take serious issue with the more expansive notions of de-politicisation; some of the normative work examining the foreclosure of political debate and arguing for a re-animation of the political sphere 121

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is both timely and important. Nor is it our intention to exaggerate the differences between governmental de-politicisation scholars and those who use a more expansive definition of the term. Often the work (and emphases) of both overlap and complement each other significantly. However, our aim is to suggest some of the potential problems that can arise if the definition of depoliticisation becomes too closely linked to the definition of ‘politics’, while at the same time the definition of politics becomes too closely related to ideas of choice, contingency, collective action and deliberation, rather than more directly linked to the formal and informal exercise of power. Arguably, too easy a distinction is often made between ‘politicising’ and ‘depoliticising’ tendencies and between which areas should be deemed ‘political’ and which are ‘non-political’, as if to imply that ‘politics’ occurs somewhere ‘out there’, in certain arenas and under certain conditions, rather than being a ubiquitous process (Leftwich, 1984) or a lived experience (Marsh et al, 2007) from which there is little to no escape. Likewise, another related problem with some of the more expansive notions of depoliticisation relates to the discussion, or often lack thereof, of the role of the state or governmental actors. Just as much of the literature is dominated by an implication that, in the wake of depoliticisation comes a reduction in or an absence of politics, likewise there is often a further implication that what follows de-politicisation is also an absence of government, or state intervention. Indeed, this is a problem with much of the literature on neo-liberalism in general, a point which is central to the following sections. In relation to the literature on depoliticisation though, much is made of the shifting of issues from the governmental or public sphere to the ‘societal’ or ‘private’ spheres, with the implication often being that such a movement inherently takes government and the state ‘out’ of the equation, thereby limiting the field on which politics is played out. In the more ‘narrow’ literature on governmental depoliticisation, such problematic distinctions between the ‘political’ and the ‘non-political’ and between the ‘governmental’ and ‘non-governmental’ spheres are often largely by-passed due to the recognition that depoliticisation is a deliberate governmental tactic designed to tackle a number of management problems within the governmental and quasi-governmental sphere. In this context, depoliticisation becomes, not the ‘reverse’ of politics, but an inherently political game played by state actors in order to achieve specific political aims.Thus, what gets ‘squeezed out’ by de-politicisation, is not politics per se, but rather the responsibility, blame, costs and discretion associated with policy making. The difference in emphasis here is a subtle but important one.While governmental actors may use de-politicisation to place blame, responsibility and even decision making ‘at one remove’, perhaps even to 122

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the societal or private spheres, it is rarely assumed that government truly ‘absents’ itself from the policy area; nor is it assumed that such arenashifting examples amount to consigning issues to the realm of fate, or even to ‘autonomous’ expert professionals. Flinders and Buller (2006a , 296) make the important point that: It is politicians who make decisions about what functions should be ‘depoliticised’, and the subsequent selection of appropriate tactics and tools. Politicians also commonly retain significant indirect control mechanisms (for example, appointments), reserve powers (for example, immediate authority in certain situations) or discretion (for example, the creative interpretation of rules). Moreover, it is politicians who may from time to time face pressures to either justify their choices or even re-politicise certain issues in terms of adopting a direct governing relationship. Likewise, this point is directly acknowledged by Burnham (2002: 127), who states that ‘depoliticisation does not represent the direct removal of politics from social and economic spheres’ (Burnham, 2002, 136). In this sense then, a distinction is made between the image and reality of depoliticisation (Flinders and Buller, 2006a) as depoliticisation amounts only to the illusion of the removal of both politics and the state. For such reasons, our aim in this chapter is to move away from more expansive definitions of depoliticisation and redirect our focus back towards depoliticisation as a tool of government and one which is central, indeed, an inherent component of, (neo)liberal governmental rationality in particular. In this sense, we return to Burnham’s definition of depoliticisation as the ‘process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’ (2002, 136); to us then, the presence of government, politics and the exercise of power must invariably be considered central to any contemporary understanding of depoliticisation.

Neo-liberalism as a political project It is unsurprising that the recent explosion of literature on depoliticisation (whether defined as governmental or expansive) should be so prolific in an era of neo-liberalism, with its emphasis on the rolling back of the state and the privatisation and contracting out of former state functions. This is not to say that depoliticisation should be associated directly with neo-liberalism. Burnham’s (2002; also Kettell, 2008) work reminds us that de-politicisation strategies can be evidenced in the area of macroeconomic policy before the era of neo-liberalism, while Rancière (2006) 123

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would even argue that depoliticisation is a practice that is central to the operation of government in general. There can, however, be little doubt that, as neo-liberal governance strategies have matured, so too has the deployment of depoliticisation tactics and tools grown in abundance. It is perhaps too easy then, to be tempted into an assumption that, as the state has seemingly either withdrawn altogether or partially dislocated itself from direct control over a wide range of policy areas, this has led to a genuine retreat of the state and, by correlation, an overall shrinking of the space within which formal political activity occurs. Likewise, it is perhaps also too easy to make the related assumption, that as a number of political issues have been relegated to the societal and private spheres, then this has meant that they have been somehow displaced to the realm of fate, necessity, or ‘autonomous’ technocrats, with governmental control and state intervention having been removed from the equation. To make such assumptions is to be drawn into the image, not only of depoliticisation, but also of neo-liberalism; both of which function to obscure the transformation, rather than a shrinking, of governing relations (Lemke, 2001; Rose and Miller, [1992] 2010; Oksala, 2011). It is surprising that very few depoliticisation authors cite the work of scholars examining the operation of new types of neo-liberal governmentality.The governmentality literature has been as prolific as that of the de-politicisation literature and, despite echoing many of the same core themes noted by de-politicisation scholars, is very much directed towards emphasising the continuing development, rather than the rolling back, of government. Central to such literature is the important observation that neo-liberalism is: ‘not just an economic theory nor a political ideology intended to lead to a lack of actual government. It is a comprehensive political project that sees the market as the model for the state and for the overall organization of society’ (Oksala, 2011, 480). Thus, such authors base their work on Foucault’s understanding that ‘neoliberal governmental intervention was no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than any other system of governmental rationality. Only the domains and methods of governmental intervention were new’ (Oksala, 2011, 476).Thus, neo-liberalism and the state are by no means bound up in an antagonistic relationship; rather, the latter is central to the functioning of the former in terms of creating the rules of the game upon which market mechanisms can operate effectively. To achieve this it is necessary for the state to intervene continuously to ensure that such rules are being upheld. The premise of such continuous state intervention is the recognition that the rationality of the ‘market’ and market competition is not a natural ‘given’; rather, the values and rules which comprise a market rationality must be ‘actively instituted, maintained, reassessed and, if need be, reinserted 124

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at all levels of society’ (Hamann, 2009, 42). Thus, to successfully balance the contradictory requirements of continuously regulating the functioning of the market while maintaining the ‘minimalist state’ governmental rationality of neo-liberalism, it becomes a necessity for the state to behave as if it has retreated. According to Lemke (2002, 58): [N]eo-liberal governmentality shows that the so-called ‘retreat of the state’ is in fact a prolongation of government, neo-liberalism is not the end but a transformation of politic, that restructures the power relations in society.What we observe today is not a diminishment or a reduction of state sovereignty and planning capacities but a displacement from formal to informal techniques of government. This brings us back to the distinction made earlier between the image and the reality of both neo-liberalism and de-politicisation. The seeming retreat of the state becomes central, indeed, necessary for the legitimation of ‘arm’s-length’, neo-liberal governmental rationality; a rationality primarily based upon rational choice assumptions about the free will and self-determination of individuals within a marketised, as opposed to a politicised, space.What is interesting is that, just as de-politicisation scholars rarely cite the work of authors in the field of governmentality studies, governmentality scholars rarely cite de-politicisation scholarship. This is odd, as the recognition of the state’s proclivity to offload responsibility is widely referenced by the former (Lemke, 2001, 201). We see a strong correlation between the themes covered in both the depoliticisation and the governmentality literatures, with the shifting of responsibility and the risks associated with government playing a central role in both processes. Whereas for some de-politicisation scholars this involves a shrinking of political space, for governmentality authors it amounts to an opening up of the range of areas over which government/ market rationality is extended; in other words, an extension of government. Thus, any perceived ‘roll-back’ of the state merely disguises what is, in essence, a rolling forward of the evolution of government. In this environment, the neo-liberal citizen is imbued with a seemingly enhanced capacity and responsibility for managing choices and decisions around a number of issues formerly managed directly by the state. Yet, the same citizen is at the same time disciplined through formal and informal systems of government which function to imbue the individual with an equally enhanced capacity to incur the risk of making the ‘wrong’ choices, given that the consequences of their actions are to be borne by the subject alone. It is this process of governmentality which we now turn to look at in more detail and which, we argue, provides a broader political context 125

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for explaining the increasing deployment of de-politicisation strategies; strategies which to us are best viewed as central (though not exclusive) to the dominant political rationality of neo-liberalism.

Neo-liberal governmentality: understanding government Governmentality was coined by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s to describe how power functions in contemporary societies (see Burchell et al, 1991). Governmentality describes the functioning of insidious forms of government beyond, but also including, the state as an institution, directed towards self-regulation as the most efficient way to govern. Thus, the definition of government, for Foucault, is not restricted to state government, but rather is extended to include the governing of others, at an organisation, community or familial level, and the governing of one’s self. As Lemke (2002, 5–1) notes: ‘for this reason, Foucault defines government as…“the conduct of conduct” and thus as a term which ranges from “governing the self ” to “governing others”’.This broad definition of government is useful as it ‘allows the analyst to criss-cross the state/civil society distinction at will’ (Murdoch, 1997: 110). For governmentality theorists, the distinction between state and civil society is a problematic product of liberal discourses, rather than a reality. Thus, government is not something tied to specific institutions but, rather, takes place in a variety of arenas of varying scale – from the government, as understood in mainstream political science, to the consciousness of the individual. As such, governing, in the governmentality sense – and to which we might add ‘politics – is omnipresent’; an observation noted by some more mainstream political science scholars such as Leftwich. As Foucault notes, governmentality is: The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections.The calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target populations, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. (Foucault et al, 2007, 108) Three aspects of this quote are worth discussing further. First, to Foucault, the idea of ‘governing’ becomes detached from ‘the government’ as it is popularly understood, and rather is seen as permeating all spheres and processes of human life. Thus, governmentality operates through the targeting of populations, through welfare narratives (referred to by Foucault as biopower), largely to construct subjects who make effective workforces 126

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and consumers, while marginalising and excluding those who do not. Second, what Foucault means by ‘the principal form of knowledge’ being political economy is that the contemporary rationality of government (namely neo-liberalism) with its emphasis on the ‘market’, works as the dominant logic driving all arenas of government, including the individual (as self-regulative) and peer regulation/government. Thus, neo-liberal governmentality ‘involves forms of governance that encourage both institutions and individuals to conform to the norms of the market’ (Larner, 2000, 12). In other words, individuals are mechanised, in congruence with market logic, to behave as rational and autonomous actors imbued with a capacity to weigh up the costs and benefits of their behaviour. Finally, the technical means of security is used to further consolidate this form of power based on the notion that all individuals should modify their behaviours in line with the dominant governmental rationality or else suffer individual, group, national or even global insecurity. For Foucault, modern forms of governing became operational as liberalism became the dominant political rationality. Under liberalism there is a recognition that the state cannot maintain power over all policy areas and populations, as had been the case in previous eras, which were characterised by the exercise of sovereign power, a power more overtly coercive and focused within the hands of one or a few individuals (for a concise review of Foucault’s genealogy of ‘statecraft’ see Jessop, 2007). As such, central to the functioning of liberal government is the processes whereby the state ‘sub-lets’ various policy areas to expert professionals. As Dean (2002, 42) notes, the liberal state, through the necessity to ‘roll back’ and a commitment to the idea of free (but regulated) citizens, seeks to ‘co-operate with, contract out or enter into partnership with the agencies, groups and bodies of civil society’. Given, however, that these agencies, groups and bodies are also subjectified to internalise the self-regulating norms of the particular political rationality, in this case liberalism, they work, by and large, consistently within the governmental logic and, in so doing, the logic of the state. Overall, this process of subletting and the ostensible withdrawal of the state from policy areas is akin to depolitisation, and, as such we now turn to discuss depoliticisation as an aspect highlighted in the governmentality literature.

Understandings of depoliticisation in the governmentality literature There has been a swathe of scholarship utilising and developing the term governmentality, largely within the discipline of sociology, where Foucault has traditionally received a warmer reception. These publications have 127

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tended to look at crime (Garland, 1997), sexuality (Harris, 2005) and medicine (Peterson and Bunton, 1997). In Political Science, however, Foucault’s work has also found a number of supporters. Much of this has been centred on political economy and has been led by scholars such as Lemke (2001, 2002), Rose (Rose 1996; Rose and Miller, [1992] 2010; and Rose et al, 2006) and Dean (2002). In these pieces, the term governmentality has been pre-fixed with the adage ‘neo-liberal’ to demonstrate the ways in which contemporary states function through their supposed retreat and whereby ‘economics’ (artificially rendered distinct from politics and society) is awarded precedence.Thus, neo-liberal governmentality describes a process which places market based logics above all other paradigms. According to Lemke (2001, 191), governmentality, helps us to understand processes of power. This understanding has two key elements. First, governing works through certain discursive rationalities – in this case a neo-liberal rationalit – whereby groups, borders and subjects are identified and problems and solutions are constructed, within the framework of said rationality, as an ‘act of government’. The second understanding of governmentality is the ‘conduct of conduct’ through processes of subjectification. Lemke contends that ‘Foucault endeavours to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern automonous individual codetermine each other’s emergence’ Lemke, 2001, 191).Thus, neo-liberalism is a political project which seeks to construct notions of ‘naturally’ ‘lean, fit, flexible [and] automonous’ individuals, communities and institutions (Lemke, 2002, 60). Similarly, Rose and Miller note that neo-liberalism marks a realignment between political rationality and self-regulation as ‘individuals can be governed by their freedom to choose’ ([1992] 2010, 298). This is because, through the political rationality of neo-liberalism, one is ‘programmed’ to strive to pursue their individualised goals through minute cost–benefit calculations to maximise one’s quality of life. However, these goals rarely extend beyond the logic of the dominant political rationality and, therefore demonstrate the limitations of authentic choice and, consequently, contingency. Some of the more recent governmentality scholarship does make limited reference to the term depoliticisation. For example, Oksala (2011), in pointing out that state violence is central to the functioning of neoliberalism, argues that the most concerning aspect of the relationship between neo-liberalism and violence is that violence, within this system is depoliticised. As she astutely notes, the most dangerous aspect of the relationship between neoliberalism and violence, ‘is not the permanent need in the former for instrumental violence nor its inherent “objective” violence, but the fact that it effectively depoliticises violence by turning it 128

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into an essentially economic rather than a political or moral issue’ (Oksala, 2011, 475–6). Indeed, state violence, which Oksala defines as ‘effective practices of policing’ (Oksala, 2011, 479), works to ensure that the market is operational and to prevent individuals from ‘opting out’. To demonstrate this, Oksala points to the ‘violent repression’ of movements who have occupied buildings as a form of political protest against neo-liberal hegemony, stating that ‘[t]he violent suppression of such activism in Western democratic states must be seen not only as an attempt to protect private property – effective policing of the economic game – but also as an attempt to close off possibilities for opting out of it’ (Oksala, 2011, 479). Similarly, in Tosa’s (2009) work, depoliticisation is presented as intrinsic to neo-liberal government. Remarking on how governments seek to manage ‘global slums’ he notes that ‘technical solutions that work to avoid economic problems, rather than political solutions to bring about structural change, are sought’ (Tosa, 2009, 427). As such, for these governmentality scholars who have engaged with the term depoliticisation it seems that depoliticisation relates to the fact that governmentality has as its principal form of knowledge political economy; as such, ‘political’ problems are placed at one remove from the state as they are constructed as economic issues (rather than political or moral problems, demanding political and moral solutions). This complements the work of Lemke (2002) who, although not directly referencing the term depoliticisation, highlights that neo-liberal political rationality works through a constructed separation between the political and the economic, whereby the latter takes primacy. Despite these few attempts to utilise the term depoliticisation, much of the governmentality literature leaves the theorisation of the relationship between de-politicisation and neo-liberal governmentality largely underdeveloped or implicit. Given this, in the following sections, we attempt to bridge this gap between the two sets of literatures and provide a tentative effort to conceptualise de-politicisation as a central element of the rolling out of new forms of power and regulation essential to neoliberal rationality.

Reframing depoliticisation and politicisation As noted above, the understanding of politicisation and depoliticisation heavily relies upon definitions of the political. Given that we are using a broadly Foucauldian framework here we therefore need to formulate what Foucault meant by the political. This is no easy task. In fact, there are two established understandings of the political for Foucault. The first is akin to Hay (2007), Jenkins (2010), and Wood and Flinders (2014, 129

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151–70) in that the political is a space of deliberation and contingency. Thus, Foucault recognised politics as ‘a theatre of war and battle, tactics and strategies’ (Thiele, 1990, 916). To be politicised by this rationale is to engage in battle or struggle. However, in contrast to the majority of depoliticisation scholars, Foucault is not in any way optimistic about the potential outcomes associated with conducting this battle, suggesting that his ‘position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism’ (Foucault cited in Thiele, 1990, 916) in the face of unachievable goals. As such, unlike scholars who recognise resistance, deliberation and choice to be central to politics in an optimistic way, Foucault recognises these forms of resistance to be relatively futile, but necessary, in that ‘the uncontested life is deemed not worth living’ (Foucault cited in Thiele, 1990, 916). This form of politics for Foucault is synonymous with the concept of ‘politicisation’ referred to by depoliticisation scholars working with an expansive understanding of the term, but, as noted above, does not herald as much optimism. Indeed, from this point, we will refer to this form of ‘politicisation’ as resistance politicisation as it is based on resisting – through formal political struggle or otherwise – the dominant norms within the given political rationality. For Foucault, however, there is a second understanding of politics and the political. Here, the political is equivalent to particular understandings of government or governmental rationality. Implicit in his lectures on governmentality, but perhaps more fluently articulated in his lecture ‘Omnes et Singulatim: towards a criticism of political reason’ (Foucault, 1981) is that the ‘political’ relates to historically and culturally specific understandings of the ‘governmental’. In other words, ‘politics’ is the process – not of engaging in political struggle per se – but of establishing and re-establishing forms of governmental rationality or political reason and the particular form of rationality utilised to justify how states manage their own affairs and those of their populations. Thus, politics here is conceived, not in terms of resistance or debate or opposition to power, but rather as the (often unreflexive) reproduction of political reason. As Hindess notes: ‘Political reason addresses practical questions of how to manage the population of the state and the institutions, organisations and processes which operate within that population’ (1997: 259). Given this understanding of the political, as in the establishment and reproduction of political rationality to manage populations, and based on the supposition that government is exercised – not only by the state and quasi-state institutions – but also by individuals as they regulate themselves and their peers, we recognise ‘politicisation’ to be a process of the successful establishment of political rationalities within and beyond the state, towards organisations, institutions, one’s peers and themselves. Indeed, we recognise 130

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the ‘constitution of the subject’ to the ‘formation of the state’ (Lemke, 2002, 50) to be itself an act of politicisation, as the subject becomes, in effect, an extension of government. By broadening the term government and defining politicisation as the establishment of certain logics of governing – in the contemporary sense the logic of market governance through neo-liberalism – politicisation thus relates to every aspect, organisation and individual which perpetuates or generates these logics. The interesting aspect of liberal and neo-liberal rationalities is that, while being ‘totalitarian’ in their remit, they also depend on the notions of individualisation, freedom and autonomy (Foucault, 1981; also see Dean, 2002). As such, in this context, depoliticisation can be viewed as a technology of government; the purpose of which is to demonstrate the particular political rationality of our time, which is ostensibly the rolling back of government from a number of policy areas with a view to enhancing the autonomy of the economic and private spheres. This is because neo-liberalism demands the façade of a minimalist state as central to the rationality of contemporary state government. In other words, ‘by means of the notion of governmentality the neo-liberal agenda for the “withdrawal of the state” can be deciphered as a technique for government’ (Lemke, 2002, 201). Depoliticisation, then, to us, involves the shifting of responsibility as the state appears to subordinate itself to the operation of the market; however, by moving the responsibility of a policy domain onto either the individual, an institution or agency which is considered to be less overtly political in its organisation or even to the realm of necessity via discourse (Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2010; Wood and Flinders (2014, 151–70) depoliticisation thus arguably opens up the space within which ‘politics’ and government is played out by producing in its wake a system of complicit politicisatio – as the agencies and individuals to whom responsibility for a policy domain is transferred are politicised. Here, we would argue that the ‘politicisation’ in this framework is one of complicity – in that these subjects are unlikely to engage in any significant, paradigm shifting deliberation and more likely to seek to achieve the political objectives which run in line with the governmental (and therefore state) rationality of the time. As Wendy Brown notes, neo-liberal governmentality reduces ‘political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency’ (cited in Hamann, 2009, 44). Moreover, she further notes that: ‘The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself, among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options’ (cited in Hamann, 2009, 44). By this rationale, then, we could conceive of state depoliticisation as incurring the complicit politicisation of individuals as they are seemingly 131

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imbued with greater levels of choice, autonomy and contingency to pursue technologies of the self (a political activity) through the negotiation of the given political, economic and social milieu. This occurs amid the backdrop of a wider collective passivity to the dominant political rationality. Thus, this process of ‘subjectification’ politicises individuals to develop ‘a self which [can] cope with more complex relations of reciprocity and mutuality, in marriage as well as politics.This [is] achieved by conducting oneself according to universal, rational principles’ (Simons, 1995, 102). To put it simply, within neo-liberal rationality, the space for choice and contingency is gradually reoriented to the individual away from arenas more traditionally understood as ‘political’. However, this does not mean that politics is negated but rather that it is renegotiated and transferred to the subject. Indeed, as Judith Butler argues (1994, 13), the constitution of the subject, the accomplishment of being a ‘good citizen’, is political (and we would argue politicising) in itself: For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again…It is not enough to say that the subject is invariably engaged in a political field; that phenomenological phrasing misses the point that the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself. Here, individuals are rendered political in their subjectification, through either their partial assimilation or resistance, and, with regards to the latter, perhaps their likely marginalisation and exclusion, through the framework of governing mentalities. To demonstrate this, Jeff Maskovsky (2001), has argued that the urban poor are politicised through their assimilation into neo-liberal rationalities. Through his case study of the activist group the Eastern Philadelphia Organizing Project (EPOP), he argues that: EPOP has forged a politics in which the removal of injection drug users is equivalent to the removal of abandoned cars, dilapidated housing and other symptoms of ‘blight.’ No longer viewed or vilified as immoral or pathological per se, injection drug users are instead seen simply as impediments to growth. They are an expression of the decadent, unproductive built environment and, as such, must be cleared. (Maskovsky, 2001, 224–5)

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In this example, the urban poor are politicised, through their assimilation to neo-liberal norms, which work to justify the exclusion and marginalisation of part of the population. As such, here the urban poor are politicised to act as an extension of the state and, simultaneously, the rationality of government. The state in this instance has depoliticised the issue by shifting responsibility to individuals, consumer groups and businesses. This has led, in turn, to the subsequent politicisation of those activists and consumer groups. Returning to the typology offered by Wood and Flinders (2014, 151–70), type three depoliticisation relates to the placing of issues and policy domains away from any space of deliberation by virtue of the fact they are non-negotiable, or displaced to the ‘realm of fate’. The authors helpfully illustrate type three depoliticisation through their discussion of ‘moral panics’. Moral panics, they argue, both politicise and depoliticise issues, as they bring the topic to the attention of the public but then offer a simple common-sense solution to the problem (namely ‘constrain, reject, kill the “folk-devil”’). As such, the offering of only one choice is a form of discursive depoliticisation. However, if set within a governmentality framework, it is arguable that the language of ‘one choice’ or ‘no alternative’ works to open up political space – in that it is a political act which functions to invoke or re-establish government whereby, in this case and similar to the case study offered by Maskovsky (2001), a moral majority is armed with the tools to reject, constrain or legitimately support the killing of various ‘folk-devils’ or social groups. Thus, moral panics mobilise a programmed populous into forms of exclusion and marginalisation which could be considered social cleansing and therefore, in this context, these groups are practicing politics (even if there is no deliberation and choice and contingency are somewhat limited).They are practicing power. Discursive depoliticisation does not foreclose political resistance (consciously or not with regards, for example, to drinking, drug taking and the range of ‘social ills’ open to medical discourse) but rather offers the rationale for government at all levels – government from the state, government of peers, government of oneself in line with this logic of no alternative. In other words, it allows for the social cleansing necessary to uphold a particular political rationality and therefore demands that the population and expert agencies are politicised in line with the political rationality of the time. As such, if we place depoliticisation within a Foucauldian understanding of politics and power, then depoliticisation cannot exist in any ‘real’ sense as, to borrow and pervert the Aristotlean phrase, politics abhors a vacuum. Depoliticisation, then is a technology or art of government central to neo-liberal rationality or rather a myth to perpetuate neo-liberal governmentality. Politicisation, conversely in such a framework, becomes 133

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ubiquitous. In other words, depoliticisation is a technology associated with ostensibly ‘governing at a distance’ which seeks to construct ‘locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy’ (Rose and Miller, [1992] 2010, 271). More simply, the political rationality of the time is neo-liberalism and this political rationality demands an ostensible ‘rolling back’ of the state to demonstrate its own legitimacy by constituting us as autonomous individuals and therefore, in response to the construction of an a priori subject, that the state government should be kept to a minimum (in favour of markets and consumer dynamics). Moreover, depoliticisation has the concurrent effect of politicising agencies and individuals in pursuit of normalised political goals. As such, these agencies and individuals become ‘swallowed up’ by the governing rationality of the time as they are given responsibility for a number of policy domains yet seemingly left to act individually. Only seemingly, because governmentality works in a programmatic fashion to naturalise political behaviour towards similar agendas based on the dominant political rationality. Within the political reason offered by neo-liberalism, it is crucial that forms of ‘controlled’ resistance are performed. As such, the complicit character of politicisation needs to be judged and questioned at various historical points and over various issues through resistance politicisation in order to uphold the idea of autonomous individualism. As such, there is simply no space for nonpolitics, de-politics or anti-politics. In Figure 1, we attempt to illustrate our re-conceptualisation here of the relationship between neo-liberal governmentality, politicisation and depoliticisation.

Conclusion By placing the concept of de-politicisation within a wider governmentality framework, we have attempted to posit here that politicisation is ubiquitous in its complicit and resistance forms and that depoliticisation is a technique of government to perpetuate the myth of autonomous and responsible individuals through the narrative of a reduced or minimalist state. However, both politicisation and depoliticisation work within a neo-liberal schemata or neo-liberal governmentality. Thus, it is arguable that the concepts of both depoliticisation and governmentality (despite their ontological and epistemological inconsistencies) are mutually complementary. Indeed, it could be considered that depoliticisation is the ostensible façade of rolling back the state while governmentality is the insidious rolling forward of the state’s agenda through the buying in (or buying off) of other organisations or the normalising of populations to be good neo-liberal citizens. In 134

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this context, neo-liberal governmentality is made operational through depoliticisation techniques as the ostensible rolling back of the state is necessary for the rolling out of other forms of power. Ultimately then, to us, governmentality works to make the politicising aspect of depoliticisation operational. They are thus concordant with one another. Moreover, governmentality, due to the sub-letting of policy areas and norms down to the internalisation of government by individuals (through processes of politicisation) marks a movement from once-removed decision making to decision making which is perhaps many times removed from the state.

Figure 1: Dynamics of governmentality and (de)politicisation State depoliticisation is the mechanism via which the state appears to fulfil one of the primary goals of the contemporary political rationality (neo-liberalism); namely ‘rolling back’ Complicit Politicisation

Complicit Politicisation

Resistance Politicisation

Resistance Politicisation

Governmental rationality (neoliberalism – the reliance on specialist expertise) Expert professionals and technocrats rendered responsible for (or empowered to oversee) various policy areas. These organisations can depoliticise further to the realm of the individual consumer. Complicit Politicisation

Resistance Politicisation

Governmental rationality (neo-liberalism – autonomous individualisation) Communities and individuals – hailed to self regulate and police others’ behaviour in line with governmental rationality. This is both internally and externally perpetuated. Politics between individuals occurs at theis level through exclusion and marginalisation.

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References Burchell, G, Gordon, C, Miller, P (eds), 1991, The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Burnham, P, 2002, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3, 2, 127–49 Burnham, P, 2007,The politicisation of monetary policy-making in postwar Britain, British Politics 2, 3, 395–419 Burnham, P, 2011, Depoliticising monetary policy: the minimum lending rate experiment in Britain in the 1970s, New Political Economy 16, 4, 463–80 Butler, J, 1994, Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism’, in S Seidman (ed), The postmodern turn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Byrne, C, Foster, E, Kerr, P, 2012, Understanding Conservative modernization, in T Heppell, D Seawright (eds), Cameron and the Conservatives: the transition to coalition government, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Dean, M, 2002, Liberal government and authoritarianism, Economy and Society 31, 1, 37–61 Flinders, M. 2008,The future of the State, The Political Quarterly, 79,1, 19–40 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2005,The domestic origins of depoliticisation in the area of British economic policy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7, 4, 526–43 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006a, Depoliticisation: principles, tactics and tools, British Politics, 1, 3, 293–318 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006b, Depoliticisation: a response to Burnham, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 8, 2, 307–310 Flinders, M, Wood, M, 2014, Depoliticisation, governance and the state [Introduction to special issue], Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 135–49 Foster, EA, 2008, Sustainable development policy in Britain: shaping conduct through global governmentality, British Politics 3, 4, 535–55 Foucault, M, 1981, Omnes et singulatim: towards a criticism of ‘political reason’, The Tanner lectures on human values, Stanford University, found at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/foucault81.pdf Foucault, M, Senellart, M, Ewald, F, Fontana, A, 2007, Security, territory, population: lectures at the College de France, 1977–78, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Gamble, G, 2000, Politics and fate, Polity Press: Cambridge Garland, D, 1997, ‘Governmentality’ and the problem of crime: Foucault, criminology, sociology, Theoretical Criminology, 1, 2, 173–214

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Garland, D, 2001, The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamann, TH, 2009, Neoliberalism, governmentality and ethics, Foucault Studies 6, 37–59 Harris, A, 2005, Discourses of desire as governmentality: young women, sexuality and the significance of safe spaces, Feminism and Psychology 15, 1, 39–43 Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Hindess, B, 1997, Politics and governmentality, Economy and Society 26, 2, 257–72 Jenkins, L, 2010,The difference genealogy makes: strategies for politicisation or how to extend capacities for autonomy, Political Studies 59, 1, 156–74 Jessop, B, 2007, From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power, Political Geography 26, 34–40 Kerr, P, Byrne, C, Foster, E, 2011,Theorising Cameronism, Political Studies Review 9, 2, 193–207 Kettell, S, 2008, Does depoliticisation work? Evidence from Britain’s membership of the exchange rate mechanism, 1990–92, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10, 4, 630–48 Larner,W, 2000, Neo-liberalism: policy, ideology, governmentality, Studies in Political Economy 63: 5–25 Leftwich, A (ed), 1984, What is politics? The activity and its study, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Lemke,T, 2001, ‘The birth of biopolitics’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality, Economy and Society 30, 2, 190–207 Lemke,T, 2002, Foucault, governmentality and critique, Rethinking Marxism 14, 3, 49–63 Marsh, D, O’Toole, T, Jones, S, 2007, Young people and politics in the UK, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Maskovsky, J, 2001,The other war at home: the geopolitics of US poverty, Urban Anthropology 30, 2–3, 215–38 Murdoch, J, 1997, The shifting territory of government: some insights from the Rural White Paper, Area 29, 2, 109–18 Oksala, J, 2011, Violence and neoliberal governmentality, Constellations 18, 3, 474–86 Peterson, A, Bunton, R, 1997, Foucault, health and medicine, London: Routledge Rancière, J, 2006, Hatred of democracy, London:Verso

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Rose, N, 1996, Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies, in A Barry, T Osborne and N Rose (eds), Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neoliberalism and rationalities of government, London: UCL Press Rose, N, Miller, P, 1992, Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, The British Journal of Sociology, 43, 2, 173–205, republished 2010, The British Journal of Sociology 61, s1, 271–303 Rose, N, O’Malley, P,Valverde, M, 2006, Governmentality, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2, 83–104 Simons, J, 1995, Foucault and the political, London: Routledge Thiele, LP 1990,The agony of politics: the Nietzschean roots of Foucault’s thought, The American Political Science Review 84, 3, 907–25 Tosa, H, 2009, Anarchical governance: neoliberal governmentality in resonance with the State of exception, International Political Sociology 3, 414–30 Wood, M, Flinders, M, 2014, Rethinking depoliticisation: Beyond the governmental, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 151–70

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CHAPTER SEVEN

(De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins, and Fran Amery

(De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates The concepts of politicisation and depoliticisation are used within this chapter to provide a lens through which to analyse the social and political consequences of the development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and, specifically, the introduction of the Father’s Clause (henceforth the Clause) and its subsequent removal in the 1990 and 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Acts passed in the UK Parliament. The Clause referred to the ‘child’s need for a father’ when considering whether to provide women with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and acted as a lightning rod for broader ideological clashes over the family, sexuality, children’s welfare and parenthood. Despite the legislation being a formal governmental politicisation (in that ARTs are taken as a specific field of state intervention), we argue that the Clause’s insertion and related debates were depoliticising in that they maintained discursive sedimentation and the restriction of agency and deliberation. Yet, the Clause’s removal is not a simple case of correction because depoliticising remainders exist within what can be seen as a formal repoliticising move. Its removal is partially politicising because it formally opens access, destabilises certain norms and recognises a plurality of family forms.Yet, the potential for legislation in this area to repoliticise particular social relations is tempered by depoliticising processes which reduce the capacity for deliberation, contestation and, thus, place limitations upon human agency and collective choice. This is highlighted by the presence of pervasive gender essentialisms within the debates, and depoliticising assumptions concerning pro-natalism, kinship, access and control within the legislation which perpetuate the constitution of stable subject positions and place limits on reproductive choice. In making this argument, the chapter makes three main contributions to the (de)politicisation and governance literatures. First, it offers a completely fresh empirical terrain through which to explore (de)politicisation 139

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and demonstrate how the concepts can be employed usefully beyond economic and monetary policy. Second, the chapter offers a deeper and historically situated analysis of (de)politicising tendencies and the interplay of sociopolitical developments, sensitivities and practices on discourses, processes and outcomes in different political realms. A focus on public policy construction within the governmental arena can help us to reveal broader (de)politicising processes that emerge from social relations, technological developments and expectations related to human reproduction and that impact upon formal political outcomes. Further, a lens of (de)politicisation allows us to analyse the reciprocal impacts of these parliamentary proceedings on such narratives, institutions and technologies and, thus, the possibilities for reproductive choice and agency. Third and most significantly, through an analysis of the Clause and the legislative and regulatory outcomes, the chapter reveals how politicisation and depoliticisation should not be viewed solely and simply as opposing forces, as much of the literature does, but rather as operating, at least sometimes, as parallel and simultaneous socioeconomic trends within and between governmental, public and private realms. We suggest that highlighting these tensions and paradoxes within and between the content and context of politics is important. Using such distinctions demonstrates further the value and utility of (de)politicisation to sensitising governance researchers to the flows and eddies of state-societal relations and the intricacies of contemporary patterns of policy making, governance and democracy. Close readings of parliamentary debates concerning the Clause and the 1990 and 2008 HFE Acts provide the substance of this chapter.Transcripts of debates were obtained from Hansard and coded using qualitative analysis software, NVivo. Analysis occurred in two stages. First, coding was undertaken to distinguish the basic themes of debate surrounding the Clause’s insertion and removal. Although parliamentarians drew upon public deliberation of IVF, the parliamentary debates had their own dynamic with contributions being articulated around four main themes: the family; rights and interests; purposes/consequences of legislation; and the role of the state. Second, more in-depth analysis was conducted in order to identify the different kinds and patterns of argument occurring within each theme (for example, distinguishing the role of the state in preventing discrimination from its role in protecting children) which then allowed us to offer an analysis of the (de)politicising discourses, processes and (legislative) outcomes operating within the parliamentary debates and juridical regulation of IVF. The chapter contains five sections. First, we situate our approach within the (de)politicisation spectrum. Second, we provide an overview of the politics of ARTs and the place of the Clause within this politics.We then 140

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analyse the parliamentary debates on both the Clause’s insertion and removal in the third and fourth sections respectively. In the conclusion, we summarise our argument and reflect upon the potential contribution to governance research of this processual yet differentiated approach to (de)politicisation.

The spectrum of (de)politicisation As Wood and Flinders (2014: 151–70) demonstrate, types of (de) politicisation can be categorised into one of three broad and overlapping ‘faces’ – discursive, societal and governmental – which broadly map on to Hay’s three realms of politicisation (with depoliticisation operating in a reverse order): • • •

Politicisation 1: Promotion from the realm of necessity to the private sphere Politicisation 2: Promotion from the private to the public sphere Politicisation 3: Promotion from the public to the governmental sphere (Hay, 2007, 79–80)

Discursive depoliticisation focuses on ideas and language. It ‘offers a de-centred approach that cuts across conventional boundaries…and instead recognises the manner in which any [fatalistic] speech-act… is itself a powerful tool of depolitisation’ (Wood and Flinders, 2014: 161). Societal depoliticisation can be conceived as ‘the process by which the social deliberation surrounding a political issue gradually erodes to the extent that… the existence of choices concerning that issue are no longer debated’ (Harder (1996) cited in Wood and Flinders, 2014: 159). Depoliticisation research in British politics and public policy (for example, Burnham, 2001; Buller and Flinders, 2005; Flinders and Buller, 2006; Kettell, 2008) has tended to focus mainly on the governmental face or Depoliticisation 3 in terms of economic and monetary policy. In this work, depoliticisation is examined as a governing strategy or statecraft which involves the appearance of a transfer or reduction of control and responsibility (although significant control is still maintained and often enhanced in the process) and/or as a concept which refers to the central role such processes have played in forms of technocratic governance and/or economic management guiding neoliberal capitalist reproduction. This research is very important in recognising, explaining and critiquing governing strategies under neoliberalism. However, there is a limitation in conceptualising depoliticisation exclusively as a function of government and the state and solely in terms of ‘placing at one remove’ 141

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and ‘managing market expectations’ (Burnham, 2001).The feminist claim that the ‘personal is political’ suggests that scholars concerned with (de) politicisation can and, perhaps, should widen their gaze both to political spaces beyond the formal governmental arena and to empirical terrains beyond economic and monetary policy. This would mean loosening the concept of (de)politicisation from the state and recognising that there are other processes of (de)politicisation beyond modes of statecraft. We wish to argue that an expansive and differentiated conceptualisation of (de)politicisation is helpful in examining fully the interplay between policy, politics and the polity, in drawing attention to both the content and context of (de)politicisation and, consequently, in exposing relations of power and political agency within the domestic, personal and private spheres. Here, the political is conceptualised as the realm of contingency, such that the existence of politics relies on the possibility or hope of deliberation, contestation, change and, consequently, on human capacities for agency (Gamble, 2000; Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2011). This expansive definition serves to delineate the political from the realm of fate and necessity and, concurrently, raises questions both about how political capacities can be increased or reduced and about the changing boundaries within the political. Consequently, in the most general terms,‘to politicise’ is to expose and contest what is taken for granted, or perceived to be necessary, permanent, invariable, essential and morally or politically obligatory within particular social relations;‘to depoliticise’ is to externalise, to form necessities, permanence, immobility and closure, and conceal, negate or remove contingency and contestation within particular social relations (Jenkins, 2011, 159–60). Both are political acts: politicisation helps to denaturalise, to reveal and contribute towards contingency, openness and autonomy; depoliticisation generates discursive sedimentation; the restriction, removal or suppression of our capacities for autonomy, as well as the preservation of particular (fatalistic) strategies or forces. At a content level, the process of depoliticisation is akin to the sedimentation or decontestation of ideology (Howarth et al, 2000). Here, political discourses that shape our worlds and our understandings of them reach a degree of stability or ‘sedimentation’ such that the contestable conditions of their constitution are no longer socially recognised (Norval, 2000, 328). This process of naturalising sedimentation is an aspect of political conduct which can take different forms, such as subject or identity formation, myth-making, production of ‘moral panics’ or, simply, decision making that invokes ideological concepts. This approach sensitises us to the content of (de)politicisation – the type of choice and contestation that is being invited or foreclosed, and from and for whom. However, it is also important to examine the means through 142

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which things can become (de)politicised (Flinders and Buller, 2006) both within and between different political contexts. This is achieved through conserving the idea of different (real and imagined) spaces within the non-political and political terrain and differentiating between the private (that is, the domestic and personal), public and governmental spheres (Hay, 2007, 78–87).Although these distinctions are permeable and can, of course, be ambiguous, controversial and contested, the sphere in which a (de) politicising process occurs is frequently significant in terms of the scope, significance and even the content of that process (as demonstrated below). Retaining a focus on context within an expansive definition of the political allows for the provision of political cartographies, the examination of changing topographies and transgressed boundaries, the investigation of the movement of issues, people, processes and so on between different (permeable and non-static) arenas (Coole, 2000), an examination of both the ways in which different spheres have been normatively interpreted, and the political nature of spaces which, traditionally, have been viewed as either less or non-political. Moreover, it allows for the identification of both politicising and depoliticising processes within the same moment and same political space in that depoliticising content can be found within contextual politicising shifts and vice versa. So, as shown below in detail, the UK Parliament intervened in the area of reproductive technologies in the 1990 HFE Act which entails governmental politicisation (Hay’s Politicisation 1). This was both responsive to and generative of societal deliberation and a degree of contestation (Hay’s Politicisation 2), but the Act contained depoliticisation in the form of discursive sedimentation (Hay’s Depoliticisation 1) as it attempted to moralise, normalise and limit provision to particular (nuclear) families. In this way, the approach advocated here seeks to examine all three ‘faces’ of (de)politicisation identified by Wood and Flinders (2014) and their interplay.

The politics of human reproduction and arts Feminists and others have long recognised that human reproduction is political and imbued with power relations. Louise Brown’s birth in 1978 marked an important moment in this politics. Her existence as the first ‘test tube baby’ confirmed the viability of IVF as a means of conception and brought hope to those with fertility problems. Concurrently, IVF’s development heralded a turning point in the ability of humans to control and direct human reproduction through scientific and technical intervention and, thus, in the politics of human reproduction. Hay argues that ‘in increasing the capacity for human agency or interference… in matters previously the preserve of nature, the development of modern 143

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science has proved politicising’ (2007, 81). This is not to suggest naively that IVF has spectacularly shifted human reproduction per se from the realm of fate to that of politics. The biological process of reproduction has never been untouched by social intervention (for example, surrogacy has existed for almost as long as recorded human history (Anleu, 1992)). Yet, the development of IVF is exceptional in its successful creation of an embryo outside the female body without the privacy of the sex act; it allows for divisions between the roles of biological and social parenthood that were ‘impossible before the appearance of these techniques’ (Caplan, 1990, 101). Louise Brown’s birth represents both the creation of new life and unprecedented political and conceptive possibilities. As Purdy argues, IVF ‘means that the infertile do not have to accept their fate: there is always another procedure to try’ (1998, 167). Thus, the development of ARTs crosses a significant threshold: there is a shift from the non-political realm of necessity towards the political realm of contingency and agency, as well as a significant alteration in the institution of the family through the production of new social and kin relations. Thus, in relation to Politicisation 1 with its emphasis on extending agency and choice, the development of ARTs came to politicise human reproduction in two key ways which are non-governmental at base: it accomplished a radical material change in the management of reproduction through technical intervention; and it had the potential not only to impact upon the institutional form of the family but also destabilise decontested assumptions concerning the ‘naturalness’ of the hetero-nuclear family by exposing, as well as introducing, the contingency operating within this institution. So, for example, new possibilities for identification (that is, biological mother; second parent, male role model, and so on) have been opened up. Further, in relation to Politicisation 2, Louise Brown’s birth engendered impassioned public debate and deliberation about the choices, hopes, fears, expectations, dangers and prohibitions created by IVF. Religious organisations, feminists, patient and support groups, healthcare professionals, scientists, ethicists and philosophers, as well as the populace, immediately began to deliberate on the moral, ethical, social and practical implications. The public debate was often polarised and perhaps inevitably centred on the apparent benefits and dangers of IVF, employing the general rhetoric of what Mulkay (1993; 1996) entitles ‘hope and fear’ (see also Kettell, 2010) and opening up reflection on the embryo’s status, related technology, the meaning of parenthood, reproductive control, the health and welfare of prospective mothers and unborn children, and scarcity and access of provision.

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These non-governmental politicisations were followed by further, more formal politicising processes associated with the development of public policy, regulation and legislation. Franklin argues, ‘the birth of Louise Brown brought into being more than a child; it created a ‘legislative vacuum’ that needed to be filled’ (1993, 97) and, therefore, the theming of the issue as appropriate for state action.Yet, in part due to IVF’s controversy and the lack of relevant extant law, there was a time lag between the beginnings of this formal politicisation and the legislative outcome and subsequent juridical regulation – the culmination of Politicisation 3. The beginning of this politicising shift from the public to the governmental realm occurred with the commission of the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, chaired by Mary Warnock, in July 1982.The committee delivered its report in 1984 with it forming the basis of the 1990 Act and the establishment of an arm’s-length regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 1991 (for other relevant Parliamentary activity during this period see Franklin 1993, 98). In Parliament and to the surprise of Warnock and others, it was the issue of embryo research which came to dominate parliamentary debates on the HFE Act (Franklin, 1993). However, another prominent element of the debate surrounded the welfare of the child and, in particular, the need for a father. The draft bill stated: •

•

13(5): A woman shall not be provided with treatment services unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born as a result of the treatment, and of any other child who may be affected by the birth... 25(2):The guidance given by the code shall include guidance for those providing treatment services about the account to be taken of the welfare of children who may be born as a result of treatment services.

However, after two amendments were introduced successfully (on a vote of 226 to 174) by the Conservative MP, David Wilshire, the words ‘including the need of that child for a father’ were inserted in brackets after ‘treatment’ in 13(5) and the words ‘including a child’s need for a father’ were parenthetically inserted after ‘services’ in 25(2). These amendments made explicit what was contained within the Warnock report (that is, that an IVF child would and should have both mother and father). In 2004, parliamentarians and others felt the need to review the law and regulation surrounding human reproductive technologies to ensure that the law remained ‘effective and fit for purpose’ (Department of Health, 2005). Under the headings of ‘Welfare of the child’ and ‘Status and legal parenthood’ and through reference to notions of comprehensiveness, 145

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discrimination, the changing nature of family structures and openness to access, the review made explicit the need to consider the necessity of the Father’s Clause in subsequent public consultation (see Annex B, Department of Health, 2005, and Recommendation 21, House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, 2005). In the 2007 Draft Bill, the two references to the child’s need for a father were removed. A number of amendments were tabled proposing the re-introduction of explicit reference to the need for a father (and mother) but these were rejected in favour of another amendment that replaced ‘the need for a father’ with ‘the need for supportive parenting’ and the Bill went on to receive its Royal Assent in November 2008. The Clause’s removal and its replacement with the phrase ‘the need for supportive parenting’ means that IVF has now been fully and formally opened up to single women and same-sex couples. Perhaps predictably, this change drew strong reactions and was both hailed as progressive and condemned as harmful and absurd. Evan Harris, then a Liberal Democrat MP, said the Clause ‘was unjustifiable, discriminatory and vindictive… so good riddance’, while Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, criticised the removal as a ‘dreadful statement to make about the role of men. Fatherhood is much more than the donation of sperm’ (BBC, 2006). In either interpretation, the Clause’s removal was seen as transformative. This contrasts with the academic literature (for example, Fox, 2009; Gamble, 2009; McCandless and Sheldon, 2010), which views the 2008 Act as a ‘missed opportunity’ and the Clause’s removal as a relatively minor amendment that makes little difference in terms of clinical guidance and in keeping with the original legislation. Yet, as McCandless and Sheldon (2010) themselves suggest, parliamentary debates on the Clause’s introduction and removal acted as lightning rods for underlying ideological clashes on the family, rights and equality that derive from (changing) social perspectives. It is partly in this sense that the Clause makes such an excellent case to demonstrate the utility of approaching public policy through the lens of (de)politicisation, in that it allows us to depart from both public and prevailing academic interpretations.We see its removal as neither ‘transformative’, nor ‘minor’. Rather, as demonstrated below, the Clause’s introduction, despite being contained within a formal politicising shift, is best viewed as a depoliticising, moralising response to IVF’s development and its removal should be viewed as partial repoliticisation with depoliticising remainders.

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Parliamentary debates on the introduction of the Father’s Clause, 1984–90 In the debates surrounding the Clause’s introduction, discussions of the family, rights and interests, and the purposes and consequences of legislation were framed, overall, by conservative social and moral narratives on the traditional family form, in part due to the Conservative parliamentary majority. For example, the Lord Chancellor believed that the legislation should not detract from the stability of the family, as ‘the health of the family is largely at the heart of the continuing health of our society’ (HL 6-3-1990 col.1105). Within this overarching emphasis on the traditional family, the Clause’s introduction is thus best conceptualised ‘in terms of a refusal of single motherhood and a desire to link women to men’ (McCandless and Sheldon, 2010, 205). This attempted entrenchment of the traditional nuclear family is a high-profile and formal depoliticising reaction to the politicisation of the family form that IVF engendered. At a time when single parenthood and the decline of marriage often provoked moral panic, the creation of a child in vitro extended further the possibility of parenthood, not only to infertile married couples but also to single, cohabiting and homosexual people. This was something ‘deplorable’ to many, especially those of a conservative and/or religious disposition, and was something that needed to be prevented, or at least limited. The restriction of IVF access to particular groups (and, thus, the restriction of human agency) was achieved in a legal sense through the introduction of the Clause, which itself was a dilution of Lady Saltoun’s narrowly unsuccessful amendment to criminalise the treatment of unmarried women (Gamble, 2009). The attempt to limit IVF was also achieved in a linguistic sense, through the articulation and perpetuation of depoliticising narratives in the debates. Such arguments were often premised on a Christian morality, which utilised the language of what was ‘God-given’, ‘natural’, ‘normal’, ‘common-sense’ and in line with ‘the witness of history’. This moralising depoliticisation attempted to define issues as either inside or outside day-to-day political debate, both imposing a ‘rational’ normative foundation and, thereby, reducing and attempting to conceal possible choices. These linguistic devices acted as extra deliberative defences that had to be breached before the substance of the argument surrounding IVF and its impact on the family and society could be addressed. The message is fatalistic: humans should not interfere with the natural family form, even if scientifically possible.Therefore, restrictions should be imposed to maintain the status quo and protect both the child’s welfare and, more broadly, the health of society. Thus, Lord Denning argued that artificial insemination 147

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should be allowed ‘only in those circumstances to a married couple with a stable union with every likelihood of the child being brought up properly’ (HL 15-1-1988 col.1478).To open up access to ARTs to people not part of a traditional family would, in Ann Winterton’s words, be to ‘upset the natural order of things’,‘threaten the bonds of the conventional family unit’, and not be in ‘the best interests of the child’ (HC 23-11-1984 col.577). Allowing access to other types of ‘abnormal’ families was ‘deplorable’.This oft-made line of argument is encapsulated by David Wilshire’s contribution: When speaking of the family in this context, we are seeking to speak up for the traditional values and standards of society that have stood us in good stead for a long time… That value and standard is deeply embedded in our culture…. It is a tried and tested way of giving a child the best possible start in… life. We tinker with that social unit at our peril. (HC 20-6-1990 col.1023) The emotive and ‘common sense’ linkage of the traditional family to the child’s welfare is particularly depoliticising in that alternatives appear automatically as non-viable and immoral. Moral and political boundaries are preserved and the scope of political choice is limited by attempts to cover over or reject the contingent nature of family forms and, indeed, attempts to remove the family from political debate.The discursive power of these limitations can perhaps be seen in that, when objections to this line of argument were raised, it was only in terms of opening access to unmarried heterosexual couples and, occasionally, single women but not to homosexuals, even though the Warnock Report mentioned the potential of IVF to allow same-sex couples and single men to become parents. The linkages made between the traditional family and the child’s welfare meant that discussions centred on the child’s interests, rather than the interests and rights of other groups and individuals. This emphasis on the child was ultimately premised on a form of gender essentialism – the purported different, complementary and fundamental familial roles played by men and women and the production of particular stable subjects. For example, Renée Short referred to the necessity of ‘a stable relationship with a father and a mother’ because ‘the establishment of the gender role is important [for the child]’ (HC 23-11-1984 col.557).These gender roles tended to go along traditional lines with parliamentarians often – sometimes solely – drawing attention to the father’s financial contribution in providing a stable home. Thus, the Clause’s introduction can be viewed as a means of protecting three related, preponderating and depoliticising perspectives disrupted by IVF’s development: the association of men and women with distinct modes of parenting such as providing 148

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and caring respectively; that these gendered differences were seen to be a direct reflection of biological differences; and that heterosexual parents and heterosexuality in general were the desired standard because of the purported complementary roles of the two distinct genders.The protection and perpetuation of these views within the legislation operates as an attempt to restrict agency, both in terms of access to IVF for certain families, and in terms of constraining the possibility of approaching parenthood in a way that differs from traditional normalising traits. Reflecting the emphasis on the child’s interests, discussions of rights did not emerge until debates in 1990 (with the exception of the child’s right to know their heritage and father). A key discussion here was whether childbearing is a right. In explaining why he believed ARTs should be restricted to married couples, David Blunkett contended: People have an absolute right to be themselves, to reject contact with men or to shun any physical contact with them.That is their choice. But that is not the same as accepting that there is some automatic or inalienable right to child bearing. Child bearing is not a right. It is part of the unfathomable life force. (HC 20-61990 col.1023) In speaking of the ‘unfathomable life force’, Blunkett can be seen as ignoring or even rejecting the degree to which IVF presents new choices and shifts childbearing from the realm of fate towards the realm of human agency and ‘fathomability’. Once again, this reinforces the fatalistic tone of much debate and the moral anxiety surrounding the development of ARTs. In contrast, the extension of reproductive possibilities caused by IVF’s development was more often recognised by those who argued against the Clause and in terms that were often a forerunner of debates about its removal in the 2000s; for example, Jo Richardson’s argument that the Clause would be rendered unworkable due to the ‘overwhelming wish’ of many women, whether single, divorced or separated, to have a baby (HC 20-6-1990 col.1028).

Parliamentary debates on the removal of the Father’s Clause, 2007–08 In contrast to the parliamentary debates that led to the Clause’s introduction in which conservative arguments on the benefits of the traditional family were to the fore, discussions of the Clause after the millennium were framed largely by a liberal emphasis on rights and non-discrimination. In this sense, a shift in prominence can be identified between a paternalistic view of the 149

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state as protector of citizens to a liberal view of the state as guarantor of citizens’ freedom and equality which was perhaps reflective of the New Labour majority.This shift represents a politicisation of reproduction, and IVF in particular, in the sense of increasing openness and autonomy such that things, specifically family forms, become ‘the subject of deliberation, decision making and human agency where previously they were not’ (Hay, 2007, 81). The Clause’s removal formally opens up equal capacity to become parents to more groups and involves recognition of the (value of) plurality of family forms. Yet, the Clause’s removal should not be viewed in any other way than a partial and limited repoliticisation, in that neither the amended 2008 HFE Act, nor the accompanying parliamentary debates, offer the possibility of challenging other social patterns and restrictive, sedimented understandings of reproduction. It would be mistaken to present the Clause’s removal as a simple case of correcting the depoliticising tendencies of previous legislation. Furthermore, unlike debates in the 1980s and 1990s in which liberal arguments were marginal (despite the relative closeness of the vote), (modified) conservative arguments maintained a prominent, although not dominant, position. Nonetheless, these conservative lines of argument tended to be characterised by a certain defensiveness that was not present in earlier debates (for example, Patrick Cormack (HC 20-52008 col.206-207); the Earl of Listowel (HL 10-12-2007 col.58)). This is perhaps indicative of an attempt to operate within the different political composition of Parliament, an alternative ideological, legal and linguistic frame and a society in which attitudes concerning sexuality had altered. Strong and relatively uncontested linkages in debates in the 1980s and 1990 between the traditional family and the child’s welfare had hindered the possibility of considering the rights and interests of other groups. This altered in debates concerning the Clause removal, both because of intervening changes in social attitudes concerning the merits of alternative family forms, and because of the ability of reformers to articulate their belief that the child’s welfare could be assured through alternative family forms. This was achieved primarily through a focus on scientific and anecdotal evidence that either had not yet been undertaken, or was previously treated dismissively (for example, see Dari Taylor, HC 20-5-2008 col.194). One major source was Golombok’s and others’ research (1999; 2001) which claimed that there were signs that children brought up by lesbian couples were better parented. This highlighting of the evidential basis of arguments can be contrasted with the value claims underpinning earlier discussions. The insistence on considering the available evidence enabled reformers to shape the contours of debate around the quality of 150

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parenting, rather than the sex of prospective parents, and couch the interests of both child and parent in terms of rights to which their opponents had to respond. Consequently, one of the focuses of debate was the fairness of the Clause, rather than, as the Clause’s supporters wanted, fatherhood’s value (see Evan Harris, HC 20-5-2008 col.203). Reformers’ arguments were informed by a belief that the Clause violated the rights of certain potential parents and discriminated against particular groups. For example, Baroness Barker suggested that all that was being asked for was ‘equality of consideration’ (HL 10-12-2007 col. 50) and Emily Thornberry stated that the Clause was ‘discriminatory and unfair’ towards single women and lesbian couples (HC 12-5-2008 col. 1123).The success of this shift of emphasis allowed an instance of Politicisation 3: equality of access to IVF was politicised, both in terms of it being an issue subject to parliamentary deliberation, and in terms of the legislative outcome as part of a broader programme of formally prohibiting discrimination. As well as breaking with the previous near-consensus that access to IVF should be restricted, the later debates brought into question judgments on particular family forms as normal, natural and normatively desirable.This destabilisation and denaturalisation represent a more formal recognition within the governmental arena of the (value of the) plurality of family forms. This recognition can be viewed as politicising to the extent that alternatives are taken to be viable and a clear commonsensical link is no longer seen to flow necessarily from someone’s sexuality and the status of their relationship to their ability to parent. Homosexual partners and single women tended to be no longer dismissed automatically as suitable parents or as a threat to the institution of the family (and society). Thus, the debates were less essentialised, at least in terms of traits purportedly related to one’s sexuality. So when parliamentarians did refer to the vital role of the nuclear family both in society and in raising a child in terms of what was ‘designed by nature’ (Geraldine Smith, HC 12-5-2008 col.1097; see also Iris Robinson, HC 12-5-2008 col.1125), they were immediately challenged in a way which was not seen in previous debates. Reformers accused the Clause’s advocates of offensiveness, exclusivity and of using common sense and particular ‘evidence’ as a cover for prejudice (Sandra Osborne and Emily Thornberry, HC 20-5-2008 col.176-178; Chris Bryant, HC 20-5-2008 co.205). The language of pro-Clause parliamentarians did alter to incorporate references to rights, evidence, and positive value judgments on single and same-sex parents, but rather than claiming that full access would threaten the traditional family and openly recommending marriage, the Clause’s advocates contended that its removal would: lead to a violation of children’s rights (Baroness O’Cathain, HL 10-12-2007 col.26); lead to an increase 151

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in social problems deemed to be connected to unstable, fatherless families (Geraldine Smith, HC 12-5-2008 col.1097); and threaten fatherhood and men (Lord Alton, HL 10-12-2007 col.45).The implication was that these negative outcomes, couched emotively in terms of depriving the child and, indeed, the language of gender equality and anti-discrimination (for example, Lord Patten, HL 21-1-2008 col.83-84), would be partially avoided if IVF provision were limited to married couples or stable heterosexual partnerships.This change in terminology and discursive markers can then perhaps be seen as rebranding and altering the emphasis of depoliticising arguments concerning restricted access which had not fundamentally changed. However, the continuing presence of depoliticising arguments concerning ‘natural’ family forms within the parliamentary debates is not, in itself, depoliticising. Indeed, the silencing of these kinds of arguments would be a depoliticising move itself, as one aspect of politicisation concerns maintaining deliberation, the possibility of disagreement and contestation (Honig, 1993). While issues of access and alternative family forms were repoliticised within both debates and the resulting legislation, the Clause’s removal is a partial politicisation for at least two reasons: first, different forms of gender essentialism remained prominent and unchallenged within debates (although not carried formally into the wording of the legislation itself); second, there was an absence of challenges to various sedimented assumptions concerning pro-natalism, access, choice, kinship and control in relation to human reproduction. Turning to the former first, a residual depoliticising presence of gender essentialism pervaded arguments on both sides, despite the questioning of the idea that homosexuality was incompatible with good parenting. This questioning and the consequent disruption of the ideal family did lead to references to ‘the male role model’, rather than solely ‘the father’ (for example,Andrew Lansley, HC 12-5-2008 col.1078-9) but, overall, the idea that men and women play distinct, necessary, but complementary roles in family life was rarely contested. Although Baroness Finlay came close to questioning whether parental duties and children’s needs were necessarily guaranteed by ‘biological definitions’ (HL 10-12-2007 col.57), gendered distinctions were generally represented as ‘facts of life’ – again, concealing and forgetting the contingency of gendered norms – and the view that experiencing the interactions of both men and women would necessarily enhance the child’s life was portrayed as commonsensical (for example, Baroness Deech, HL 10-12-2007 col.23-4; Baroness Williams, HL 21-12008 col.73; Geraldine Smith, HC 20-5-2008 col.177). As feminists have contended, the view that men and women have distinct characteristics is depoliticising because it is inaccurate, harmful, constraining and, ultimately 152

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restricts agency. It is a harmful view because those who do not conform to accepted characteristics are seen as abnormal and, if left unchallenged, often legitimises unequal treatment through the valuation of particular gendered characteristics above others (Steans, 2006, 7–10). It constrains by homogenising and entrenching gendered behaviour. For example, Baroness Deech perpetuated gendered expectations concerning mothers as ‘nurturers’ when she spoke of the fact that the need for a mother was already ‘implicit in the need to consider the welfare of the child’ (HL 1012-2007 col. 22).Yet, while parliamentary contributions may be imbued with gender essentialism, the resulting legislation does not make genderexplicit claims about parenthood. Therefore, the legislative outcome, at least, does not continue to entrench depoliticising assumptions about mother- and fatherhood and could open up space for a plurality of gender characteristics. The second reason why the Clause’s removal should not be interpreted as entirely politicising is the absence of open deliberation upon, and interrogation of, various sedimented assumptions concerning parenthood, such as pro-natalism, kinship, choice and control. Perhaps the most noticeable absence was any challenge to pro-natalist ideas. Pro-natalism – the view that desiring children is natural for women and that motherhood is female destiny – has been extensively challenged within feminist literatures that suggest that the desire for genetically related children is socially conditioned (Rich, 1977; Oakley, 1980; Stanworth, 1987; Rowland, 1992; Raymond, 1993). Furthermore, this literature highlights the way in which social pressure and stigma is exerted on the childless, and in which the availability of IVF perpetuates and reinforces pro-natalism, as infertility becomes viewed as pathological (Ulrich and Weatherall, 2000). The parliamentary debates on the Clause’s removal are underpinned overwhelmingly by positive valuations of IVF and the opportunity it provides for biological parenthood. This has several ramifications. First, the debates ignored possible negative consequences of IVF provision. IVF was assumed to provide a safe and entirely positive solution to the otherwise disrupted ‘normal’ progression of life (Mulkay, 1993, 725). Indeed, parliamentarians did not consider the technology’s relatively low success rates, its high financial costs (beyond cycles provided on the NHS), and the potentially serious health risks (to child and mother), widely acknowledged in feminist literatures and campaigns (Klein, 1989; Shildrick, 1997; Throsby and Gill, 2004; www.handsoffourovaries.com). Such literature suggests that privately pursuing IVF is never a neutral decision and stresses the difficulty of achieving both informed choices about parenthood and positive outcomes.

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Second, the formal extension of IVF to more people (that is, single women and same-sex couples), and the negotiations over kinship that this entailed, reinforces the symbolic importance of the genetic identity of the child that is characteristic of Euro-American cultures (Franklin, 1993). In this way, the greater availability of IVF may discourage and undermine both other ways of becoming a parent (for example, adoption), and the role of the wider community in childrearing and children’s welfare (although see Baronesses Howarth (HL 10-12-2007 col. 55), and Butler-Sloss (HL 10-12-2007 col. 67)). There was very little recognition of the cultural importance of bloodlines and genetic relations and how IVF reinforces this culture. The final absence from the debates on the Clause’s removal concerns those groups in society who still have limited or no access to IVF (for example, the poor). If one returns to the Warnock Report, what is conspicuous by its absence in parliamentary debates, especially given its controversial nature, is any reference to the possibility of single men becoming parents through IVF (in combination with surrogacy arrangements). The Warnock Report states: In the same way that a single woman may believe she has a right to motherhood, so a single man may feel he has a right to fatherhood… [W]e were told of a group of single, mainly homosexual men who were campaigning for the right to bring up a child. The primary aim at present is to obtain in practice equal rights in the adoption field, but they are also well aware of the potential of surrogacy for providing a single man with a child which is genetically his… It can be argued that as a matter of sex equality if single women are not totally barred from parenthood, then neither should single men be so barred. (1984, Para.2.10) This absence is important in the context of the way in which IVF involves a shift from the realm of fate to the realm of contingency. The amended 2008 HFE Act still throws up the anomaly that single men are now the only group legally excluded from producing genetically related children. This fact was not referred to either in the consultation or the debates. The point here is not necessarily to advocate an extension of the law but to highlight how an instance of Politicisation 1 – the development of IVF – creates novel controversies, issues and possibilities that may be neglected and may remain depoliticised (or become re-depoliticised) at different times and in different political spaces (this repoliticisation may now be occurring with the case of the man who is making a legal bid to

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become the first single father using surrogacy arrangements (Daily Mail, 2012), which echoes the campaign mentioned in the Warnock Report).

Conclusion The purposes of this chapter were threefold: first, to demonstrate the ability of (de)politicisation research to enter new empirical terrain beyond economic and monetary policy; second, to offer an analysis of the (de) politicising tendencies within both the development of ARTs and, especially, subsequent parliamentary activity; and, in so doing, third, to illustrate to governance researchers the benefits of an approach to (de)politicisation, underpinned by a processual but differentiated conceptualisation of politics, that sensitises us to both the complex content and context of politics, their interplay and the resultant outcomes, tensions and paradoxes. The development of IVF did not politicise reproduction in the sense that it became subject to social intervention for the first time, nor did it entirely remove fatalism from reproduction. However, it did politicise in the sense that it introduced (private) reproductive choices and contingencies that were not present previously and that led to a governmental response in the form of parliamentary debates and the 1990 HFE Act. In this sense, the Father’s Clause, as part of the HFE Act, was a formal politicisation to regulate and manage ARTs. Yet the Clause itself is also a depoliticising move to entrench the nuclear family and the position of marriage in society. Thus, a governmental politicisation had depoliticising (discursive and material) effects in terms of both placing ideological barriers around acceptable political debate, and constraining the choices and agency of particular groups of people by excluding them from IVF access. The Clause’s removal was hailed as transformative – whether positively or negatively – by campaigners and parliamentarians alike. It would be easy to present this legislative amendment as an entirely progressive victory in terms of opening up access to technologies for frequently disadvantaged and stigmatised groups and cementing a commitment to equality and plurality. Yet the Clause’s removal and attendant parliamentary debates take on a slightly different character when viewed through the lens of (de) politicisation. This lens highlights (changing) societal assumptions about human reproduction, gender, sexuality and the family as articulated within a formal governmental arena, and helps reveal remaining absences and silences. Thus, we have argued that the Clause’s removal is politicising in that it formally opens up access to single women and homosexual couples and, in so doing, does not discriminate against, or prescribe, particular family forms. Furthermore, the debates involved negotiations over kinship (for example, in discussions about ‘male role models’ rather than ‘fathers’, 155

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and the legal status of the second parent within same-sex couples) which somewhat disrupted the linkage of social to natural parenthood. However, essentialist arguments remained prominent in the 2007–08 debates in terms of particular gendered traits being seen as facts of life (for example, the delivery of care and nurturing were tied exclusively to women). Furthermore, there were remaining silences concerning the cultural importance of pro-natalism, possible negative effects of the technologies, the perpetuation of geneticised kinship relations, as well as some enduring issues with access and choice among particular groups which meant that the same processes and legislative outcomes, while politicising for some actors, were depoliticising for others. Therefore, a (de)politicisation lens reveals more fully the scope and terrain of this aspect of the politics of human reproduction and demonstrates why the Clause’s removal is best viewed as only a partial repoliticisation. Moreover, understanding the development of technology – in this case ARTs – as a type of politicisation entails grasping how governments have to formally respond both to fundamental material changes – in this instance with regard to how humans are capable of managing both reproduction and family forms – and to subsequent public deliberation. In this sense, parliamentarians and governments draw upon and extend, rather than direct, strategies and processes of (de)politicisation operating within society. As this summary of our argument shows, the approach taken to (de) politicisation within this chapter is somewhat different to most of the approaches within the extant governance, British politics and public policy literatures. Depoliticisation tends to be viewed within these literatures solely as a governing strategy or statecraft in which the appearance of removing responsibility (often in the direction of arm’s-length bodies) results in low levels of deliberation and agency but also high levels of governmental control. This emphasis on placing at one remove and the subsequent impact upon the content of politics is valuable for understanding contemporary patterns of governance.Yet, it is also important to remember, as demonstrated in this chapter, both that processes of (de)politicisation can also occur concurrently and within particular political and social spaces, and that state-societal relations are intimately entangled in all arenas in the governing of particular elements of our lives. Politicisation and depoliticisation should not be viewed solely and simply as opposing forces but also as parallel and simultaneous sociopolitical trends. Consequently, both the content and context of (de)politicisation matters; processes of (de/re)politicisation should be viewed in terms of the opening and foreclosing of deliberation, engagement and agency, as well as in terms of shifting boundaries. This then allows governance researchers to capture, analyse and, potentially, criticise the complex 156

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interplay of democratic processes and state interventions with societal, cultural, economic and technological developments. This additional focus upon parliamentary debates and legislative outcomes as themselves potentially (de)politicising makes possible the exploration of tensions between (de)politicisation as a (formal) context-shifting of responsibilities between realms and (de)politicisation as an (informal) content-shift in how an issue is viewed (that is, as ‘natural’, subject to human agency, in need of government intervention, and so on). By opening up patterns of governance, parliamentary debates and public policy to critical scrutiny through this particular lens of (de)politicisation, it is possible, first, to reveal the restrictive and potentially disempowering depoliticising remainders within formal politicising moves and vice versa and, second, to demonstrate the critical potential of academic work on (de)politicisation by highlighting processes which hold us captive and, thus, potentially extending the possibilities for contestation and collective action. References Anleu, SR, 1992, Surrogacy: For love but not for money?, Gender and Society, 6, 2, 30–48 BBC, 2006, IVF father figure clause is to go, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ health/6175501stm Buller, J, Flinders, M, 2005, The domestic origins of depoliticisation in the area of British economic policy, British Journal of Political Science and International Relations, 7, 526–43 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Political Science and International Relations, 3, 2, 127–49 Caplan, AL, 1990,The ethics of in vitro fertilisation, in Hull, RT (ed), Ethical issues in the new reproductive technologies, Belmont, CA:Wadsworth, 96–108 Coole, D, 2000, Negativity and politics, London: Routledge Daily Mail, 2012, Supermarket worker, 24, in legal bid to become Britain’s first single father using a surrogate, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-2229691/Supermarket-worker-24-legal-bid-Britain’s-singlefather-using-surrogate.html Department of Health, 2005, Review of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act: A public consultation, London: Department of Health Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006, Depoliticisation: Principles, tactics and tools, British Politics, 1, 3, 293–318 Fox, M, 2009,The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008:Tinkering at the margins, Feminist Legal Studies, 17, 3, 333–44

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Franklin, S, 1993, Making representations: The parliamentary debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, in Edwards, J, Franklin, S, Hirsch, E, Price, F, Strathern, M (eds), Technologies of procreation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 96–131 Gamble, A, 2000, Politics and fate, Cambridge: Polity Press Gamble, N, 2009, Considering the need for a father:The role of clinicians in safeguarding family values in UK fertility treatment, Reproductive Medicine Online, 19, S1, 15–18 Golombok, S, 1999, New family forms: Children raised in solo mother families, lesbian mother families, and in families created by assisted reproduction, in Balter, L, Tamis-LeMonda, C (eds), Child psychology, Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press Golombok, S, MacCallum, F, Goodman, E, 2001,The test-tube generation: Parent-child relationships and the psychological wellbeing of in vitro fertilisation children at adolescence, Child Development, 72, 599–608 Harder, L, 1996, Depoliticising insurgency, Studies in Political Economy, 50, 37–64 Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Press Honig, B, 1993, Political theory and the displacement of politics, London: Cornell University Press House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2005, Human reproductive technologies and the law: Fifth report of session 2004–05, Vol I), London: The Stationery Office Howarth, D, Norval,A, Stavrakakis,Y (eds), 2000, Discourse theory and political analysis: Identities, hegemonies and social change, Manchester: Manchester University Press Jenkins, L, 2011,The difference genealogy makes: Strategies for politicisation or how to extend capacities for autonomy, Political Studies, 59, 1, 156–74 Kettell, S, 2008, Does depoliticisation work? Evidence from Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, 1990–92, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10, 4, 630–48 Kettell, S, 2010, Rites of passage: Discursive strategies in the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill debate, Political Studies, 58, 4, 789–808 Klein, R, 1989, The exploitation of a desire, Victoria: Deakin University Press McCandless, J, Sheldon, S, 2010,‘No father required’? The welfare assessment in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, Feminist Legal Studies, 18, 3, 201–25 Mulkay, M, 1993, Rhetorics of hope and fear in the great embryo debate, Social Studies of Science, 23, 4, 721–42 Mulkay, M, 1996, Frankenstein and the debate over embryo research, Science Technology and Social Values, 21, 2, 157–76

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Norval,AJ, 2000,The things we do with words: Contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology, British Journal of Political Science, 30, 2, 313–46 Oakley, A, 1980, Woman confined, Oxford: Martin Robertson Purdy, LM, 1998, Assisted reproduction, in Kuhse, H, Singer, P (eds), A companion to bioethics, Oxford: Blackwell Raymond, J, 1993, Women and wombs, San Francisco, CA: Harper Rich, A, 1977, Of woman born, New York: Bantam Rowland, R, 1992, Living laboratories, London: Cedar Shildrick, M, 1997, Leaky bodies and boundaries, London: Routledge Stanworth, M, 1987, Reproductive technologies, Cambridge: Polity Press Steans, J, 2006, Gender and international relations, Cambridge: Polity Press Throsby, K, Gill, R, 2004,‘It’s different for men’: Masculinity and IVF, Men and Masculinities, 6, 4, 330–48 Ulrich, M, Weatherall, A, 2000, Motherhood and infertility: Viewing motherhood through the lens of infertility, Feminist Psychology, 10, 323–36 Warnock Committee, 1984, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Wood, M, Flinders, M, 2014, Rethinking depoliticisation: Beyond the governmental, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 151–70

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Politicising UK energy: what ‘speaking energy security’ can do Caroline Kuzemko

Introduction A growing body of work has recently emerged that applies depoliticisation as an analytical concept, often to explain developments in monetary and financial policy making (Burnham, 2001; Buller and Flinders, 2005; Flinders and Buller, 2006; Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2011). It argues that responsibility for economic policy making has been passed away, by various means, from government to either quasi or wholly independent bodies resulting in lower degrees of political contestation and less active collective representation of public bodies by majoritarian institutions (Hay, 2007; Jenkins, 2011; Mügge, 2011). This chapter moves beyond the empirical realms of economic policy by exploring UK energy governance through the lenses of (de-) politicisation. UK energy policy making is understood here as having been subject to very deliberate depoliticising processes during the 1980s and 1990s. By some contrast, however, by the late 2000s energy had become somewhat re-politicised and subject to higher degrees of contestation and formal political deliberation. New government institutions had been established in order to steer energy policy towards the achievement of new objectives, of energy security and climate change mitigation. These changes are notable in that they mark energy policy out from other areas of economic policy making in the UK, and elsewhere, where depoliticising trends arguably continue.Through the application of insights from a second conceptual frame, that of speaking security, it is argued here that energy was politicised partly through the impact of narratives of national energy supply (in-)security. These processes took place at the time of mounting political support for climate change mitigation, Russian energy policy restructurings, the emergence of China as a powerful energy actor, of rising oil and gas prices, and of the Russia–Ukraine gas transit disputes. In addition, the UK was on the brink of becoming an importer of oil and gas after decades as a net exporter. The specific argument here, however, is that renewed public and political interest in energy security, alongside the apparent failure of existing energy institutions to anticipate,

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explain or address energy security issues, highlighted a need for institutional change. Combining conceptual insights from literatures on depoliticisation and securitisation may be novel, but it is also not entirely unproblematic.This is not least because, according to Copenhagen School scholars, a successful securitisation process would result in a distinct lack of open or collective political deliberation as decision making would disappear ‘behind closed doors’. More recent critical security literature, however, has suggested that securitising moves do not always have to result in secretised decision making (McDonald, 2008, 580; see Floyd, 2007; Browning and McDonald, 2011). Both Copenhagen School and critical security scholars are united, however, in suggesting that the language of security is evocative, that it raises public and political interest, and that it can cause governments to break with previous political practice (Wæver, 1995, 54–5; Buzan et al, 1998, 23).The argument here moves somewhat beyond this debate in that it offers up an empirical example of what the language of security can do when applied in political situations – it can be described as offering actors political leverage albeit within quite specific contexts. This chapter as a whole focuses on one set of conditions under which politicisation occurred marking it out from much of the literature on depoliticisation that focuses on processes of delegation away from government. It initially presents arguments about ways in which UK energy policy had been depoliticised by the start of the 2000s, before moving on to outline ways in which we can draw on the notion of securitisation to explore conditions under which politicisation can take place. The following two sections will apply this conceptual frame to UK energy policy making – first through an analysis of emerging energy security narratives and then by tracing how specific articulations of the UK energy supply security crisis had an impact upon existing processes and practices of energy governance.

Depoliticisation, politicisation and speaking security It is not without some caution that this chapter proceeds with the explication and application of a conceptual framework that has borrowed from multiple schools of thought.This task is, however, undertaken because both concepts of depoliticisation and securitisation have something to tell us about the political nature of policy making, and in particular about types of state involvement under certain conditions. Both concepts also utilise, in some instances more explicitly than others, the notion that narratives and the ways in which subjects are both conceived and framed

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are important in understanding political processes and specific forms of political agency and change. UK Depoliticisations and energy governance

In his 2001 chapter on the governing strategies of New Labour, Peter Burnham suggested that depoliticisation can be understood as placing the political character of decision making at one remove from government (Burnham, 2001, 127).The emphasis in his chapter is on depoliticisation as a governing strategy whereby the discretionary nature of decision making is reduced and replaced with a more ‘rules-based’ system over which state managers, and politicians, have less active control (Burnham, 2001, 136). This at once both reduces government responsibility for policy while also leaving it less subject to political discretions, deliberations and interventions (see, Mügge, 2011, 189). There are different ‘tactics’ which politicians can pursue in order to move a policy field to this more indirect governing relationship (Flinders and Buller, 2006, 296). For the purposes of this analysis one particular form of depoliticisation is emphasised: the passing of policy-making responsibility to quasi-public, or independent, authorities (Hay, 2007, 82–3). What is notable about this form of depoliticisation is the degree to which it can serve, over time, to reduce political capacity. Thus we can compare two different types of policy-making system that can be placed at two ends of a spectrum. Depoliticised here refers to a system where rules have been decided, embedded into political practice, where there is little or no contestation of policy, and where there is little room for open deliberation, self-reflexivity or discretionary politics. The other, politicised, end of the spectrum is articulated here as one where politics as deliberation and contestation are embedded within the structures of governance such that capacity exists for more informed collective choices to be made (Hay, 2007; Gamble, 2000). UK energy institutions had undergone significant changes over the course of the twentieth century reflecting shifting relationships between states and markets. Energy in the post-Second World War era was considered a merit good, energy companies were state owned and operated and a considerable state programme of establishing national access to electricity was undertaken (Helm, 2003). This was followed in the 1980s by a, not unproblematic, period of energy deregulation and privatisation as part of wider UK neoliberal reform processes. One aspect of this process that is often overlooked was the establishment over time of a more indirect, technocratic governing system for energy – in line with neoliberal economic and rational choice ideas. Both Conservative, 163

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and later New Labour, politicians had actively sought to remove energy from politics, making it subject to neutral, ‘economic’ forces: ‘From the early 1980s, British energy policy, and its associated regulatory regime, was designed to transform a state-owned and directed sector into a normal commodity market. Competition and liberalization would, its architects hoped, take energy out of the political arena’ (Helm, 2003, 386). By the early 2000s the Energy Ministry had been disbanded, there was little or no opportunity for or interest in Parliamentary debate, energy was not represented directly at Cabinet level, responsibility for the supply of energy had been passed to private operators, and electricity and gas markets were regulated by an independent body, Ofgem, paid for by the gas and electricity industry.The Energy Directorate within the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), to which overall responsibility for energy policy had passed, had no specific energy mandates but instead mandates aimed at encouraging the ‘right’ conditions for business, with an emphasis on competition and freely trading markets. The job of government, with regard to energy, had been defined as setting a framework within which the scope of market forces, and competition, could be maximised and the establishment of freely trading, competitive markets became the principal objective of policy (Lawson, 1989, 23).The Energy Directorate of the DTI was tasked only with maintaining the prevailing framework and, as such, the expectation was that their policy discretionary function would be low and that energy should be managed within the confines of set rules, regulations and norms, with little active political interference. These processes of depoliticisation resulted over time in a lack of political deliberation about energy, about its specific and complex infrastructures and about how it should be governed, outside of technocratic circles. Within technocratic circles energy systems were modelled, language was specific and often unintelligible to others, including generalist politicians and other public bodies, and this can in part explain the high degree of public and collective disengagement with the subject (see Stern, 1987). Technical language and hiring practices that privileged neoliberal economic knowledge served to further isolate policy practices from contestation and from other political interpretations and choices. Arguably, the placing of elected representatives at a remove from active deliberation also resulted in lack of political capacity to engage with and understand energy and its relationship to wider societal goals, such as security. It is worth reiterating here the paradoxical nature of depoliticisation – while decisions to depoliticise are deeply political, political capacities to deliberate, contest and act in a policy area are reduced through these same processes. It has been observed that depoliticisation, particularly of this technocratic nature, has been an ongoing form of governing throughout the twentieth 164

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century (Burnham, 2001, 464). Depoliticisation is understood here, however, as being particularly powerful and more difficult to reverse when underpinned by a dominant and embedded policy paradigm. In looking for the domestic sources of UK depoliticisations in the 1980s and 1990s one book suggests that these processes were underpinned by neoliberal and public choice ideas about the role of the state and about the ability of political actors to make sound decisions relating to the economy (Hay, 2007, 95–9). Such ideas had also dominated approaches to governing for sustainable energy. As of 2003 climate change mitigation had become an, albeit vaguely worded, objective for energy policy but this had implied little serious change to energy governance structures and reliance on markets and market instruments to deliver (Mitchell, 2008; Scrase and Ockwell, 2009). Given the degree to which neoliberal economic ideas were held by a range of political elites to be legitimate over this time period depoliticisation was genuinely understood by some as a process that would result in ‘better’ governance (Hay, 2007, 94). This makes decisions to depoliticise appear both less instrumental but also harder to reverse given the degree to which such ideas had become yet further entrenched via processes of depoliticisation (Kuzemko, 2013, 46–8; Wood, 2011, 7). Speaking security and political priority

As already suggested, the bulk of scholarship that applies concepts of (de-) politicisation does so in order to explore and explain processes of delegation in economic governance, but little is said on the subject of politicisation and how it occurs. Flinders and Buller observe that politicians can be pressured to repoliticise a subject and to become more actively engaged with it once more (2006, 296) and Hay suggests that issues can be promoted from the public sphere to direct governmental deliberation and collective agency (2007, 82). Politicisation as a process is conceptualised as placing a subject into the realm of contingency and deliberation (Hay, 2007, 79), and as an instance within which an arm’s-length governing position can be subject to change via contestation and the identification and dispute of underlying assumptions (Jenkins, 2011, 159). Less is said in these analyses, also, about how politicisation can take place. This is an important question given the degree to which the most recent phase of depoliticisation in the UK is understood here as having become entrenched within governance practices and institutions. Hay comes closest to describing how politicisation happens in his suggestion that it can be through the successful lobbying of government, the replacement of one administration by another, or the attempt by an incumbent administration to expand its political reach. In such instances issues, which may already have considerable salience within 165

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broader public discourses, can be taken up and incorporated within formal legislative processes (Hay, 2007, 82).The inference here that it is issues that have a prior and considerable degree of resonance with public opinion and discourse is one to which we will return below. The Copenhagen School draws links between political interest, state agency, and security discourses that can be usefully considered here when asking questions about how politicisations can take place. Speaking security is understood as, ‘the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics. Securitization can thus be seen as a more extreme version of politicization’ (Buzan et al, 1998, 23). This implies that once a subject has been understood as a security issue then government, as security is the language of political priority and of the state, is enabled to break with ‘normal’ political practices to address the problem (Wæver, 1995, 54–5; see also Buzan et al, 1998).This statement is problematic in that it implies both that there is such a thing as ‘normal’ politics, as well as a somewhat fixed notion of what normal politics might be (McDonald, 2008). However, normal politics could be taken to refer to ongoing governance practices at a point in time, in a given policy area. What is important for the argument here, however, is that the evocative language of threat and urgency are understood to lend the concept of security mobilising powers – not least in that an issue can be framed as ‘a special kind of politics’ subject to state intervention. This conceptualisation of the effects of speaking security has elements of ‘Schmittian exceptionalism’ to it in that the state is understood to be the appropriate actor to decide upon ‘the exception’ in times of crisis (Schmitt 1986, 5, in Flinders and Wood, 2014). This is where we need to proceed carefully, however, in that according to original Copenhagen School analyses once a subject has been fully securitised it may well become subject to a particular form of depoliticisation. This is because decision making, if the issue is taken to be ‘above politics’, can justifiably take place behind closed doors without input from other political institutions. A subject, once securitised, tends to move into the logic of national security where the state becomes more preoccupied with identifying and countering enemies, with the focus often being on the wrong-doing of others but not on internal reflection (Wæver 1995, 55). Furthermore because particular institutions, such as the armed forces, are understood to be legitimate security providers responsibility is often immediately passed on to these more expert institutions without the need for further political deliberation. By contrast there are more recent suggestions, emanating in particular from critical security studies, that speaking security does not always have 166

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to lead to sets of conflictual and exclusionary reactions (McDonald, 2008, 580; Browning and McDonald, 2011, 8). Browning and McDonald suggest that the language of security pervades political debates but only rarely does it have the effect of shifting issues beyond the democratic realm. They point out, using the example of the political resources given over to tackling HIV/AIDS, that the language of security has often proved useful in placing previously non-politicised issues onto the political agenda (2011, 7). As such although security does often involve militaristic solutions and ‘panic politics’ it can also focus attention, political and public, onto certain subjects. McDonald further suggests, in language similar to that used in conceptualising politicisation above, that security can be understood as a site of contestation and therefore for change (McDonald, 2008, 580). As such speaking security can do different things at different times and in different places (Browning and MacDonald, 2011, 8), and as such context is important. It can be understood, therefore, as capable of enabling a degree of politicisation certainly of a momentary nature although whether momentary politicisation leads to a new system that embodies more ongoing deliberation and contestation is another question entirely. We can return at this point to the suggestion that subjects that become politicised may be ones that already have broader public salience (Hay, 2007, 82). Within notions of speaking security there are links implicit between elite politicians and wider society, particularly in democracies. For example, the concept of securitisation infers that wider publics matter in processes of political change when it is suggested that governments can use public fear about an issue to justify a break with ‘normal’, or ongoing, political practice (Wæver, 1995; Buzan et al, 1998). Sociological institutionalists have argued both for a more inter-subjective relationship between publics and political possibility (Widmaier et al 2007, 755) and that structural change in ongoing political practices ‘are generally associated…with highly politicized and public debates’ (Hay, 2001, 200). It has also been argued that for a particular narrative to prevail it does not necessarily need to be complex or sophisticated, but that it should be cognitively convincing and normatively appealing (Hay, 1999, 100). Simple explanations can, as such, be effective in garnering public and political interest in that they can be communicated more easily and widely than complex explanations that perhaps require a more in-depth knowledge of the subject. Success in terms of raising the political profile of a subject can also depend on whether a narrative can appeal to existing, or emerging, norms, values and understandings (Schmidt, 2006, 252). In this vein, it has been suggested that not all subjects can be as successfully spoken about in terms of security as others (Wæver, 1995; Buzan et al, 1998; Browning and MacDonald, 2011).This chapter argues that the association of energy 167

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with security does appear to have a reasonably high degree of cognitive authority. As will be discussed below, this may have to do with historical precedent given the nature of international oil relations in the twentieth century but it may also have to do with energy security being understood in near-term, national terms, as opposed to long-term, global terms in the case of climate change security. As such (energy) securitising moves are taken here as offering a set of specific conditions under which politicisation can happen in that fears about the security of a particular subject can equate to a sense that something is wrong and that something needs to be done (Widmaier et al, 2007, 749). It also implies, possibly because security is still understood largely in national terms akin to a social good, that government has direct responsibility to respond (Wæver, 1995, 55) – in direct contrast to the notion of an arm’s-length government relationship to a policy area.

Speaking security, popular response and national agendas The period from 2005 to 2009 UK was a busy one for energy politics and policy.This is not least because of the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, the decision taken to sign up to the EU 20-20-20 agreement, and the adoption of specific climate change objectives.1 A less well analysed part of the UK energy policy story of this time is the way in which energy security had an impact upon political agendas. UK policy makers started to become more aware of changes in the international environment for energy which was understood as more important given the shifting UK oil and gas import–export position. By contrast, just a few years earlier, both the 2002 Energy Review and the 2003 Energy White Paper had observed that, despite sharply growing demand for fossil fuels from China and India, the international environment for energy was both developing in a more marketised direction and ‘benign’ (PIU, 2002, 6; DTI, 2003, 79–80). The development of energy markets in a pro-market direction during the 1990s was considered fundamentally important given the embedded understanding that energy security would be an outcome of freely trading, competitive markets (DTI 2003, 14 and 79). Academic and think-tank reports in the early 2000s observed that almost all consuming markets had adopted pro-market energy policies and that this had, in part, allowed for an end to energy security issues (Hayes and Victor, 2006; Mitchell et al, 2001). The events that unfolded from 2005 onwards were perceived as worrying, not least in that they signalled a return of ‘resource nationalism’ in emerging powers such as China and Russia. Chinese economic growth, and links between growth and energy usage, had prompted a surge in demand for 168

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fossil fuels and upward pressure on prices. Equally worryingly, from a promarket perspective, China had started to pursue what was considered to be an aggressive energy diplomacy, striking bi-lateral deals with producer countries thereby by-passing both international oil markets and multilateral governance rules and norms. Starting in 2004 a number of changes were made to Russian energy governance whereby the state assumed a greater degree of control over energy assets and these events made headlines across the UK and Europe. In 2003 Mikhail Khodorkhovsky, the CEO of the oil and gas company,Yukos, was imprisoned and Yukos assets were purchased at auction in 2004 by the Russian state-owned company, Rosneft (Brill Olcott, 2004, 11). At the same time, restrictions on foreign investments in the Russian energy sector were applied, appropriation of Exxon–Mobil and Shell assets and the Russia–Ukraine gas transit disputes of 2006 and 2009 further disturbed UK observers (Locatelli, 2006). Russian energy policy changes were arguably of particular significance for UK observers. They marked a reversal from the politically and ideologically significant processes of privatisation and liberalisation that Russia had initiated after the cold war. In energy governance terms they represented the polar opposite of the free markets that UK policy makers, and other institutions, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), had been so actively seeking to establish. Clearly there were many changes ongoing in energy in the mid-2000s but the storm underpinned by Russia’s reversal, despite the ‘victory’ of Western ideas, prompted a public debate about energy the like of which had not been witnessed for decades. During the 1970s oil shocks crisis debates had highlighted deficiencies in UK energy policy, politicised energy and led to a variety of changes. Not least among these were the reinstatement of the Ministry for Energy, which had only just been disbanded in 1969, and the establishment of the International Energy Agency (IEA) by OECD consumers to co-ordinate responses to energy shocks. Likewise, in the mid-2000s, notions of energy as a security issue started to ignite media and academic energy debates in the UK and Europe. The return of such a framing of energy arguably also allowed space for the re-emergence of ‘peak oil’ arguments which served to throw further fuel on the fire of fears about access to sufficient, vital energy supplies in future (Klare, 2008; ITPOES, 2008). Peak oil arguments had been in and out of favour since the 1970s, but the notion of running out of energy appears to have had wide popular appeal over time – perhaps of particular saliency in the 2000s given the UK’s changing import–export position.2 Broadsheet newspapers, such as The Times and Financial Times, and journals such as The Economist, started to paint a picture of energy supply insecurity underpinned by overt threats to UK supplies from producer 169

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countries, especially Russia (Wagstyl, 2006, 3; Rodgers, 2007, 5). Broadsheet newspapers ran stories on Russia ‘bullying’ UK and other Western energy companies (The Times, 2006), and described Russia as a ‘threat’ to energy security in Europe (Ostrovsky, 2006). Articles were replete with cold war terminology and reference to Russia’s emerging position as an energy ‘superpower’ based on assumptions that the possession of large quantities of oil and gas qualified a nation to be internationally powerful (Ostrovsky, 2006; Rodgers, 2007, 5).This position was contrasted evocatively with the euphoria that had been felt in many Western quarters at the end of the cold war (The Economist, 2004, 11). Around this time cartoons depicting Russia, or President Putin, as not only in control of important energy arsenals but as willing and able to threaten the West appeared widely (The Economist, 2006; Scherr, 2009). One BBC television programme, ‘Have I Got News for You’, still includes in the opening titles a depiction of lights going out all over Europe as a Russian soldier turns the gas pipe off.3 Certainly Russia remains one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters of particular significance for Europe, but what is interesting here is the degree of success of this popular re-interpretation of Russia – from developing country to a threat to free-market energy. Negative assumptions about resource nationalism, as conducted specifically by Russia, seem to have provided a rationale for energy supply to become an issue of national security. By contrast rising Chinese and Indian energy demand, the earlier return of Venezuela to OPEC and growing state control over Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PdVSA) had not evoked such widespread interest and responses in the UK. This may be because the notion that Russia could pose a threat arguably contains a high degree of cognitive authority – it speaks directly to already embedded ideas about Russia related to the cold war and underpinned by the great number of depictions historically of Russia as the enemy. It was observed above that if narratives are to find purchase they need to be simple, to have a degree of popular appeal, as well as an equal measure of credibility (Hay, 2007, 82). This observation highlights the important effects that narratives can have on audiences if they appeal to pre-existing sets of ideas, norms and understanding (Schmidt, 2006, 252). Narratives about resource nationalism and energy security fit these criteria also given the popularity of energy supplies running out in popular fiction and film and the reasonably recent experience of the 1970s oil shocks. It is important to note that these narratives overshadowed other factors. For example, actual UK fossil fuel imports from Russia were below 5 per cent and Russia had reliably supplied Europe with fossil fuels throughout the cold war period. What is important is that they were believed, believable and that they shone the spotlight on energy security issues and, ultimately, energy policy. 170

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One further, but very important, example of the popular saliency of energy security narratives was the emergence of an energy security– climate nexus at this time. Some climate change groups seized upon this new sense of urgency and popular interest surrounding energy to argue for change to energy policy. Some started to utilise security language about energy dependency on unstable suppliers as a device to underpin arguments about the need for more state funding and support for UK domestic renewable energy production and energy efficiency measures (Greenpeace, 2006; ITPOES, 2008; Ochs, 2008). Although many climate groups had long sought to bring political attention to climate change through evocative depictions of future insecurities the method of doing so now changed in order to harness the perceived political power of speaking energy security.There was a clear sense here that energy security was considered more tangible – UK audiences were understood to engage with energy as a near-term, national security issue as opposed to notions of long-term, global climate threats. Evidence of this is born out in a number of opinion polls: one suggested that energy security was understood as a more important issue than climate change (Niblett, 2011) and another that British consumers would be more willing to pay a higher price for their energy for security of supply than for climate change reasons (House of Commons, 2002). The degree to which energy security was understood as a more credible narrative to underpin climate demands could arguably be explained by the observation that some subjects, as suggested above, are more suitable to speaking security in a national sense than others (Browning and MacDonald, 2011). Put together this evocative narrative tended to create a picture not only of energy insecurity, of a need for greater domestic energy production but also of UK energy in contrast to Russian energy.This is an archetypal ‘us’ and ‘them’ picture often applied in processes of speaking security about a subject wherein collective identity is created around a nationally conceived ‘us’ in contrast to a foreign other (Browning and McDonald 2011). It made energy a subject for national concern thereby making it politically more relevant and arguably demanding some sort of state response (Scrase and Ockwell, 2009, 40). Energy security was placed on agendas for think tanks and a new journal, the Journal of Energy Security, was launched in 2008 in order to better analyse and debate energy security issues.4 References to energy’s socio-economic role started to take on an alternative tone moving away from the notion of energy as a replaceable commodity towards claims of energy as ‘the lifeblood of a modern economy’ (CBI, 2006, 1). If energy is important and supplies are potentially threatened then this evokes a sense of state responsibility which is taken here as particularly

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significant for the UK given the preceding decades of withdrawal of state capacity from energy.

Processes of politicisation: deliberation and political capacity The return of energy as a security issue also led to the placement of energy onto national and international political agendas and a widening and deepening of political debate. This in turn opened energy up to whole host of questions about prices, about a lack of investment in UK energy infrastructures but also about a lack of political capacity to govern (Leake, 2005; CBI, 2006). Some media outlets started to single out energy institutions, particularly Ofgem, arguing that they had been so blinded by free-market ideology that they had neglected security of energy supply and the national interest (Warner, 2009). A plethora of new papers and policy documents on energy emerged over this time in response to both energy security and climate concerns (DTI, 2006a, 2006b and 2006c; House of Commons, 2007a). In marked contrast to preceding policy documents the energy sector became increasingly referenced in terms of supply insecurity. Echoing media, academic and think-tank narratives, direct links are made between energy security fears and Russia, for example the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) report entitled Global security: Russia (FAC, 2008; see also House of Commons, 2007a). This is where we can understand how pro-market assumptions about resource nationalism as wrong affected interpretations of the global energy environment.The FAC report claimed that political frameworks in certain non-OECD producer countries, particularly Russia, were economically inefficient and unlikely to allow new fossil fuel reserves to be developed properly (FAC, 2008). It was argued that resource nationalism and national oil companies would undermine Russia’s ability to be a stable supplier, and bad investment decisions would be made because of state interference. This in turn was understood to have negative implications for politically important energy prices as articulated by the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw (Straw in Plesch et al, 2005; DTI, 2007, 19). What was also evident around this time was the broadening out of the energy debate as evident in the number of reports now being produced by political institutions outside of those directly responsible for policy maintenance, the DTI’s Energy Directorate and Ofgem.The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the newly formed House of Commons Committee on Energy Security and parliamentary offices, such as that of Science and Technology, are examples of institutions that started to produce reports on energy security (FCO et al, 2004; POST, 2004; House of Commons, 2007a). Energy security was added to formal forums for 172

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international negotiation such as the 2006 G8 Summit and the 2005 EU Summit at Hampton Court. In a paper prepared for the EU Summit, energy was characterised as a sector that was fast becoming an issue of national security (Helm, 2005, 2). Increasing dependence on Russia for supplies, particularly of gas, was interpreted as a source of threat to the security of the EU, and by extension, the UK, energy supply. In 2006 Prime Minister Tony Blair used his annual Lord Mayor’s speech to highlight energy security concerns (DTI, 2006c, 4). The scale of political response to fears about energy security, after decades of relative silence on the subject, can be seen as evidence not only of the mobilising powers of speaking security but also arguably reflects the degree of cognitive authority around notions of energy as security issue. Growing interest in energy, outside of technocratic circles, indicates the extent to which energy had become subject again to political interest, debate and deliberation.There had been a suggestion by the then Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, in his report on energy security that what was required in response, among other things, was increased military spending (Fox, 2006). This kind of response would be more akin to responses to securitising moves envisaged within the Copenhagen School. By contrast, what happened in response to the increased political deliberation of energy was the establishment of new processes through which energy policy makers would be mandated to report to Parliament on energy security. This started in July 2004, in the immediate aftermath of the Yukos affair, when the new Energy Act conferred on the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry a fixed duty to report annually on energy security matters to Parliament (DTI, 2005). Thus a political process was formalised whereby Britain’s primary majoritarian institution was to revisit energy security at least annually – thereby in theory exposing elected representatives to questions surrounding energy on a more regular basis. Changes related to the need to deliberate more formally had also started to take place within the DTI and FCO in that new resources were allocated to energy (Kuzemko, 2013, 153–4).The 2007 White Paper acknowledged that energy had not previously existed as a discrete area of foreign policy and for this reason it had had less dedicated government capacity assigned to it. The paper announced that, for the first time, the UK would have, ‘an integrated international energy strategy which describes the action we are taking to help deliver secure energy supplies and tackle climate change’ (DTI, 2007, 8). Strategy documents from this period start to openly associate questions of security as being ‘the first responsibility of government’ implying a need for some sort of state response (House of Commons, 2007b, 32).

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Concurrent with the degree to which energy security was re-entering elite political debates at both the national and international levels, which in itself indicates a degree of deliberative politicisation, there were a number of policy alterations made relating to changing interpretations of energy. It could be argued that energy security had, in 2003, been assumed to exist, especially given the degree to which energy governance was still understood to be heading in a pro-market direction (DTI, 2003, 79–80). For example the energy supply objective had been worded such that the UK should continue to ‘maintain the reliability of…supplies’ (DTI, 2003, 11).5 Energy security, although still an objective, had been an assumed outcome of marketisation and this explains why competitive markets had been the principal objective of energy policy at that time. By 2007, however, energy security was understood to be something that needed to be established, as one of the ‘immense’ challenges facing the UK, and furthermore, as requiring further political action to achieve (DTI, 2006c, Introduction and 4). The rise of energy security up the hierarchy of objectives added to the political pressures being brought to bear on energy policy makers given the degree to which supplies continued to be considered ‘insecure’. This re-emphasis on energy security was rued by some climate change academics who feared a distraction from climate change mitigation policy (Scrase and Ockwell, 2009, 40). These changes in policy objectives, political institutions, and the addition of political capacity to deliberate energy were put in place partly in response to political pressures to change emanating from outside energy policy circles. Ofgem officials report a higher degree of ‘outside’ political interference in their practices (Kuzemko, 2013, 155), and it has been claimed that both the 2006 Energy Review and 2007 White Paper were compiled in part because the DTI and Ofgem understood the political need to respond to perceptions of energy security crisis (CEPMLP, 2006; House of Commons, 2007a).As these processes of deliberation intensified it started also to become clear that the State had lost considerable capacity to understand the complexities of energy. Government was, given the narrative of national energy security, considered to be more responsible for ensuring energy security but lacking in information and knowledge both about what was happening and what to do about it. Ultimately this underpinned arguments for establishing a new government institution, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), with specific mandates to deliver on energy security and climate change mitigation.The House of Commons set up an Energy and Climate Change Committee to oversee progress of DECC’s policies and the FCO likewise added a dedicated team to researching and dealing with energy security as part of the new Energy and Environment team.These new institutions increasingly 174

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picked up on the energy security–climate narrative, outlined above, which was utilising fears of reliance on unstable foreign supplies to argue for clean, ‘home grown’ energy production (Wicks, 2009). It might be plausible to argue that it was precisely the degree of depoliticisation, particularly in terms of a lack of dedicated capacity at the government level that triggered politicisation in this context of energy security concerns.The lack of existing political capacity dedicated to energy can be directly related to pro-market ideas about government intervention in economic subject areas. These ideas were, however, also, and ironically, partly responsible for the strong reaction by British audiences to the rise of ‘resource nationalism’ in Russia and elsewhere and for creating a sense of crisis.The crisis then opened up a realisation that security issues require response that existing technocrats had few answers and that government has a responsibility in instances of potential national security to act. As a result a more direct relationship between UK majoritarian institutions and policy-making departments had been established in energy placing it back on political agendas on a more formalised and ongoing basis – a stark contrast to previous decisions to depoliticise energy and place it at ‘arm’s length’ from government.

Conclusions This chapter has suggested one set of conditions under which an issue area can move along the spectrum, outlined in Section 1, away from depoliticised to more politicised. Speaking energy security appears to have galvanised interest, to have allowed for a degree of political leverage while also driving interpretations in a nationalistic, ‘us versus them’ direction. Such interpretations tended to highlight differences between Western neoliberal energy governance and Russian, and Chinese, energy nationalism that suggested not only a shift in the direction of energy market governance but also that these shifts were driven by increasingly influential, non-OECD energy players.This marks energy out as a policy area within which contestations of neoliberal economic governance are not only more developed internationally but are also resulting in a higher degree of state involvement in policy making. There are three main conceptual insights that emerge from this analysis. One is that ‘speaking security’, using the evocative language of imminent threat to a nationally defined space, has been an integral part of why British publics and politicians became interested in energy once more. This not only provides a useful link between suggestions that policy areas can become subject to politicisation and the language of security as being politically potent but it is also an example of what security can do within 175

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certain contexts. A further conceptual insight is that renewed public and political interest can be understood as leading, within depoliticised policy areas, to the realisation that there is a lack of capacity to understand energy events and to respond. Such a realisation can be causal of change through the establishment of new institutions.The final conceptual point is that combining insights from different schools of thought, as advocated in recent work on ‘analytic eclecticism’ (see Sil and Katzenstein, 2010), has opened energy politics up to sociological, institutional and security explanations. Arguably, neither concepts of politicisation, underdeveloped as they currently are, nor concepts of securitisation could on their own have allowed for such detailed explanations of both how and why change took place. What this chapter also tells us, however, is that context is of central importance in understanding these process of politicisation.The degree of cognitive authority around notions of energy supplies as nationally relevant and around Russia as both willing and able to pose a threat arguably made energy a more credible subject for security.The alacrity with which media and political commentators returned to cold war narratives is evocative both of the perceived divisions that remain in place between East and West 20 years after the cold war and of how long such memories last. Context is also important in understanding why speaking energy security resulted in some politicisation of a longer-lasting nature. If energy institutions had been more capable of a response, or even if a Department of Energy had existed, then it would arguably have been far less likely that the energy security crisis debate would have led to institutional changes. Notes 1 This is not to negate the impact of ‘climate narratives’ in contesting UK energy policy at the time but the intention of this chapter is to focus on the impacts of energy security narratives. 2 For examples see the movie,‘Mad Max II’, books such as Alex Scarrow’s Last light and the video game, ‘Frontlines: Fuel of War’. 3 See www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03ggqbx/Have_I_Got_News_for_ You_Series_46_Episode_5. 4 See http://ensec.org/. 5 Emphasis: author’s own. Acknowledgement I would like to thank members of the Anti-politics and (De)politicisation PSA working group for all their support, feedback and ideas, as well as Oliver Daddow for his insightful comments on an early draft of this chapter. This

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work has been supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/K001582/1].

References Brill Olcott, M, 2004, The energy dimension in Russian global strategy: Vladimir Putin and the geopolitics of oil, Paper for the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, Houston, TX: Rice University Browning, CS, McDonald, M, 2011,The future of critical security studies: Ethics and the politics of security, European Journal of International Relations, published online 27 October, DOI: 10.1177/1354066111419538 Buller, J, Flinders, M, 2005,The domestic origins of depoliticisation in the area of British economic policy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7, 526–43 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3, 2, 127–49 Buzan, B,Wæver, O, de Wilde, J, 1998, Security: A new framework for analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publications CEPMLP (Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy), 2006 Security of International Oil and Gas: Challenges and Research Priorities, CEPMLP, University of Dundee, www.energyinst.org.uk/content/files/ esrcinterim.pdf CBI (Confederation of British Industry), 2006, Powering the future: Enabling the UK energy market to deliver, Energy Brief November 2005, London: Confederation of British Industry DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2003, Energy White Paper. Our energy future: Creating a low carbon economy, London: HMSO DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2005, Secretary of State’s first report to parliament on security of gas and electricity supply in Great Britain, London: TSO DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2006a, Secretary of State’s second report to parliament on security of gas and electricity supply in Great Britain, London: TSO DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2006b, The effectiveness of current gas security of supply arrangements: A consultation, London: The National Archives DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2006c, The energy challenge: Energy review report 2006, London: TSO DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), 2007, Meeting the energy challenge: An energy White Paper, London: TSO Economist, The, 2004, Putting up with Putin: How to live with a Russia that is not a liberal democracy, The Economist, May 22

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Economist, The, 2006, Don’t mess with Russia, Front cover of The Economist, 15 to 22 December FAC (Foreign Affairs Committee), 2008, Global Security: Russia, Second Response from the Foreign Affairs Committee, Session 2007-08, London: HMSO FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), SEPN (Sustainability and Education Policy Network), 2004, UK international priorities:The energy strategy, London: FCO Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006, Depoliticisation: Principles, tactics and tools, in British Politics 1, 293–318 Flinders, M, Wood, M, 2013, Depoliticisation, governance and the state, Policy & Politics, www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/pap/preprints/content-PP_PP_020 Floyd, R, 2007,Towards a consequentialist evaluation of security: Bringing together the Copenhagen and the Welsh Schools of security studies, Review of International Studies 33, 327–50 Fox, L, 2006, Over a barrel:The challenge of defense and energy security, London: Westminster Energy Forum Gamble,A, 2000, Politics and fate, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press Greenpeace, 2006, Oil and peace don’t mix, London: Greenpeace Hay, C, 1999, Crisis and political development in postwar Britain, in D Marsh, J Buller, C Hay et al (eds) Postwar British politics in perspective, Cambridge: Polity Press Hay, C, 2001,The ‘crisis’ of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism in Britain: An ideational institutionalist approach, in John L Campbell and Ove K Pedersen (eds) The rise of neoliberalism and institutional analysis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge and Malden SA: Polity Press Hayes, MH, Victor, DG, 2006, Politics, Markets and the Shift to Gas: Insights from the Seven Historical Cases, in DG Victor, AM Jaffe and MH Hughes (eds) Natural Gas and Geopolitics: From 1970 to 2040, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Helm, D, 2003, Energy, the state and the market, Oxford: Oxford University Press Helm, D, 2005, Securing supplies and meeting the challenges of climate change, A discussion paper for the 2005 Meeting of EU Heads of State at Hampton Court House of Commons, 2002, Trade and industry. Second report: Session 2001–02, Internet publication, www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ cm200102/cmselect/cmtrdind/364/36402.htm

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House of Commons, 2007a, Energy security: Research paper 07/42, London: House of Commons Library House of Commons, 2007b, The governance of Britain, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor by Command of Her Majesty July 2007, London: HMSO ITPOES (Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security), 2008, The oil crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future, First report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, London: ITPOES Jenkins, L, 2011,The difference genealogy makes: Strategies for politicisation or how to extend capacities for autonomy, Political Studies, 59, 1, 156–74 Klare, M, 2008, Rising powers, shrinking planet: How scarce energy is creating a new world order, Oxford: Oneworld Publications Kuzemko, C, 2013, The energy security–climate nexus: Institutional change in the UK and beyond, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Lawson, N, 1989, Energy policy: The text of a speech given in 1982, Oxford: Clarendon Press Leake, J, 2005, Interview: Malcolm Wicks, New Statesman, 3 October Locatelli, C, 2006, The Russian oil industry between public and private governance: Obstacles to international oil companies’ investment strategies, Energy Policy 34, 1075–85 McDonald, M, 2008, Securitization and the construction of society, European Journal of International Relations 14, 4, 563–87 Mitchell, C, 2008, The political economy of sustainable energy, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Mügge, D, 2011, From pragmatism to dogmatism: European Union governance, policy paradigms and financial meltdown, New Political Economy 16, 2, 185–206 Niblett, R, 2011, The Chatham House YouGov survey 2011, London: Chatham House Ochs,A, 2008, Overcoming the lethargy: Climate change, energy security, and the case for a third industrial revolution, AICGS Policy Report 34, Baltimore: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies Ostrovsky,A, 2006, Oil and gas bring influence, Financial Times special report on Russia, Friday 21 April, 5 PIU (Performance and Innovation Unit), 2002, The energy review, A Performance and Innovation Unit report, London: Cabinet Office Plesch, D, Austin, G, Grant, F, 2005, Britain’s energy future: Securing the ‘home front’, Paper for the (FPC) Foreign Policy Centre, London: FPC POST (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology), 2004, The future of UK gas supplies, Postnote, October 2004, 230 Rodgers, P, 2007, Gas: who controls the tap?, in New Statesman, 2 July, 4–8

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Scherr, J, 2009, Europe, Russia, Ukraine and energy: Final warning, The World Today, 65, 2 Schmidt,VA, 2006, Democracy in Europe:The EU and national polities, Oxford: Oxford University Press Schmitt, C, 1985, Political theology, London: MIT Press Scrase, I, Ockwell, D, 2009, Energy issues: Framing and policy change, in I Scrase, G MacKerron (eds) Energy for the future, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Sil, R, Katzenstein, P, 2010, Beyond paradigms: Analytic eclecticism in the study of world politics, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Stern, J, 1987, UK energy issues 1987–92, Energy policy, December, 498–502 Times, The, 2006, A deal is a deal: Russia threatens the West at its peril, The Times, Friday, September 22 Wæver, O, 1995, Securitization and desecuritization, in RD Lipschutz (ed) On security, New York: Columbia University Press Wagstyl, S, 2006, The country may look strong but…, Financial Times, 21 April Warner, J, 2009, Britain’s energy gap is down to ministers, not markets, Daily Telegraph, 12 October Wicks, M, 2009, Energy security: A national challenge in a changing world, London: Department of Energy and Climate Change Widmaier, W, Blyth, M, Seabrooke, L, 2007, Exogenous shocks or endogenous constructions? The meanings of wars and crises, International Studies Quarterly 51, 747–59 Wood, M, 2011, Shifting paradigms?: Mapping policy change in the wake of the financial crisis, Paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik, 24–8 August

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CHAPTER NINE

Global norms, local contestation: privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin Ross Beveridge and Matthias Naumann

Introduction The emerging political science literature on de/politicisation has focused mainly on national and economic policy and the processes and effects of depoliticisation. This chapter seeks to broaden the scope of the literature by making two important contributions: focusing on the urban (regional/ local) level and examining how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance are repoliticised. Hence, if research into depoliticisation tends to examine how the global norms of liberalisation and privatisation (what Roberts (2010) calls the ‘logic of discipline’) become embedded in public policy through specific ‘principles, tactics and tools’ (Flinders and Buller, 2006), then this chapter examines precisely the opposite – namely, how those global norms can be challenged and rendered contingent through the agency of non-state actors, such as social movements, problematising their effects at the local/regional level of the city. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the partial remunicipalisation of the Berlin Water Company (Berliner Wasserbetriebe – BWB) in 2012. After 12 years of partial privatisation, one private partner, the German energy utility RWE, agreed to sell its 24.9% share of the Berlin Water Company (BWB) back to the city of Berlin in May 2012. After initial threats of legal action against RWE, French utility Véolia, the second partner, has recently suggested that they are also willing to sell their 24.9% share. Partially privatised in 1999 in the context of fiscal crisis and failed attempts to remake Berlin as a ‘global city’, the privatisation was presented by the city government as a necessity and provoked little public opposition. Gradually, however, it became a focal point for the contestation of neoliberal policy in the city. From inevitable to at least partially reversed, the privatisation case reveals the ongoing potential for political agency. Formerly a goal championed only by activists, remunicipalisation was in the manifesto of three of the four major political parties at the last city elections (2011), despite the fact that Berlin still has large debts.This chapter provides an account of this shift, showing the key processes through which

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the consensus in the formal political realm was disturbed – how a perceived norm, indeed necessity, of (urban) governance in the context of economic globalisation and fiscal debts, was rendered contingent, repoliticised. The case is made for a non-deterministic and empirically grounded means of engaging with de/politicisation. Research on de/politicisation needs to strike a balance between an appreciation of the constraints of material and discursive structures and the ongoing possibilities of political agency. Accepting that increased depoliticisation in political systems is apparent should not blind researchers to the potential for repoliticisation. The tendency, particularly in more theoretical accounts of de/politicisation, is to overlook the latter in order to provide, sometimes sweeping, criticisms of politics (for example, Rancière, 2009) and the capacity of civil society to challenge the neoliberal policies implemented by many political systems (Crouch, 2011, 159–161). Rather than do this, the chapter takes inspiration from the work of Hay (2007, 91–95), whose definition of politicisation and depoliticisation centres on a notion of capacity for agency and emphasises the fluid interplay between the two. The chapter is structured as follows. The second section outlines the approach to de/politicisation, with reference to recent relevant literature. The third section discusses privatisation as both a global norm and a key strategy of depoliticisation, and the city and water as sites of resistance. From this basis, the fourth section summarises the Berlin water privatisation process and the depoliticisation which accompanied it. The fifth section offers an account of the politicisation of the privatisation.The key role of a social movement in mobilising public interest in and opposition to the privatisation is detailed.The final part of the chapter provides an assessment of the Berlin case, reflections upon the key findings and the relevance to research on de/politicisation in governance.

Constraints and contingencies in contemporary governance: understanding depoliticisation Economic globalisation, neoliberalism and depoliticisation United by the belief that the post-cold war period has witnessed a neoliberal settlement centred on the norms and interests of the market, an increasing number of scholars across diverse fields have recently questioned the extent to which advanced democracies are actually democratic, and the degree to which politics is genuinely political.The thrust of critiques is that economic globalisation, neoliberalism and new forms of governance since the 1990s have shaped a politics that is increasingly technocratic and detached from citizens (Hay, 2007, 122). Politicians have become obsessed 182

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with the global economy and the business interests which profit from it (Crouch, 2011); a highly political and partial market-fixated agenda has, to varying degrees around the world, become depoliticised, ‘naturalised’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) as an economic constraint on policy making (Hay and Rosamond, 2002). The general aim of such research has been to detail and explain how the contingent has been rendered necessary (Watson and Hay, 2003); and how the material and discursive constraints imposed by neoliberal economic globalisation have narrowed the parameters of politics and reduced the spectrum of political agency.The now well-known theses of post-politics or post-political (for example, Mouffe, 2005; Žižek, 2008; Rancière, 2009) and post-democracy (Crouch, 2004) speak of political systems in which democracy is a charade, where genuine contestation and conflicting claims about the world are not apparent. These grand statements by philosophers and social theorists have been paralleled by the emergence of a literature in political science concerned with the more tangible strategies and effects of depoliticisation. Here the focus has been on the thinking behind, and the concrete changes in, political practices associated with the shift from government to ‘governance’, where the ‘boundaries between and within public and private sectors have become blurred’ (Stoker, 1998, 17). Moving away from well-established assumptions that governance is normatively superior to government (Mayntz, 2003, 32), this literature delves into a politics where state and international institutions (like the European Union and the World Bank) have encouraged the development of new forms of governance centred on non-state (usually market) actors as necessary forms of ‘de/politicisation’, required in building state capacity and market confidence (Flinders and Buller, 2006, 294).These moves to indirect forms of governing (2006, 295), of delegating responsibilities, centre in particular on replacing – at least in part- politicians with experts, redefining political processes in technical terms and transferring tasks and responsibilities to non-state actors, for example through the multiple forms of privatisation which have emerged since the 1980s. As Flinders and Buller (2006, 296) have observed, however, depoliticisation is a misleading notion because policy making is always political, regardless of who is responsible for making it. Rather, the policymaking process can be made easier to manage and less controversial. Burnham (2001, 128) states that depoliticisation is a ‘process of placing at one remove the political character of decision making’. Underlying depoliticisation strategies is, then, an inherent anti-politics, which seeks to preclude conflict and plurality. Politics is framed as inefficient and

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bureaucratic and de/politicisation as a panacea for it:‘Politics is a pathogen; depoliticisation an antidote’ (Hay, 2007, 93). From depoliticisation to politicisation and political agency

Rather than resorting to generalities, the strength of this political science literature is that it has focused on engaging with the actualities of depoliticisation in contemporary governance (for example, Newman, 2009; Roberts, 2009). Up until now, however, much of the literature has been relatively narrow in scope, focused largely on depoliticisation, concerned mainly with British national politics (for example, Flinders and Buller, 2006; Kerr et al, 2011) and particularly economic policy making (for example, Burnham, 2001; Flinders and Buller, 2005; James, 2010). This chapter adopts a similar concern for the specificities of political practices, but examines a different sector (water policy), country (Germany), and level of governance (urban local/ regional). In doing so it makes an important contribution to the literature by flipping the focus of research onto how modes of depoliticisation are challenged, or come to be repoliticised. What this emerging literature lacks is empirical study of such processes and a concern for the role of non-state actors in these processes. If the post-political/ post-politics/ postdemocracy theses risk universalising observable, and very worrying, trends in contemporary politics, the depoliticisation literature risks focusing the researcher on exhaustive searches and forensic analyses of depoliticisation, with little sense of the ongoing potential for politicisation to occur. This is problematic on both empirical and conceptual grounds. As the following section on privatisation reveals, there is ample evidence of the repoliticisation of policies and norms of neoliberal economic globalisation around the world (albeit often locally and in urban contexts). In conceptual terms this is also problematic because it is clear that depoliticisation is not a stable endpoint, but an effect or outcome of policies or political strategies which can be challenged and reversed (Jenkins, 2011). For this reason Hay’s (2007) general means of thinking about depoliticisation and politicisation processes is important. As well as being the only clear articulation of politicisation within the depoliticisation literature, it also provides a definition which centres on the capacity for political agency. Following Gamble (2000) he defines depoliticisation and politicisation as the movements of issues between an arena of fate and necessity (the non-political), where nothing can be done (depoliticisation), to one of deliberation and contingency (the political), where action and change are possible (politicisation) (Hay, 2007, 81).

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These movements take place in and across governmental, public and private contexts and are defined simply. Focusing solely on politicisation (depoliticisation is defined as the reverse of the following), the first form Hay identifies is the promotion of an issue from the realm of necessity to the private sphere for example, the challenging of religious taboos or authority, (Politicisation 1); Politicisation 2 is the promotion of an issue from the private to the public sphere for example, the work of feminist social movements in raising public awareness of domestic violence; and Politicisation 3 is the promotion of an issue from the public to the governmental sphere, for example, the new politicisation of issues of public concern, linking carbon emissions to direct tax levies on businesses which links them to governmental action and policy (Hay, 2007, 79–85). Thus for repoliticisation to occur, the contingency of an issue and political agency must be asserted over fate and passivity. This could occur in the private and public realm, but for policy change to take place it must, at some stage, be translated into political agency in the governmental realm. Only then can Politicisation type 1 (transfer from the public to the governmental realm) occur. Importantly, the capacity for political agency is ongoing as depoliticisation and politicisation are not fixed states but ongoing, dynamic processes (Hay, 2007, 84). From Hay we can generally define depoliticisation and politicisation as the institutional and discursive movements which determine the visibility of an issue, and the extent to which it is a target of political agency and the subject of policy making. A visible issue in politics is one that is perceived in some way, and by some people, to be problematical, necessitating political action. To politicise an issue is to render it unsatisfactory, unacceptable, somehow open and in need of closure. This might occur through the realisation that interests are under threat, and that needs will not be met. It might also arise through the emergence of a dissonance between an aspect of social life and the norms or ideology of a person/ group of people. Importantly, it might be added that to become truly politicised an issue must garner enough opposition or provoke a sufficient intensity of action that it becomes ‘public’, apparent to a wider group of people. By contrast, a less visible or invisible issue is simply not problematised, it is seen as natural, part of the everyday fabric of society. It is rather a non-issue, ‘normal’, not controversial. Returning to the discussion of the norms of economic globalisation and policy making, the privatisation issue provides a striking example of the to-ing and fro-ing between politicisation and depoliticisation, visibility and invisibility.

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Privatisation and the city: no alternatives and contestation Privatisation as a tool of depoliticisation No other policy is more associated with neoliberal ‘no alternative’ common-sense narratives than privatisation. Following Hay privatisation is often, when accompanied by narratives on the necessities of globalisation or fiscal crisis in public budgets, a potent example of depoliticisation (Hay, 2007, 87). Utilised as an apolitical policy ‘tool’, implemented by governments of both the Left and Right, reflective of an apparently postideological politics, privatisation has spread rapidly around the world since the 1980s.The increasing prevalence of privatisation can be explained with reference to the potency of neoliberalism and economic globalisation, but it may often be, as Barraqué (2009, 245) states, opportunistic, in that governments may not be obviously driven by ‘ideological’ arguments, but simply want to raise money or sell a loss-making company. Privatisation has also been promoted to solve the fiscal crisis of the state (Swyngedouw, 2003). In strict terms, privatisation can be said to cover several ‘distinct and possibly alternative means of changing the relationships between government and the private sector’: the sale of public assets; deregulation, the introduction of competition in monopolies; and sub-contracting or outsourcing of the provision of goods and services (Kay and Thompson, 1986, 18). On the one hand, this variety is tribute to the appetite and innovation of those attempting to implement private sector logics and ownership. On the other, it points to the problems which have emerged, the strength of resistance to privatisation, and the consequent reforms which have been necessary to implement it. Proponents of privatisation have often talked or written of it as if its merits are virtually self-evident: that it will lead to greater efficiency, better services, higher environmental standards, wider ownership in society through the sale of shares, and even counter corruption through reducing the role of the state (Poole, 1996, 2–3). In such accounts, the ‘political’, contestable character of privatisation disappears, obscured in particular by the apparent economic benefits to be had from its implementation. If there is contest and conflict, this is seen to be representative of economically unrealistic objectives (presently in Southern European countries, for example) or ‘outdated’ thinking or political dogma (more apparent in the heyday of privatisation in the 1990s). Privatisations in some sectors (for example, telecommunications and the car industry) have been less contentious, but the privatisation of water supply and sanitation systems (WSS) has most often provoked 186

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public resistance and policy change. This can be seen as a reflection of the inherent obstacles to implementing private sector logics – of profit making and competition – in the natural regional monopolies of WSS, with their sunken costs. It is also, more fundamentally, attributable to the special societal status and value of water as an essential resource and integral part of nature (Bakker, 2010). For these reasons the reframing of WSS in economic terms is intrinsically difficult in policy, regulatory and political terms (Page, 2005). Precisely because of this depoliticisation is strategically desirable. The promotion of WSS privatisation with reference to public choice theories, property rights theories and neoclassical economics (see Castro, 2002) can be seen as an act of depoliticisation in that it seeks to deny the social and cultural values of water, even to preclude any claim to them. This is of course a fundamentally political act in that it describes the world in terms of market rules and actively seeks to realise such a world. Water privatisation and the city

The introduction of a global water market has provoked resistance at all levels (see Castro, 2002, 4–5; Hall et al, 2005, 287), but the most contested privatisations have occurred in cities. Politicisation of such global norms can of course occur in rural areas, but cities play a defining role in social, political and economic developments (Swyngedouw, 2009).They provide windows through which to apprehend globalisation, to view the local and particular meet the global and general (glocalisation), when the singular politics of place confront the global politics of the market. Furthermore, idiosyncratic politics are more likely to gain hold at this level than at the national, given the difficulty of political mobilisation against, and the greater embeddedness of nation states within, the institutional and discursive frameworks of globalisation. In short, the potential for the politicisation of the norms of economic globalisation is greatest at the urban level. Urban utilities are a strategic site for entrepreneurial urban governance (Harvey, 1989), and water utilities have been a focal point of conflicts between ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Wissen and Naumann, 2006). Resistance to privatisation has also been a central element of social movements against neoliberal globalisation (Hardt and Negri, 2009) and the various movements for the ‘right to the city’ (Marcuse, 2009). Cities are the most important stages of protest and resistance, as David Harvey’s (2012) latest book on urban protest, Rebel Cities, argues. The most high profile examples of urban resistance to privatisation have occurred in the developing world, where the outcomes of privatisation have been most problematic (for recent examples, see Madaleno, 2007;Wu 187

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and Malaluan, 2008; Zaki and Amin, 2009;Ahlers, 2010; Mirosa and Harris, 2012).The Cochabamba ‘water wars’ in 2000 resulted in the international consortium of water companies losing their contract. Other successful campaigns were carried out in Buenos Aires and Tucuman in Argentina against Suez, though similar campaigns in Chile and the Philippines were not successful (Hall et al, 2005, 286). While politicisation of water privatisation has been most visceral in the global south, contestation and change have also been apparent in the global north. In Paris the municipal government did not renew the private water company’s contract when it expired in 2009, thus continuing a trend in France toward urban remunicipalisation (for example, Grenoble), which has also been apparent in Germany. In Stuttgart the city council bought the shares of the water company back from the private energy company EnBW. Furthermore, referendums against water privatisations succeeded in other cities such as Hamburg and Dessau (Pflug, 2008). In the USA, where urban water privatisation has been less evident, it has also been reversed in cities like Atlanta, in 2003. Despite the dominance of the neoliberal paradigm, privatisation has, then, often been contested and sometimes reversed. In short, privatisation has not delivered the unproblematic benefits, such as efficiency gains, promised by its proponents at the urban and other levels (Warner, 2012). Despite attempts to depoliticise the provision of certain services through privatising state-owned companies, outcomes have been contradictory: privatisation has politicised particular issues, the state has often been forced to move back in.There is an ongoing politics of privatisation, a resistance against, and alternatives to, the policy form. Reversals of privatisation reveal the continuing capacity for political agency and innovation at the local and regional level. This section has highlighted the importance of appreciating the dynamic interplay between the political and economic norms of globalisation and the – albeit often local – contestations which emerge and often reshape it. Research on de/politicisation should avoid deterministic understandings of the relationships between structure and agency. Global constraints do not dictate local actions, they do not preordain political agency.A differentiated approach is necessary, one which is rooted in the empirical study of governance, alert to its complexity and the ongoing potential for change. The next sections detail the key processes in the Berlin water privatisation case – commercialisation, privatisation, reregulation, public contestation and moves towards remunicipalisation. With its struggles to adapt to economic globalisation since reentry at the end of the Cold War, ensuing fiscal crisis, the widespread privatisation programme and restructuring to a knowledge economy in the 1990s, Berlin is in many 188

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ways emblematic of that time. For all the idiosyncrasies of Berlin’s Cold War division and central role in the reunification of Germany, the last 20 years have witnessed an urban governance of conformity under apparent global and fiscal constraints (Cochrane and Passmore, 2001; Beveridge, 2012a).At the same time, Berlin’s city politics is characterised by the relative prominence of social movements, contesting implementation of global city policy. Berlin thus provides an excellent case of both conformity to and contestation of global norms.

Depoliticisation in Berlin 1990s policy making in Berlin Policy making in Berlin in the 1990s was as much a story of urban governance in the context of globalisation as it was reunification. Berlin was suddenly exposed to the processes other industrialised cities had been facing since the 1970s (Strom, 2001, 4). After 1990, both parts of the city experienced the collapse of their highly subsidised industries and a significant decrease of jobs in the public sector (Ellger, 1992, 45). The hope was that there would be a boom in other sectors to compensate for the loss of jobs. It was a decade defined by policy making to reinvent Berlin as a ‘post-industrial service metropolis’ (Häussermann and Colomb, 2003, 201), strategically placed between Western Europe and the emerging market economies of Central and Eastern Europe. As in other cities and nation states, globalisation was a ‘powerful agent of depoliticisation’ (Hay, 2007, 125). It was used to justify the drive towards knowledge, high-tech sectors, real estate boosterism and commercialisation and privatisation, and the fiscal and socioeconomic crisis which emerged in the city. On 29 October 1999, the same day as the partial privatisation of BWB, the Rechnungshof (the German National Audit Office) criticised the city’s government for being around $46 billion in debt. In the ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, unemployment had risen by 5% to around 15%, while the city’s population had steadily dropped. Berlin was in effect a shrinking and not a global city. The aim to be globally ‘competitive’ was and still is impeded by Berlin’s inability to overtake rival cities (for example, Frankfurt and Munich) within the German context, who had taken on many of the economic functions normally associated with capital cities (Gornig and Häussermann, 2002, 339). Although the government’s policies contributed to this financial and economic situation (Lederer and Naumann, 2011), the strategy of promises based on the benefits of restructuring remained intact, and relatively unproblematised (for more detail see Beveridge, 2012a). 189

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Partial water privatisation

The process of adapting to economic globalisation was evident in the commercialisation of some of the water company’s functions in 1994.This was a trend apparent around the world as private and municipally-owned companies become competitors in global water markets (Swyngedouw, 2003, 8).The hope was that BWB, like the city as a whole, would be able to exploit the perceived opportunities emerging in the international water market, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries. As with Berlin, the strategy was unsuccessful, with global investments becoming huge loss-making failures (Beveridge, 2012a). The privatisation was ultimately accepted by most political players (apart from the PDS, forerunner party of Die Linke, and the Greens), with the promises of job security, no price rises for four years, and the compromise of a partial privatisation defusing initial opposition from the unions, and CDU and SPD Regional Party membership.A certain fatalism, a disavowal ‘of the very possibility of deliberation, choice and human agency’ (Hay, 2007, 86) was apparent in the formal political realm, dominated by the two main parties in the coalition government (CDU and SPD). There was little enthusiasm and few crusading privatisers apparent (Beveridge, 2012a), while the public offered little resistance either, despite warnings from the opposition parties that prices would rise, and attempts from civil society organizations to mobilise them (Fitch, 2007, 143–144). The partial privatisation was finalised when the city entered a publicprivate partnership with German energy supplier RWE, French utility Vivendi (now Véolia) and insurance and financial investment company SA/Allianz.The sale price of $1.96 billion for 49.9% of the company was high (Lanz and Eitner, 2005, 4), and can largely be attributed to the Partial Privatisation Law which, at least initially, contained a profit guaranteeing formula (aimed to ensure similar annual profit rates – c8% – to those enjoyed by the privatised water companies in England and Wales) (for detail see Hüesker, 2011; Beveridge, 2012a; 2012b). Although this part of the law was successfully challenged by the opposition parties at the Constitutional Court, the Berlin government had, in a range of secret contracts with the private partners, already ensured that they would receive the same profit rates outlined in the formula.This contractual agreement did, in effect, preempt due legal process. The following section details how this very attempt to depoliticise profits and prices became a focal point for the politicisation of the privatisation.

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Politicisation in Berlin: from partial privatisation to partial remunicipalisation Politicisation manifested itself in a number of related, often contradictory processes. These occurred within and outside the formal political system, and they provide insights to the constraints on and opportunities for political agency in both. In particular they can be traced to the emergence in 2006 of a campaigning citizen’s group, Berliner Wassertisch (Berlin Water Action Group), and the contradictory position of the former communist party, Die Linke, in the governing coalition with the SPD (2001–11). Red–red government and reregulation

First, a political scandal in 2001 centred on preferential loans from a public-private Berlin bank to friends and supporters of leading, mainly CDU, politicians, led to the resignation of the CDU mayor and collapse of the CDU–SPD governing coalition. As well as revealing corruption and incompetence (the bank had also incurred huge debts), the scandal brought the left wing party, Die Linke, to power in a red–red Coalition with the SPD. As a direct consequence, a party which had opposed the privatisation came to lead the Senate for Economy, which was politically responsible for the regulation and public share of the water company. Although Die Linke did not initially call for a reversal of the privatisation, a more aggressive approach to the private partners was taken. Reregulation of the company was evident. Most notably the Berliner Betriebegesetz (the Berlin company law) in 2006 brought in new rules for governmental and parliamentary oversight of public companies (Hüesker, 2011, 201). This can be seen as a result of political opposition to the increase in prices after the term of fixed prices (1999–2003), as well as a more pragmatic recognition of policy and regulatory failure. Due to the contractual agreement on annual profit for the private partners, on many occasions the government had to either raise water tariffs or meet the requirements by withdrawing money from the state budget.The state – as the 50.1% majority shareholder – also had to abstain from its own part of the profit. Politicisation of privatisation did, then, emerge within the formal political system. With a junior governing party, at least officially opposed to privatisation, this might be expected. More generally, the ‘regulatory creep’ is indicative of the inherent problem of dealing with the introduction of private sector ownership and profit-seeking logic in the water sector – the almost inevitable rise in prices it brings creates public opposition which politicians usually have to address (Bakker, 2001).The reregulation 191

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of BWB reveals a process apparent in other privatised water sectors, most notably England and Wales (Bakker, 2003, 8). The rise of public opposition

Despite the changes introduced by the red–red coalition, their unwillingness to consider reversing the water privatisation led to growing frustration and increasing activity among leftist social movements in Berlin, such as the alter-globalisation group, attac, WEED (World Economy, Ecology and Development) and Antifaschistische Linke Berlin, as well the emergence of new groups, like Netzwerk Privatisierung/Öffentliche Güter (ppg-network = Privatization, Public Goods) in 2003 and Berliner Wassertisch in 2006.This has to be understood within the wider context of increased campaigning and social movements within the city in the 2000s. These were usually focused on opposition to the perceived effects of economic globalisation, the ‘normalisation’ of the city and the government’s promotion of it. Emblematic examples include the rise of a campaign (‘Mediaspree versenken!’) opposing a government programme to redevelop ex-industrial and residential areas along the river Spree into a focal point for media and creative industries (Mediaspree); the Squat Tempelhof movement which occupied the newly closed Tempelhof airport in 2009; and the proliferation of small groups (for example, Karla Pappel in 2008) campaigning against the rapidly rising rental prices in the city. During this entire period there was a red–red government in Berlin, and Die Linke in particular became the subject of heavy criticism for their failure to outline an alternative urban politics for the city. Although opposition to the privatisation of the water company was mounting within the SPD and Die Linke, reversing privatisation was seen as impossible given the long-term (29-year) contracts signed with the private partnersVivendi and RWE. Die Linke was attacked for its ‘opportunism’ in not trying to end the BWB agreements guaranteeing the annual profit rates for the private investors (Behnis, 2011). Furthermore, during the first term (2001–06) of the red–red coalition, privatisations of public companies even continued, for example with the privatisation of the housing company GSW, the selling off of public land and companies, such as the Royal PorzellanManufaktur (KPM) (Chacón, 2011b). As a consequence, in 2011 a range of social movements boycotted a conference ‘Commonwealth instead of profits’ organised by Die Linke (Chacón, 2011a). With a left-wing party in government continuing privatisation on the grounds that there really were no alternatives to privatisation, a disavowal of political agency on the issue was plain.There were obvious institutional and material constraints on the red–red government and particularly Die 192

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Linke.The severe fiscal crisis continued in the 2000s, allowing little room for manoeuvre. If they opposed privatisation and other policies aimed at curbing state expenditure, they were criticised for being unrealistic or dogmatic. For example, under pressure from the CDU opposition, as well as the federal court (Bundesverfassungsgericht), the party found itself in a position where they had to accept decisions like cross-border leasing deals to acquire private investment for Berlin’s public transport company (BVG) (Lederer and Naumann, 2011, 131). Ultimately, Die Linke had to balance their political beliefs with the limitations on municipal finances and the lack of overwhelming support for remunicipalisation in the SPD, the leading partner in the coalition.The denial by the left-wing parties of the possibility to reverse privatisation seems to have contributed to the politicisation of the issue outside of the governmental realm, and to the emergence of political agency in the public realm.With the formal political parties failing to provide a locus for opposition, civil society groups appear to have been provoked into action. Thus the perceived lack of political agency of Die Linke led not only to anger on the left but also played a role in the displacement of political contestation of water privatisation from the political to the public realm. The politics of privatisation was ultimately articulated by social movements. The campaign to publish the privatisation contracts

Upon reelection in 2006, the red–red government did outline a wish to strengthen the public sector, and the remunicipalisation of BWB was part of the coalition contract (Lederer and Naumann, 2011). By this stage, both parties in government wanted to end the deal because of the effect of the profit guarantee on rising prices and the city’s budget. But the adoption of this objective may be interpreted as being, at least in part, political posturing. Die Linke had suffered a heavy loss of votes in the 2006 election and needed to reassure its base support and react to growing criticism. There was still no concrete discussion on how the privatisation law and contractual agreements could be reversed. This was revealed in the governmental response to the citizens’ group, Berliner Wassertisch, campaigning for the publication of the confidential contracts.The initiative Berliner Wassertisch is not a coalition of organisations, such as anti-globalisation movements like attac, and is not a part of the ‘classic’ non-dogmatic radical movements found in the city, for example, the squatter movement (Holm and Kuhn, 2011). Nevertheless, the public referendum to publish the privatisation contracts was supported by environmental organisations (Grüne Liga, Naturschutzbund, tenant

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organisations such as Berliner Mietergemeinschaft), as well as other social movements in the city and even local branches of Die Linke. The emergence and success of an anti-privatisation movement almost seven years after the privatisation was the result of a variety of developments. First, water prices had risen dramatically – Berlin already had the highest water tariffs in Germany. Second, as stated, many on the left were dissatisfied with Die Linke and increasingly willing to express this. Third, the Berliner Wassertisch benefited and learned from successful anti-privatisation movements around the world, copying much of the rhetoric and style of protest. Successful campaigns, particularly in the Global South, provided not only evidence that privatisation could be reversed, they also provided inspiration in terms of imagery, slogans and tactics of protest. Fourth, and related to these developments, the global discourse on privatisation had changed since the end of the 1990s, with even arch-promoter of privatisation, the World Bank, questioning the benefits of privatisation (Castro, 2002, 4; Hall et al, 2005, 287). Fifth, the national discourse on privatisation had also hardened as a result of the remunicipalisations in other cities, such as neighbouring Potsdam in 2000. Finally, a new legal tool had become available to campaigning citizen groups – the public referendum (Volksbegehren) – as a constitutional means of changing laws when specific levels of support are reached. Somewhat ironically, this change was one of many introduced by the red–red government in 2006 and 2008 as a means of encouraging greater direct democracy. The formal political realm may not have provided the terrain for political contestation, but it did provide the political-legal instruments to enable it to flourish within the public realm. The Berliner Wassertisch focused its efforts on the publication of the confidential contracts of the privatisation deal. After collecting the signatures of around 280,000 Berliners, they had met the conditions necessary to formally start a Volksbegehren. Initially, however, they faced opposition from the red–red government, who blocked the initiative claiming the new law was not constitutionally applicable in this case. It was argued that it would be illegal to force private investors to publish private contracts finalised before this new law had come into force. In a further display of the importance of formal legal processes in this politicisation, the Berliner Wassertisch and its supporters spent two years contesting this decision in the Constitutional Court, before they won the right to go ahead with the referendum in October 2009 (Hüesker, 2011). During this period media interest in the case and the privatisation more generally grew.The leftwing Berlin newspaper, die Tageszeitung, published the secret contracts in October 2010 and effectively forced the Berlin government to follow suit. Nevertheless, Berliner Wassertisch decided to go 194

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on with the referendum.This took place in February 2011 and a majority of 98.2% of those who voted, more than 660,000, supported the proposal to publish the privatisation contracts (Nowakowski, 2011). Partial remunicipalisation

Running parallel to this public debate, the three shareholders of BWB began negotiations about remunicipalising BWB in 2010. While the private partners (RWE and Véolia) were still making a profit from their involvement in BWB, it was arguably not good for their image in Berlin and beyond. With only the CDU still formally in favour of maintaining private sector involvement in the City Elections of 2011, and Die Linke, the Greens and, most importantly the largest party in the city, the SPD, in favour of remunicipalisation, much of the political as well as the public realm was hostile to them and particularly to the profits which had been made as prices rose. As in the privatisation, negotiations were conducted confidentially – a clear attempt to depoliticise the issue. RWE, who had decided to withdraw from the water market to concentrate on energy, sold in May 2012, when the Berlin executive agreed to a price of around €650 million for the 24.9% share of RWE in BWB. Having consistently rejected the idea of selling its share, and still very much committed to the water market generally, Véolia stated in June 2012 that it was going to start negotiations, and according the media reports in August 2013 an agreement about the deal is near (Alberti, 2013). The executive’s plan is to fund the price of the sale from the future de facto guaranteed revenues of BWB – an option which was obviously always available to them. Summing up the shift in the political landscape which had occurred, a new coalition government of the SPD and CDU (from September 2011) conducted the deal.

Between constraints and opportunities: assessing the BWB case Within the wider context of a growth in social movements in the city in the 2000s, the campaign to publish the confidential contractual agreements with the private partners led to the politicisation of the partial privatisation. At the centre of this process was unhappiness at rising prices for consumers and the profits made by the private partners. Unlike England and Wales, the efficiency of the water company’s core services – supplying drinking water and treating wastewater – were not a major concern in the debate. Rather the seeds of politicisation lay in the privatisation deal itself, especially the profit guarantee and the secrecy surrounding it.

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The Berliner Wassertisch and its supporters may not have provoked the discontent at rising prices, but they did provide a focal point and outlet for it. Importantly, in line with our definition of politicisation, the issue was not merely problematised, but made visible to the wider public and the subject of political agency. By highlighting the problems privatisation had created, they asserted the contingency of the policy and articulated alternatives to it in the public realm. This was politicisation from beyond, and in opposition to, the formal political system.The failure of the former communist party, Die Linke, to promote remunicipalisation, and to even prevent further privatisations, is indicative of the ongoing constraints on leftwing parties in government.Their failure to act on this issue contributed to depoliticisation, but also ultimately to politicisation. Overall, the debate and its outcomes show that depoliticisation, particularly a fatalistic acceptance of external constraints on political agency (Hay’s type 3; Hay 2007, 87), can potentially work as a driver for politicisation. Inaction in the face of apparently inevitable and irreversible policies, particularly in the context of financial constraints, provoked a more direct form of political agency, one which sought to assert the contingency of policy. In Berlin, there was dynamic interplay between depoliticisation and politicisation; more specifically, between depoliticisation of the issue within the formal political system, its politicisation within the public realm and a resulting repoliticisation in the political realm. Importantly, for this to occur, however, the Berlin case suggests that legal and political instruments such as public referenda are as crucial as an engaged civil society. The referendum campaign provided an opportunity for direct democracy, or, in more conceptual terms, political agency. In short, it not only provided a focal point for political campaigning, it created possibility in politics. This mechanism by which citizens could force politicians to discuss and legislate on issues they had little desire to do so, undermined inactivity and fatalism in the governmental realm.

Outlook This chapter has made a distinctive contribution to the depoliticisation literature by examining a case of repoliticisation, one which demonstrates the continuing contingencies of a contemporary politics attuned to the needs of market actors at the urban level. In doing so, the chapter has highlighted the need for further research on the strategies and outcomes of repoliticisation. In particular, a more refined conceptualisation of de/ politicisation is required. Presently the literature remains too focused on depoliticisation. As such there is a weakness with regard to the sites and sources of politicisation. Most obviously, research has overlooked the fact 196

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that the politicisation of issues often occurs through civil society resistance to the (in)actions of politicians, and opposition to depoliticisation of issues within the formal political realm more generally. While there has been discussion of depoliticisation in relation to how public dissatisfaction with politics has led to apathy and fatalism (for example, Hay, 2007), there has been less research on examples of public discontent being translated into an assertion of political agency and alternative politics. A greater focus on non-state actors in de/ politicisation is required. What kinds of organisations are most often the sources of politicisation? And in relation to which issues? Furthermore, an examination of the sites where politicisation most often occurs would be illuminating. Here it is has been suggested that the city and water services are key sites of contestation and resistance to global norms. Future research might further explore the scalar dimension in de/politicisation, the importance of interactions between local, regional, national and global levels in such processes and strategies. More fundamentally, it is necessary to carefully consider the dynamic by which anti-politics, emerging from a depoliticised political realm, politicises civil society. Of course the outcomes of this dynamic are uncertain, and cannot be seen in normatively good terms because of the different politics they produce. Nonetheless, the forms such politicisation takes, the means through which issues are made visible, a target of political agency, is crucial to an understanding of how policy change occurs. Acknowledgements The authors thank Frank Hüesker, with whom some joint research on the remunicipalisation process was conducted.They are also grateful to the editors of the special issue, Matthew Flinders and Matthew Wood, for their detailed comments on earlier drafts. References Ahlers, R, 2010, Fixing and nixing: The politics of water privatisation, Review of Radical Political Economies, 42, 2, 213–30 Alberti, S, 2013, Shoppingtour nach Paris, die tageszeitung, 7 August Bakker, K, 2001, Paying for water: Water pricing and equity in England and Wales Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26, 2, 143–64 Bakker, K, 2003, An uncooperative commodity: Privatising water in England and Wales, Oxford: Oxford University Press Bakker, K, 2010, The limits of neoliberal natures: Debating green neoliberalism, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 6, 715–35

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Barraqué, B, 2009, The development of water services in Europe: From diversity to convergence, in Castro, JE, Heller, L (eds), Water and sanitation services: Public policy and management, London: Earthscan Behnis, M, 2011, Der Wolf und das Wasser: Wie ein vor mals privatisierungskritischer Senator die Teilprivatisierung der Wasserbetriebe zementierte (The Wolf and the Water: how a senator who had been a critic of privatization ended up further entrenching it), MieterEcho, 349, 9 Beveridge, R, 2012a, A politics of inevitability: The privatisation of the Berlin Water Company, the global city discourse and governance in 1990s Berlin, Wiesbaden:VS Springer Beveridge, R, 2012b, Consultants, depoliticisation and arena-shifting in the policy process: Privatising water in Berlin, Policy Sciences, 45, 1, 47–68 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3, 2, 127–49 Castro, JE, 2002, Arguments underlying current programmes promoting private participation in water and sanitation services, in Castro, JE (ed), PRINWASS Project, European Commission: 5th Framework Programme, INCO-DEV, Contract ICA4–CT–2001–10041, Oxford: University of Oxford Chacón, B, 2011a, GuteVorsätze. Kurz vor ihrem absehbaren Ende versucht die rot-rote Koalition, mit dem Thema ‘Re-Kommunalisierung’ zu punkten (With good intentions just prior to their probable demise, the red-red Coalition tries to score points with the remunicipalisation topic), MieterEcho, 345, 14–16 Chacón, B, 2011b, Privatisierung in rot-rot: Regierungskoalition verspricht die Abkehr von der Privatisierungspolitik der vergangenen Jahre (Privatisation under red-red: Governing coalition pledges departure from privatization policies of recent years), MieterEcho, 349, 4–7 Cochrane, A, Passmore, A, 2001, Building a national capital in an age of globalisation, Area, 33, 4, 341–52 Crouch, C, 2004, Post-democracy, London: Polity Crouch, C, 2011, The strange non-death of neoliberalism, Malden, MA:Wiley Ellger, C, 1992, Berlin: Legacies of division and problems of unification, Geographical Journal, 158, 1, 40–6 Fitch, K, 2007,Water privatisation in France and Germany:The importance of local interest groups, Local Government Studies, 33, 1, 589–605 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2005,The domestic origins of depoliticisation in the area of British economic policy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7, 4, 526–43 Flinders, M, Buller, J, 2006, Depoliticisation: Principles, tactics and tools, British Politics, 1, 3, 293–318 198

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Gamble, A, 2000, Politics and fate, Cambridge: Polity Gornig, M, Häussermann, H, 2002, Berlin: Economic and spatial change, European Urban and Regional Studies, 9, 4, 331–41 Hall, D, Lobina, E, de la Motte, R, 2005, Public resistance to privatisation in water and energy, Development in Practice, 15, 3–4, 286–301 Hardt, M, Negri,A, 2009, Commonwealth, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press Harvey, D, 2012, Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution, London:Verso Harvey, D, 1989, From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism, Geografiska Annaler B, 71, 1, 3–17 Häussermann, H, Colomb, C, 2003,The new Berlin: Marketing the city of dreams, in Hoffman, LM, Fainstein, SS, Judd, DR (eds), Cities and visitors: Regulating people, markets, and city space, New York: Blackwell Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Hay, C, Rosamond, B, 2002, Globalisation, European integration and the discursive construction of economic imperatives, Journal of European Public Policy, 9, 2, 147–67 Holm, A, Kuhn, A, 2011, Squatting and urban renewal: The interaction of squatter movements and strategies of urban restructuring in Berlin, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35, 5, 644–58 Hüesker, F, 2011, Auswirkungen von Privatisierungen auf die Gemeinwohlfähigkeit des Daseinsvorsorgestaates – untersucht am Fall der Wasserbetriebe des Landes Berlin (Impact of privatization on the capacity of the Welfare State to provide for the common good: case study of the Berlin Water Works), München: Oekom James, S, 2010,The rise and fall of Euro preparations: Strategic networking and the depoliticisation of Labour’s national changeover plan, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12, 3, 368–86 Jenkins, L, 2011,The difference genealogy makes: Strategies for politicisation or how to extend capacities for autonomy, Political Studies, 59, 1, 156–74 Kay, JA,Thompson, DJ, 1986, Privatisation:A policy in search of a rationale, Economic Journal, 96, 18–32 Kerr, P, Byrne, C, Foster, E, 2011,Theorising Cameronism, Political Studies Review, 9, 2, 193–207 Lanz, K, Eitner, K, 2005, Watertime case study: Berlin, Germany, www. watertime.net/docs/WP2/D12_Berlin.doc

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Lederer, K, Naumann, M, 2011, Linke Metropolenpolitik und öffentliche Unternehmen: Eine Bestandsaufnahme am Beispiel Berlins, (Left metropolitan politics and public companies: taking of the Berlin case), in Holm, A, Lederer, K, Naumann, M (eds), Linke Metropolenpolitik. Erfahrungen und Perspektiven am Beispiel Berlin, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot Madaleno, I, 2007,The privatisation of water and its impacts on settlement and traditional cultural practices in northern Chile, Scottish Geographical Journal, 123, 3, 193–208 Marcuse, P, 2009, From critical urban theory to the right to the city, City, 13, 2–3, 185–97 Mayntz, R, 2003, New challenges to governance theory, in Bang, H (ed), Governance as political and social communication, Manchester: Manchester University Press Mirosa, O, Harris, L, 2012, Human right to water: Contemporary challenges and contours of a global debate, Antipode, 44, 3, 932–49 Mouffe, C, 2005, On the political, London, New York: Routledge Newman, P, 2009, Markets, experts and depoliticising decisions on major infrastructure, Urban Research and Practice, 2, 2, 158–68 Nowakowski, G, 2011, Kalte Dusche für rot–rot (Cold shower for red-red), Der Tagesspiegel, 14 February Page, B, 2005, Paying for water and the geography of commodities, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 3, 293–306 Peck, J, Tickell, A, 2002, Neoliberalising space, Antipode, 34, 3, 380–404 Pflug, T, 2008, Gewerkschaftliche Strategien in kontroversen politischen Privatisierungsprozessen, in Wasserkolloquium (eds), Wasser: Die Kommerzialisierung eines öffentlichen Gutes, Berlin: Dietz Poole, RW, 1996, Privatisation for economic development, in Anderson, TL, Hill, PJ (eds), The privatisation process:A worldwide perspective, Lanham, MD: Rowan Littlefield Rancière, J, 2009, Hatred of democracy, London:Verso Roberts, A, 2010, The logic of discipline: Global capitalism and the architecture of government, Oxford: Oxford University Press Stoker, G, 1998, Governance as theory: Five propositions, International Social Science Journal, 50, 155, 17–28 Strom, E, 2001, Building the new Berlin:The politics of urban development in Germany’s capital city, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books Swyngedouw, E, 2003, Privatising H2O:Turning local water into global money, http://socgeo.ruhosting.nl/colloquium/water.pdf Swyngedouw, E, 2009, The antinomies of the postpolitical city: In search of a democratic politics of environmental production, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33, 3, 601–20 200

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Warner, M, 2012, Privatisation and urban governance: The continuing challenges of efficiency, voice and integration, Cities, 29, 2, 38–43   Watson, M, Hay, C, 2003, The discourse of globalisation and the logic of no alternative: Rendering the contingent necessary in the political economy of New Labour, Policy & Politics, 31, 3, 289–305 Wissen, M, Naumann, M, 2006, A new logic of infrastructure supply:The commercialisation of water and the transformation of urban governance in Germany, Social Justice, 33, 3, 20–37 Wu, X, Malaluan, NA, 2008, A tale of two concessionaires: A natural experiment of water privatisation in metro Manila, Urban Studies, 45, 1, 207–29 Zaki, S, Amin, ATM, 2009, Does basic services privatisation benefit the urban poor? Some evidence from water supply privatisation in Thailand, Urban Studies, 46, 11, 2301–27 Žižek, S, 2008, In defence of lost causes, London:Verso

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CHAPTER TEN

Depoliticisation as process, governance as practice: what did the ‘first wave’ get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right? Colin Hay

Introduction I am extremely grateful to the editors of Policy & Politics for the opportunity to respond to this important, innovative and challenging collection of chapters on the process of depoliticisation and the analytical strategies required to best understand its sources, dynamics and consequences.There has – alas – never been a better time to write about depoliticisation, judging by the contempt in which so many citizens hold political elites in most advanced liberal democracies today and the extent to which political elites continue to respond by placing at one remove the inherent contestability of decisions concerning the provision of collective public goods.Yet, despite the attention that the process of depoliticisation has received, the editors of this collection argue for the need to rethink and reconceptualise much of our existing understanding of this crucial set of linked concerns. They launch, in effect, a ‘second wave’ literature on depoliticisation. I typically have great sympathy for second waves. They offer a way of correcting the almost inevitable biases and distortions that creep into and accumulate within a new and often hastily developed body of literature prompted by the urgent need to come to terms with a recently identified problem, pathology or societal condition.That, I suspect, is very much the story of the first wave literature on depoliticisation, the limits of which this collection of chapters seeks first to identify and then transcend. ‘Second waves’ are, then, generally rather good things, providing a necessary corrective to errors made in (perhaps forgivable) haste. Here, however, I find myself somewhat more equivocal than usual.That is no doubt in part a product of being, perhaps for the first and only time in my career, identified as part of a ‘first wave’ – and proponents of first waves, as we know, have a tendency to make stubborn adversaries. I think, however, that there is more to this than that – though I suppose I would… For while there are undoubtedly certain biases and distortions which have come to characterise the first wave literature and while a number of these are well-identified in this collection (notably, the privileging of economic 203

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policy and nation-level decision-making processes empirically, the focus on depoliticisation at the expense of politicisation and the simplistic normative presumption that politicisation is good, depoliticisation bad), I think each is at least defensible as an analytic move, each is better than the alternative at the time, each is explicitly acknowledged (and justified) as a simplifying analytical device and, as a consequence, one does not need a bout of rethinking and reconceptualisation to correct such distortions. In short, I think the ‘first wave’ is worthy of defending and in what follows I seek to provide that defence. I do so in an unapologetically provocative way, by taking issue with a number of the arguments and claims made in this important collection of chapters – and by concentrating on those claims and arguments with which I take issue. I also do so with a profound sense of respect for and appreciation of the challenge these chapters pose to the existing literature.There is much to learn from them, as I seek to make clear, just as I hope that there is much to learn from the debate and controversy this response aims to ignite. Thus, although I am critical of aspects of each of the chapters assembled in this collection, both individually and collectively I see them as making an important contribution to the existing literature. Yet, in the end, it is better to see that contribution as an extension and development of the first wave than as arising out of a clearly substantiated case for the need to transcend the conceptual limitations of the first wave in favour of a second. Consistent perhaps with such a view, I find the more empirical and substantive contributions with which the collection concludes ultimately more compelling than the more narrowly conceptual or theoretical pieces (those that would have to substantiate the claim for the need for a second wave and provide the alternative analytical bases for such a move). In the pages that follow I seek, all too briefly, to defend such claims by considering each chapter in a little more detail. I begin with the more theoretical ones, before turning to the more substantive empirical pieces each of which I seek to show is quite compatible with the development and enrichment of the existing literature on depoliticisation.

One’s enemies’ enemies … and one’s friends Perhaps precisely because it is the most explicit, the most unequivocal and the most programmatic in its commitment to the idea both of the need for a second wave and for this collection of chapters as an opening salvo, in effect, in the launching of such a wave, it is the introductory chapter by Matthew Flinders and Matthew Wood of which I am perhaps the most critical.The claims they make for the limits of the existing literature are, I think, at times a little overstated, the case they make for their approach to 204

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depoliticisation as a cogent and holistic alternative (such as might constitute a credible second wave) is not entirely compelling, and the (Schmittian) concept of politics on which it is ostensibly predicated I find normatively troubling, analytically somewhat confusing and not entirely consistent with the chapters that follow. Their chapter opens by stating boldly that the ‘need for new perspectives’ on depoliticisation can, in the context of the ‘exceptional times’ occasioned by our present crisis,‘hardly be denied’ (2014, 1).That, I think, is contestable. First, whether or not we live in ‘exceptional times’ and whether or not the crisis marks the passage from a ‘normal’ to an ‘exceptional’ phase of the political, it is problematic to assume that each such historical juncture requires new theoretical perspectives or even new conceptual resources. ‘New times’ do not require new theories. For the implication of such a view is that we can have no theoretically-informed account of the process of change itself; political analysis in effect becomes a science of equilibrium in a world we acknowledge to be characterised (albeit only periodically and intermittently) by disequilibrating ruptures. There is, of course, a certain irony here. Indeed, there are two.The first is that this is exactly the kind of social science (in the form of neo-classical economic equilibrium theory most obviously) that led us to the crisis in the first place. It did so precisely because of its theoretical incapacity to countenance the possibility of disequilibrium (allied, of course, to its influence on those whose behaviour precipitated the crisis). Second, the existing literature on politicisation and depoliticisation is itself a dynamic theory of disequilibrium (pointing to the cumulatively destabilising consequences of ostensibly ‘rational’ behaviour and equilibrium thinking) – and, what is more, a disequilibrium theory closely linked to the anticipation and subsequent analysis of the crisis itself (see especially Crouch, 2004; 2008; 2009; Hay, 2006; 2007; 2011, but also Burnham, 2001).There is, then, something strangely perverse about making the case for an alternative to existing perspectives on depoliticisation by pointing to the extent to which the very crisis such theories anticipated (in part precisely because of the depoliticisation dynamic to which they pointed) has recast the parameters of the world in which we find ourselves. Quite apart from this, has it done this? Is the world in which we find ourselves today so very different from that described in the first wave literature? Again, I find myself sceptical. Yes, there has been a widely acknowledged crisis; but, as the contributions of Burnham, Foster et al and Jessop in this collection all make clear (echoing a well-established orthodoxy in the wider literature), the tendency in the wake of the crisis has been to reaffirm and further consolidate a ‘logic of discipline’ over a logic of public accountability and/or democratic choice (Roberts, 2011). 205

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As such, the crisis (to date at least) has proved paradigm re-enforcing rather than paradigm threatening (Hay and Smith, 2014) in a manner again anticipated in the earlier literature. Indeed, it is presumably precisely for this reason that Flinders and Wood are able to refer to depoliticisation as the dominant model of statecraft in the twenty-first century. This makes it all the more confusing that the crisis might credibly be seen to signal the rise of a period of exceptional politics and that this, in turn, might be seen to necessitate a set of new perspectives on depoliticisation. A rather stronger case for the incapacity of existing perspectives to deal with the contemporary manifestation of the politicisation–depoliticisation nexus would first need to be presented. That is something this collection lacks. More troubling in a way is Flinders and Wood’s treatment of the concept of politics. They are of course right to seek to ground any notion of politicisation and depoliticisation in a concept of politics and they are also right, it strikes me, in seeking to think of politicisation and depoliticisation as linked concepts for capturing the dynamic interplay of tendency and counter-tendency (as in Hay, 2007, chapter 2). Insofar, however, as Schmitt’s concept of politics has been ‘overlooked’ (Flinders and Wood, 2014, 136) in the existing literature on depoliticisation (and even this is something one might contest – see, for instance, Mouffe, 1993; Ranciere, 1995; Monagle 2010), there might well have been good reasons for this. For there are a range of objections to it – some specific to the debate about politicisation and depoliticisation, others more general. That conception of politics is famously couched in terms of the friend/ enemy distinction — indeed, the friend/enemy opposition. Politics, for Schmitt, is the process in and through which specific instances of the universal, ubiquitous, inevitable and inherent conflict between friend and enemy are settled — with authority, singularity and, above all, finality (2007, xiv). Such a conception has implications, some of which, to their credit, Flinders and Wood acknowledge, others which they, perhaps understandably, choose not to. The first implication, which Schmitt was anxious to emphasise and which they do acknowledge explicitly, is that liberal democracy is, in effect, the perpetration of a (depoliticising) fiction – in that, and to the extent that, it presents democratic deliberation as a means to the determination or adjudication of the collective good. For Schmitt there is no such thing as the collective good – merely the collective imposition of a singular interest or conception of the good over other competing interests or conceptions of the good. Politics is, in short, the triumph of friend over enemy; to pretend otherwise (to pretend, for instance, that we can all be friends within the terms of a democratic consensus) is to engage in a depoliticising demystification.

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This is, as is perhaps already clear, a highly normative, singular and contestable conception of the political – and it is not difficult to see why it has proved so controversial. Above all, however, it is one that, whatever its appeal, poses particular problems when it comes to the contemporary debate in Western liberal democracies (among political analysts and others) about politicising and depoliticising dynamics. Much could be said here, but I will confine myself to four brief observations. First, in the context of such debates, and despite Flinders and Wood’s protestations to the contrary, this is a somewhat limited conception of politics. It is of course useful to remind ourselves that all politics is concerned with the resolution of conflicts and that we are perhaps naïve to think that such conflicts can be resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all, but there is more to political life (and more to the concept of politics for political analysts and political practitioners) than the friend–enemy opposition. It is, at best, a dimension of politics – one, like many others, to which it is often useful to draw attention. Moreover, important though it is to be sensitive to the friend–enemy dimension present in all political practice, there are surely more or less appropriate and legitimate means of resolving the conflicts which characterise political practice. To dismiss all liberal democratic pretentions on the basis that they are predicated on the deceit that politics need not entail the triumph of a sectional interest, without first considering the credibility of the ensuing practice to deliver collective public goods (and, indeed, the contribution of politicising and/ or depoliticising dynamics to such a capacity) seems both premature and unnecessarily defeatist. It also begs the question of why we would interest ourselves in the detailed internal machinations of liberal democratic governance if we had already made up our minds as to its central deceit. Second, and related to this, to draw exclusive attention in one’s definition of politics to the friend–enemy dimension (especially if one acknowledges that there are others) is to demonise politics unnecessarily. In a context in which politics is already widely demonised and where such demonisation has contributed significantly to the paradigm of depoliticisation that one is ostensibly interested in analysing, this seems particularly perverse.Again, there is a paradox here. For part of Flinders and Wood’s objection to the existing (first wave) literature on depoliticisation is that it is, in their terms, overly normative – in that it tends towards the ‘rather stale denunciation of depoliticisation as inherently…“bad”’ (2014, 145). If normativity is the problem, then settling on an unapologetically normative (if pejorative) definition of politics (where, of course, the first wave literature has a neutral analytic definition) hardly seems like an appropriate antidote. Indeed, one could go further.Though I acknowledge this to be a personal view I, for one, would wish staunchly to defend the normative stance 207

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of much of the (first wave) literature on depoliticisation, just as I would wish equally staunchly to defend the idea that politicised governance (which is visibly deliberative and accountable) is normatively preferable to depoliticised governance (in which decisions are made ostensibly in the public good but in private and without the capacity for public scrutiny). Political analysts (particularly those in receipt of public funds), I would contend, have at least a collective public duty to hold the practices of ostensibly democratic governance to account – and that, I think, entails a normative preference for politicised over depoliticised governance (even if it is possible to imagine circumstances under which depoliticisation might be deemed necessary). I suspect Flinders and Wood would agree, but the point is that I find it difficult to reconcile such a normative conviction with the Schmittian conception of politics which they here seek to advance. A third problem with the turn to Schmitt is at the same time both semantic and practical. The Schmittian definition of politics threatens to turn on its head, in a way that Flinders and Wood fail fully to appreciate, the language of politicisation and depoliticisation in and through which the debate has been conducted up until this point. The potential for confusion is very considerable. The point is a simple one. If politics is, for Schmitt, a synonym for friend–enemy adversity and politicisation is, consequently, an index in effect of the clarity with which friend–enemy rivalries are articulated in ostensibly political contexts, then much of what we have been calling depoliticisation is politicising in Schmittian terms and much of what we have been calling politicisation is depoliticising! Flinders and Wood’s own example may serve to clarify the nature of the confusion (if not the confusion itself). Their argument is that, in the exceptional circumstances of crisis, policy makers typically feel the need to assume greater decision-making powers and typically also feel less encumbered by the need to legitimate or justify their decisions in terms of the democratic wishes of the citizens they (for the most part) claim to represent. In conventional terms this is likely to prove depoliticising – in that political elites are likely to invoke the ‘harsh economic realities’ and ‘non-negotiable constraints’ of the exceptional circumstances in which they find themselves in defending whatever policy choices they feel it necessary to impose, however unpopular these might prove (austerity through swinging welfare retrenchment is a good example). In Schmittian terms, however, the authority, decisiveness and finitude with which friend– enemy rivalries are clarified, crystallised and resolved in such moments is deeply politicising – not least because the depoliticising pretentions of liberal democratic mythology are temporarily suspended (such is the nature of the exceptionalism to which Schmitt points).The imposition of austerity in Greece may well be deeply depoliticising, then, in conventional 208

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terms (as, for instance, in Jessop’s account); but it is deeply politicising in Schmitt’s terms (and, one can only surmise, those of Flinders and Wood).

Rethinking depoliticisation Wood and Flinders’ substantive contribution is very different from the introduction and, despite its somewhat iconoclastic title – ‘rethinking depoliticisation’ – is, for the most part, quite consistent with much of the existing literature. It argues, in effect, for a widening of the focus of our analysis of contemporary depoliticisation dynamics so that we might better capture and respect their ‘full complexity’ (Wood and Flinders, 2014, 1). Crucially, though, it makes its case for so doing on the basis of insights already present within the literature it ostensibly rethinks and recasts – notably the three-fold distinction between governmental, public and private arenas as potential sites of politicisation and depoliticisation and the dynamic interplay between these competing tendencies (Hay, 2007, 79) – rather than, say, by reference to the Schmittian conception of politics discussed in the introduction.As such, if it is compatible at all with the idea of a second wave of writing on depoliticisation (as per the same authors’ introduction), this is a very much more modest second wave, seemingly quite prepared to work with the categories introduced in the first. That makes it one with which I am much more comfortable. Wood and Flinders’ contribution is cogent, compelling and well-informed and there is much to commend in it. Accordingly, my critical comments are of a relatively minor kind. First, I have always been somewhat sceptical of the idea that the extent to which a theoretical perspective might capture the ‘complexity’ of the world it seeks to analyse is an unambiguous token of its value or sophistication. The trump card of added complexity is an easy one to pull from one’s hat, but I am not convinced that it always constitutes a winning move. This is because the purpose of political analysis must surely be to achieve some kind of analytical purchase on the subjects and objects of enquiry – here the processes and practices of politicisation and depoliticisation, especially in as much as these might become self-sustaining or mutually reinforcing in some way. That analytical purchase necessarily entails achieving a certain degree of parsimony. There is bound to be much complexity in the phenomena that attract our attentions, but our task has to be to cut through at least some of this to reveal certain general features of the objects of our analysis. Analytical purchase, in other words, entails a necessary simplification. The question then becomes how much complexity to let in. Once restated in such terms it is far from self-evident that ‘more complexity’ (or, as here,‘full complexity’) makes for better political analysis. 209

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Indeed, there is surely a second issue here. For Woods and Flinders are (here) entering the debate after an initial flurry of interest in the topic has subsided somewhat.Their ‘second wave’ intervention has the advantage of ‘first wave’ hindsight. This undoubtedly makes it all the easier to play the ‘greater complexity’ trump card. First wave literatures are almost bound to cut through more of the complexity of the phenomena they analyse than their second wave counterparts.There is, I think, nothing wrong with that, even if the subsequent maturation of the literature is bound to let in a little more complexity. One can, in other words, welcome both – and I do. That said, I rather like Wood and Flinders’ chosen strategy for mapping the field of politicisation and depoliticisation processes. I think its appeal in fact comes from its simplicity – its parsimony or elegance, if you like – rather than its complexity or its capacity to acknowledge complexity, as they would have it. Indeed, if there are problems with their formulation – and I think there are – they come largely from trying to squeeze too much complexity into a relatively simple three-fold categorisation of the field of de/politicisation. There is much which could be said here, but limits of space confine me to three (simple) observations. The first is that Woods and Flinders conflate, even if they do not confuse, a number of things in their summary table in which they seek to distinguish the three faces of depoliticisation (2014, 6). In particular, it strikes me, they associate too closely the mode of depoliticisation with the arenas or sites from which/to which responsibility is passed when issues become depoliticised. Thus, they associate type 1 depoliticisation, in my view, too narrowly with delegation, type 2 depoliticisation with privatisation and type 3 depoliticisation with the (discursive) denial of political choice altogether – when each might be seen as compatible with a range of different processes. Second, it is a shame that the Lukesian analogy hinted at by the appeal to the ‘three faces’ of depoliticisation is not developed. For this would, I think, provide a basis for better conceptualising the linkage between modes of depoliticisation (or, indeed, politicisation) and arenas or sites of depoliticisation (or politicisation). Decision making, agenda setting and preference shaping can all, of course, be more or less politicised – and each might be seen to be associated with different types or modes of politicisation and depoliticisation. I see considerable potential in the further sustained reflection on such linkages. Finally, though the concept undoubtedly has a certain intuitive appeal, there are some problems I think with the (present) operationalisation of the concept of discursive depoliticisation. For, as used by Wood and Flinders, at least in this chapter, the concept relates solely to type 3 depoliticisation – the denial, in effect, that an issue has or might be seen to have a politics 210

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since there is perceived to be no contingency which a political process might debate, discuss and thereby resolve.This, I think, is problematic – not because such denials are not themselves inherently discursive (I think they are), but because there is a discursive component to all depoliticisations (whatever their type).Thus, when for instance operational independence is ceded to the Bank of England for the setting of monetary policy this is as much a discursive depoliticisation as it is an institutional one; it is unhelpful to think of discursive depoliticisation as being involved only in depoliticisation processes of type 3. Yet these are all modest objections to a conceptual mapping exercise that I find broadly persuasive, analytically elegant and eminently useful. Whether it constitutes a rethinking of depoliticisation is perhaps another matter altogether – but it is certainly a very valuable stock-taking exercise from which we can all benefit.

The link to political participation No less useful – though also no less ostensibly iconoclastic – is Paul Fawcett and David Marsh’s important set of reflections on the links between depoliticisation and political participation. As they will appreciate, these are themes very close to my own political heart and it is refreshing to see them debated in some detail in this special issue by authors who have already contributed so much to their analysis. It is perhaps precisely because these themes are so close to my own motivation for writing about depoliticisation that I find their opening observation – that the links between the literatures on depoliticisation, governance and political participation have been insufficiently explored – a slightly strange one. Why we hate politics (2007) was, of course, largely a book about political participation and one that drew me into the analysis of both depoliticisation and governance (and the relationship between the two). Accordingly, I see these issues, like Fawcett and Marsh, as intimately connected. I suspect, however, that we are not alone in so doing – and that Fawcett and Marsh somewhat overstate the size of the gap in the literature they seek to fill. That said, what is most important here is not the extent of the oversight in the existing literature, but the degree to which Fawcett and Marsh’s reflections offer us new insight into these key connections – and, for the most part and with some caveats, I think they offer us a very great deal of insight. Their observations are helpfully summarised in terms of four key claims, each of which is worth discussing in a little more detail. Their first claim takes the form of a warning – that the novelty of the term depoliticisation might lead us to exaggerate the novelty of the 211

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phenomena we use the term to describe. Or, in other words, that we are in danger of overstating the historically unprecedented character of the contemporary condition of depoliticisation.There is certainly something in this, but there is a converse danger here too…and a certain irony. Fawcett and Marsh are clearly right to suggest that there is nothing new about the deployment by political elites of strategies of what we might now term depoliticisation. Politicians have always invoked nonnegotiable external binds and constraints (sometimes genuinely, sometimes disingenuously). They have typically played fast and loose with their capacity to realise the wishes of those who elected them and, even before that, those without whose support their tenure in office might prove more precarious. There is nothing new about any of this; but that is perhaps not the point. Arguably, depoliticisation dynamics proceed rather differently today – in ways that it is important that we are attuned to.This is where there is a certain irony in Fawcett and Marsh’s contribution. For it is precisely by reflecting on the issues of governance and metagovernance that they foreground so effectively that we come to see what is historically distinctive and perhaps even unprecedented about the form (if not necessarily the extent) of depoliticisation today. The point is that depoliticisation has become institutionalised and ideationally embedded – in new public management theory most obviously. This is precisely why Flinders and Wood (2014, 135) can speak of depoliticisation as the ‘dominant model of statecraft’ in the twenty-first century. That is new, even if depoliticisation itself is not. So, yes, a sense of historical perspective is important; but that should not lead us to understate the alarmingly distinctive nature of our current political predicament. Their second observation is that much of the literature on depoliticisation casts politicians themselves as the villains of the piece.This is an important point and one with which, again, I have some considerable sympathy.This is not least because, like Fawcett and Marsh, I am of the view that the disdain in which citizens seem increasingly to hold political elites is perhaps the single greatest political pathology of our age – and one that, unless held in check, may in time threaten the very legitimacy of our democratic political culture. The issues here are complex. On the one hand there are those who openly advocate depoliticisation and whose case for depoliticisation proceeds precisely (and logically) from the presupposition that politicians are narrowly instrumental and self-serving. If the presumption is valid then politics can only ever be the triumph of sectional interests over the general interest (à la Schmitt) and we should have as little of it as we can get away with.1 Yet, on the other hand, there are those who denounce depoliticisation as a disavowal by political elites of the trust we place in them and who typically see political disaffection and disengagement as, at 212

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least in part, a reasonable (even rational) response to the resulting emptying of the content of the democratic process. As Fawcett and Marsh start to hint at, however, it is actually even more complex than this. For there is, in fact, quite a fine line between accounts of this kind and the castigation of self-serving political elites for the duplicitous appeal to depoliticising tactics and strategies to insulate themselves from criticism. The paradox is that such critiques may serve to reinforce precisely the impression that politicians are, and can only ever be, in it for themselves. So how might one seek to chart a path through this conceptual – and yet at the same time, acutely political – minefield? Fawcett and Marsh pose the problem, but they don’t really resolve it. Crucial, I think are the motivations we project on to political actors. If political elites are, indeed, instrumental self-serving utility-maximisers (the homo economicus-cum-politicus of public choice theory) then depoliticisation is the best we can hope for. If political elites are capable of exhibiting other motivational traits, however, then the scenario is an altogether different one. That suggests to me, at least, that in a climate of widespread and growing political disaffection (such as ours), we should be careful to avoid projecting instrumental motives onto political actors unless and until we have very good reason for thinking that this is the key to their behaviour. We should, in effect, give them the benefit of the doubt for as long as it is credible to do so. For the cost of not so doing, in terms of the potential for the demise of our democratic political culture, is simply too high a price to pay for our predilection to cynicism. The point is that we do not need to appeal to the instrumental motives of political elites in order to explain the pervasive depoliticisation we have witnessed. Altogether more credible, I think, is that political elites engage in depoliticisation not because they think it is in their own self-interest so to do, but because they have been convinced (and have convinced themselves) that it is in our interests for them to do so.They are almost certainly wrong in this conviction; and we need now to convince them that this is indeed the case. Calling their motives into question is unlikely to prove an effective means to that end. Fawcett and Marsh’s third claim is no less significant and no less involved. It is that the existing literature fails to give equal attention, in its analysis of political participation in particular, to political inputs and political outputs – tending to focus on the former at the expense of the latter. This is almost certainly right, though I have more problem with the way in which Fawcett and Marsh propose that we address this input-oriented bias – through an extensive engagement with the work of Henrik Bang. Limits of space prevent a detailed treatment of the complex issues involved here, so I restrict myself to two simple points. First, inputs and outputs, as I am sure Fawcett and Marsh would acknowledge, are interdependent 213

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not independent. Consequently, privileging the latter over the former (as, arguably, Bang does) is no solution to our problem. Second, and far more important, to my mind, Fawcett and Marsh are undoubtedly right to note that secular trends in political participation in recent years are not just about a decline in the use made of formal channels of engagement (such as voting). They are also about the constitution of new forms of political identity and subjectivity, typically in non-formal arenas. However important such developments are, though, they are no substitute for formal political engagement – not least if part of their appeal resides precisely in their non-formal character. Consequently, while it is crucial that we pay due attention to such trends, we cannot afford to comfort ourselves with the thought that participation has suffered not a secular decline so much as a change in form, when something very significant has nonetheless been lost. Their final point is no less significant. It is that the existing literature has failed, in effect, to ask directly enough who has benefited from the process of depoliticisation we have witnessed in recent years. This, too, may well be right – the answer, such as there is one in the existing literature (and it probably varies), is implicit rather than explicit. But they are wrong, I think, to attribute the failure of the existing (first wave) literature to pose such questions directly to its discourse-analytical, constructivist and/or poststructuralist theoretical disposition. One does not need to be a ‘materialist’ (whatever precisely one takes that to signify these days) in order to think that the consolidation of systems of governance and meta-governance (such as might be associated with depoliticisation as a mode of statecraft, for instance) generates, reinforces, institutionalises, embeds and re-embeds significant distributional asymmetries. It would not be difficult to infer the character of such asymmetries, for instance, from the (constructivist institutionalist) analysis presented in Why we hate politics. Thus, to pick a particular and familiar example, the insulation of monetary policy in an operationally independent Bank of England has undoubtedly served to favour those with access to the housing market (and to the sources of credit thereby facilitated) relative to those in the rental market (in that it has contributed significantly to a low interest rate–low inflation equilibrium).

Depoliticisation in and through crisis Peter Burnham’s important contribution to the special issue reminds us of his central contribution to the analysis of depoliticisation, in particular his role in providing the initial framing and definition of the concept – a definition still used today. His piece begins by reiterating that definition.

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Depoliticisation, for him, is the process of placing ‘at one remove the politically contested character of governing’ (2014, 1, see also Burnham, 2001). This is an important and extremely useful definition – and it is worth reflecting on it a little, if only to clear up a potential ambiguity in the literature. For depoliticisation, at least in this conception, is not really about an end to politics or an absence of politics or even some kind of quantitative reduction in the amount of politics present. Depoliticisation is not about less politics, but about a displaced and submerged politics – a politics occurring elsewhere, typically beyond sites and arenas in which it is visible to non-participants and hence amenable to public – perhaps even democratic – scrutiny. It is for precisely this reason, presumably, that Burnham can go on to suggest that the depoliticisation of decision-making processes may, paradoxically, serve to enhance political control – in that a politics conducted largely behind closed doors is less encumbered by external pressures and influences and more autonomous as a consequence. Such a definition is extremely appealing, even if the process it describes is far from appealing. It certainly seems to capture much of the distinctiveness of democratic (or perhaps, better, pseudo-democratic) governance in Western liberal democracies today. Yet there is a danger here, one to which I have already alluded. For depoliticisation thus understood is invariably a sinister and subterranean device used by political elites to insulate themselves from critique in order more effectively to impose their (presumably malevolent) desires upon those subject to their power.There is, in other words, a conspiratorial sub-text to much of this. To be fair to him, Burnham is quite explicit and unapologetic about this sub-text, not least in the present contribution – and in that sense it is, for him, less a subtext than a text.The danger, however, is that it remains a sub-text (buried somewhere in the submerged assumptions about political elites) that spills over largely unacknowledged into much of the secondary literature which draws on this definition (and which may not share those assumptions). There is also a second problem. For much of what we typically describe as depoliticisation does not fall easily within the terms of this particular definition.Thus, for instance, the delegation of decision-making discretion to a panel of experts is not a case of depoliticisation, unless of course one assumes that the decisions of such a panel are in fact precisely those that would have been made by the political elites who appointed them (or that they reflect a singular sectional or class interest).We are back to conspiracy again. The point is that it is not as easy as it is invariably assumed to be to disentangle this definition from the assumptions which inform Burnham’s more general approach to governance in capitalist societies – and those assumptions, about the motivations of political elites in particular, are distinctly instrumental. Burnham, it need hardly be pointed out, is not 215

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very interested in giving politicians the benefit of the doubt; and in that sense, his account of depoliticisation comes close to the demonisation of politics and politicians against which Fawcett and Marsh (rightly) warn us.That in itself is not a problem; but it may well pose problems for those who do not share such assumptions, but who are nonetheless attracted to the definition of depoliticisation that he offers. The implications of such an approach Burnham makes very clear in the present contribution, which is concerned with the relationship between capitalist economic crises and the process of depoliticisation.These he sees as intimately, rather than contingently (or politically), linked – and, for me, this is the problem. Indeed, in essence there are two problems here – a certain fatalism about crisis and crisis resolution on the one hand and an associated functionalism about capitalist reproduction in and through crisis on the other. Burnham’s fatalism, as I see it, is bound up with his conviction that during capitalist crises state managers seek, and can only seek, ‘to re-establish the law of value while placing other key areas of policy beyond direct political contestation’ (2014, 8). The problem with such a formulation is that it removes much of the political contingency (and hence, in effect, much of the politics) of the moment of crisis itself. Crises are, and can only be, resolved in one way – through the forcible re-imposition of the law of value (through austerity for instance) at the expense, of course, of the working class. Depoliticisation, for Burnham, is merely an efficient institutional mechanism for dealing with the political side-effects of such a necessity; though it is not strictly guaranteed by crisis management, it is almost bound to be reinforced by it, insofar as it is likely to make the restoration of the law of value a simpler task. There are, I think, two important objections to such a view: that it is politically fatalistic and that it is functionalist (perhaps more accurately, dysfunctionalist). It is fatalistic in that it precludes the possibility that the global financial crisis that we have just witnessed, for instance, could have been responded to in any way other than through austerity. That, I think, is wrong. For crises are, I would contend, politically contingent; and, moreover, until they are resolved they remain politically contingent.Thus, while it was in no sense guaranteed that the crisis would be responded to predominantly through austerity in the first instance in a paradigmreinforcing way, it was always very likely that the existing paradigm would be tested to destruction before any new paradigm might emerge in its stead. The point is that the crisis is far from over and that austerity (the forcible re-imposition of the law of value) has done much more to lengthen and deepen the crisis than it has done to resolve it.

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That leads us to the problem of functionalism. For in this chapter, at least, Burnham simply assumes that: (1) austerity is the form taken by the re-imposition of the law of value in the wake of the current crisis; (2) the re-imposition of the law of value (here, through austerity) is a condition of the resolution of the crisis; and (3) since austerity is a condition of the resolution of the crisis there can be no other resolution (and, as such, it will come to pass). Each of these assumptions, it strikes me, is contestable. Above all else, it is far from self-evident that austerity is good economics (see for instance Blyth, 2013) – and it is certainly no functional fix for the crisis in which we still remain mired. One might well argue that austerity has already proved itself extremely dysfunctional in restoring the law of value. Indeed, one could develop this line of reasoning to suggest that it is precisely because crises are politically contingent that capitalist economies can choose responses to them (like austerity) which are liable to prove so economically damaging.

Neologising depoliticisation Of all the contributions to the present collection, it is Bob Jessop’s which has the potential most to redefine how we think about and analyse politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics. As such, it is perhaps the closest to offering a manifesto for a ‘second wave’ literature on depoliticisation – albeit one significantly at odds with the introduction (whose focus on Schmitt it explicitly – and I think rightly – rejects). It is also, in a way, the most difficult to assess, to evaluate and to comment on. The problem boils down to whether or not we need the novel conceptual framework he develops in the first half of his contribution to understand the dynamic interplay of politicising and depoliticising tendencies that he explores so incisively in the second. I am not convinced. That said, there is undoubtedly a great deal of analytical insight in the second half of this chapter in which Jessop develops, all too briefly to my mind, a penetrating and original perspective on responses to the North Atlantic financial crisis (as he terms it). I am not at all convinced, however, that we need the conceptual armoury he develops in the first half of the chapter to reach these conclusions. That said, I am acutely aware that I may well be missing something here. For me, the three-fold distinction between politisation, politicalisation and politicisation (and their ‘depol-’ analogues) that Jessop develops simply lacks the intuitive capacity to animate and capture something of its subject matter that I typically associate with his conceptual work. I can tell you what a Schumpeterian post-national workfare regime is and where you might find one; but I struggle to differentiate clearly in my own mind between depolitisation 217

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and depoliticalisation – and I find myself genuinely unconvinced that they illuminate the substantive processes he describes so well. More fundamentally, I see Jessop’s chosen theoretical armoury as providing inadequate resources for conceptualising – let alone reconceptualising – politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics. Let me try to explain why. First, what I find perhaps most frustrating about this chapter is its failure to engage with the existing literature on this topic. A great deal has been written on politicisation and depoliticisation, not least by those brought together in this collection of chapters. Before building a new conceptual apparatus for interrogating the object of analysis of this literature, it is surely first necessary to consider the conceptual resources – limited though they may well be – already available and to explain, in a sense, how the new conceptual architecture relates to and goes beyond the old.Thus, although Jessop tells us that the concept of depoliticisation requires disambiguation he gives precious little sense of how it has been used by those who have deployed it to explore themes similar to those he considers here. That is a shame – not least because it makes it far more difficult to see what is at stake in adjudicating a choice between competing conceptual paradigms. Second, and perhaps related, I think we should have a certain reticence and reluctance about advancing new conceptual schema – especially where the limitations of the existing conceptual resources have yet to be established. Were we engaged in a solely intellectual exercise this might well be legitimate; but where (as here) we are exploring some of the most pressing political pathologies of our age in the hope that we might contribute to resolving them, I think it is far less tolerable.That is perhaps a little too strong; but I would argue, passionately, that when we write on topics like depoliticisation – particularly when we acknowledge (as in the contribution of Fawcett and Marsh) the links to other political pathologies of our times like pervasive political disaffection and disengagement – we have at minimum a responsibility to translate whatever insights our theoretically-informed analyses generate into a language which is accessible to others. The creation of a new conceptual armoury is by no means incompatible with that, but it certainly doesn’t make our task any easier. Here I remain unconvinced that the theoretical and conceptual innovation is a condition of generating the insights of the more substantive analysis. One of the reasons for that is that there are some obvious problems with the categories Jessop deploys here. First, rather surprisingly given the characteristic range and breadth of the strategic–relational approach, the focus on polity, politics and policy, certainly as developed here, encourages Jessop to focus rather narrowly on the formal and governmental aspects of the political.The narrowness of this focus is made clear when he explains 218

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the links between the three fields he identifies: ‘the constitution of the polity…affects unevenly capacities to engage in politics…and this in turn constrains the range of feasible policies’ (2014, 2). This state-centrism is compounded in his definition of politics as referring to ‘formally instituted, organised or informal practices that are directly oriented to, or otherwise shape, the exercise of state power’ (2014, 3). There is nothing necessarily wrong with this formulation, but: (1) it is a much more limited and statecentric conception of politics and the political than that deployed by any of the other authors in this collection; and, consequently, (2) it circumscribes much more tightly than in the existing literature the field over which politicisation and depoliticisation processes might be seen to range. Second, despite the title of the chapter, there is very little politics in Jessop’s analysis – the depoliticisation he maps, charts and describes so well is in fact never repoliticised.We gain little traction on the question of what motivates political elites in response to this particular crisis to engage in the various depoliticising practices that Jessop describes, save other than a rather vague sense (consistent in a way with Burnham’s contribution), that depoliticisation is functionally efficacious for them insofar as it insulates them from critique and facilitates the imposition of swinging austerity.We are, once again, in danger of demonising politics and politicians without first seeking to gauge a sense of their motivations. Third, and partly as a consequence, Jessop’s use of his own categories helps him re-describe in more abstract terms the response to the crisis (or aspects of it), but it does not contribute towards (and in fact leads him to stop short of offering) an explanation for that response.There is very little sense here of why any of this happened in the way that it did and what the points of contingency were in this process. In lieu of explanation, and in contrast to some of the more empirical contributions to this special issue, we are offered only abstracted re-description. In effect, Jessop’s chapter generates a series of categories which he shows can be applied to the empirical phenomena of the depoliticised response to the crisis. That is certainly valuable, but it begs the question of causation.

Depoliticised governance as governmentality Emma Foster, Peter Kerr and Christopher Byrne’s excellent and highly original chapter builds essentially from a critique of one of the core claims made early in Bob Jessop’s chapter – that whereas politicisation involves extending the frontiers of the polity, depoliticisation involves rolling them back (2014, 6).This Foster et al challenge, drawing creatively and ultimately convincingly on Foucault’s writings on governmentality. In so doing and without explicitly acknowledging it, they remind us that depoliticisation, 219

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certainly as defined by Burnham, is not about less politics but about a different kind of politics altogether. In effect, their chapter charts, details and describes the subterranean institutional and ideational ensemble (of depoliticised and, for them, neoliberal governance as governmentality) that has emerged in the shadows of an ostensibly (but in fact only superficially) retreating state. Though I am no Foucauldian and do have some objections to the at times rather agentless, holistic and amorphous conception of change that it presents, I have very considerable sympathy for this chapter. It surprises me, just as I suspect it surprises the authors, that Foucault’s writings on governmentality have not been brought before into the literature on depoliticisation. That such natural affinities and synergies had not previously been explored, however, arguably just makes Foster et al’s contribution all the more significant. I have little other than admiration for this chapter — certainly as an exploration of the heuristic value of rethinking depoliticisation through a Foucauldian lens — and can, as a consequence, deal with it a little more sparingly. That said, there are some tensions and difficulties within it which, though far from irresolvable, require some further reflection in the ongoing development and application of this potentially highly fruitful approach to questions of politicisation and depoliticisation. I confine myself here to four of these. First, I think the central claim of this chapter – that, far from rolling back the state, the advent and consolidation of a depoliticised neoliberal governmentality represents a rolling forward of the state – is over-stated and in fact in danger of distracting us from a rather more important point. Indeed, it strikes me that, rather perversely, there is almost something of a quantitative fetish at work here. Foster et al are so keen, it seems, to make and defend the (quantitative) claim that we have not less state (as so many of us have been fooled into thinking) but more state, that they fail adequately to detail, describe and defend (qualitatively) the much more important claim about the character and form of the (subterranean) web of governance that has grown in the shadows of the seemingly rapidly receding state. This is not a profound problem, in that it might easily be rectified in subsequent writing. What, however, this chapter fails to provide, while perhaps whetting one’s appetite for, is an account of the state’s changing point(s), mode(s) and rationalities of intervention. At the same time, it strikes me that the claim that there has been an ‘insidious rolling forward of state power’ is contestable. Central bank independence, for instance, may well better insulate (neo)-monetarist (or, in Foster et al’s terms, neoliberal) monetary policy from democratic scrutiny and political

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contestation, but I do not really see how it represents a rolling forward of the state. Second, there is something of a tendency in this chapter, common to much of the wider literature on neoliberal governmentality, to conflate governmentality on the one hand and neoliberal governmentality on the other. The term neoliberalism is not really defined and is used, it strikes me, rather loosely to refer simply to the pervasive societal, political and economic presuppositions of our age whatever they happen to be. This, I think, lacks precision and, in the end, makes it rather more difficult for Foster et al to identify the extent to which new points, modes and rationalities of state intervention have emerged, the extent to which they remain contested, the tensions within them and their consequences for those subject (directly or indirectly) to their effects. This, in turn, contributes to a third problem – the rather amorphous, hermetic and above all agentless conception of the rise of neoliberal governmentality as an inexorable, inevitable and irresistible force. Clearly one does not need to be wedded normatively, politically or ideologically to neoliberalism in order to exhibit neoliberal rationalities – and this, of course, makes it much more difficult to account for the institutionalisation and diffusion of neoliberal norms and modes of governance. We do, however, need rather more of a sense of where they come from, how they have proliferated, how they have become institutionalised and also how they might be resisted than Foster et al seem at present capable of providing. Once again, it seems, the closest we get to this is a rather vague sense that depoliticised neoliberal governmentality exists and has become institutionally consolidated because it is functional for the perpetration of something malign and insidious. That clearly will not do. Finally, and perhaps unremarkably, there is a very clear normative sense in Foster et al’s chapter that depoliticised neoliberal governmentality is a sinister thing and a malign force – and that, consequently, something potentially precious and valuable is lost in the transition from whatever predated depoliticised neoliberal governmentality to what we have today. They remain, however, very unclear about the nature of this loss, and that, I think, is a major problem. In general, their depiction of politics, politicians (insofar as they feature at all) and the motives of political elites gives very little clue as to why we might prefer a more clearly politicised mode of governance to the dull conformity engendered by neoliberal rationalities writ large. That, too, will not do. If we are to repoliticise depoliticisation, as I think we must, as part of an argument for restoring a politics that is conducted in public and that is visibly deliberative (certainly more visibly deliberative than that we have today) then we need to be very clear about what it is about such a politics that is valuable and worthy of struggling 221

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for. Foster et al give us a very strong sense of what is wrong with what we have, but they currently give us very little sense of what we might wish to put in its place.

Second wave or second generation? Towards an empirical reappraisal of depoliticisation This brings me, with some considerable enthusiasm, to the three more empirical and substantive contributions to the present collection of chapters. These are universally excellent – and they suggest to me at least that if the literature on politicisation and depoliticisation is to develop, as I think it must, it is perhaps best to do so by engaging in detail and a manner that it has thus far largely failed to do with a series of empirical instances (or cases) of politicising–depoliticising dynamics and to reflect on (and to seek to resolve) the limitations of the existing theoretical literature in the light of that engagement.That is precisely what each of these chapters sets out to do and precisely what each achieves.Taken together they constitute a very significant contribution to our understanding of politicisation and depoliticisation – though one, I think, more consistent with the idea of a second generation of writing and scholarship on the subject rather than a second wave at odds with the first. Given my sympathy for each of these chapters and the considerable synergies between them, I will consider them together and in somewhat less detail than the more theoretical pieces reviewed above. Indeed, I will merely seek to pull out three themes – one from each chapter – which emerge from their empirical analyses and do my best to explain their (considerable) significance in the context of the broader literature. The first of these concerns the dynamic interplay over time of politicisation and depoliticisation dynamics which emerges most clearly as an issue in the truly excellent and, I think, extremely important chapter on the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates in the UK by Stephen Bates, Laura Jenkins and Fran Amery. This chapter, more than any other contribution to this collection, charts new ground by opening up in a richly empirical way questions of temporality which have thus far tended not to be explored in any detail in the literature on politicisation and depoliticisation (save other than a few suggestive comments in the introductory chapter). In particular, Bates et al show – or at least hint strongly – at a phased relationship over time between the relative politicisation of an issue in different domains or arenas. I would suggest, though this is in fact not an argument that they themselves make, that we would expect to see the same phased relationship (or chronology) that they describe conserved (to a greater or lesser extent) between different 222

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cases. Their example, policy related to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), is an excellent one in that arguably it did not exist as a political issue (a potential subject or object of legal regulation) before and until the birth of the first ‘test-tube baby’, Louise Brown, in July 1978.As such, Bates et al are able to chart the relative politicisation of the question of ART regulation across time from the first identification of the issue as political. This they do, usefully deploying Wood and Finders’ distinction between discursive, societal and formal/governmental modes of politicisation.Their argument can be summarised schematically as follows. The birth of Louise Brown has the effect of generating a political space (a realm of contingency and potential governance) that did not previously exist (in that such questions of reproduction were previously deemed natural rather than social or political in kind). In this sense, the advent of ARTs is discursively politicising; it also has the effect of generating a regulatory vacuum and that, in turn, rapidly leads to the development of a societal controversy about how ARTs should be governed. As this suggests type 3 politicisation is rapidly followed by type 2 (societal) politicisation in anticipation of a governmental and legislative response (type 1 politicisation). This type 2 politicisation we might expect to take the form of an agenda-setting debate and this, in turn, we might expect to influence (albeit only selectively) the type 1 decision-making process. Finally, we might expect the initiation of a formal decision-making process in parliament to lead to a societal repoliticisation of the issue as the wider public debate is reignited by the formal political controversy surrounding the appropriate regulatory regime. Once this is settled, however, and legislation is passed, we might expect to see a waning of both societal and formal/governmental politicisation. Figure 1 presents an albeit stylised representation of that chronology – in effect the natural life-cycle of a formally politicised issue. The point, however, is that this is a chronology that one might expect to be replicated in other instances of policy making – and, insofar as that is indeed the case, this is a very important observation in the context of the developing literature. Caroline Kuzemko draws our attention to a similar, and similarly overlooked, issue – namely the extent to which the pathologies of depoliticised modes of governance (here those issuing from the privatisation of energy policy) might themselves contribute to, or even serve directly to unleash, powerful repoliticising dynamics. This, too, is a rich and fascinating contribution. Her argument, cogent and compelling in equal measure, is that the effective loss of governance capacity associated with the privatisation and light-touch regulation of energy provision in the UK contributed to the instability of this depoliticised governance regime. For it exposed such a regime to the possibility (and, indeed, the 223

Tracing the political Figure 1: The chronology of politicisation in policy making Degree of politicisation

Agendasetting

Decision making (legislation)

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Time Discursive politicisation Societal politicisation Formal/governmental politicisation

subsequent reality) of repoliticisation through discursive securitisation – in and through which concerns (largely spurious, as it turns out) about the security of the UK’s energy supply (particularly its perceived reliance on Russian pipelines) led to depoliticised governance being repoliticised and (partially) reconstituted. As with the Bates et al’s chapter there are, I think, wider implications of Kuzemko’s contribution. For what her detailed analysis of this case study reminds us is that depoliticisation, whatever its perceived advantages to the architects of neoliberal governmentality, does not always make for good or effective governance – and, as such, it does not necessarily make for stable governance. Consequently, here as elsewhere, the literature needs to be more attuned to some of the unanticipated (but predictable) pathological and potentially even crisisprone consequences of depoliticisation – and the extent to which these might themselves contribute to tilting the always precarious and dynamic balance between politicised and depolicised modes of governance over time in one direction or the other. Finally, and very simply, Ross Beveridge and Matthias Naumann seek to restore agents to the processes of politicisation and depoliticisation which, all too frequently in the existing literature (new and old alike), have been overlooked.They remind us, in effect, that all politics is made and remade by human hands and, more particularly, that despite the proliferation of global depoliticisation norms, resistance and coordinated local action can and does make a difference. Their chapter provides, I think, an excellent note on which to conclude. For while it might well be easier to see the human hands at work in consciously coordinated strategies aimed at 224

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repoliticisation (as in the case of the partial municipalisation of the Berlin Water Company in 2012 that they describe in some detail), depoliticisation too is the product of human agency. If there is a core challenge that remains for the literature on depoliticisation today it is surely to identify better, to describe in more detail and to explain more effectively the disparate and complex motivations of political elites as they continue to design and build institutions that prevent us from seeing clearly the political choices that govern our ostensibly democratic societies. That is no easy task, but in the final three chapters of this collection above all I think I can begin to discern the route ahead for a second generation (rather than a second wave) of scholars working on these most pressing questions. Note 1 Of course, this is not Schmitt’s conclusion – but herein lies the path to authoritarianism that many have discerned in his writing. References Bates, S, Jenkins, L, Amery, F, 2014, (De)politicisation and the Father’s Clause parliamentary debates, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 243–58 Beveridge, R, Naumann, M, 2014, Global norms, local contestation: Privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 275–91 Blyth, M, 2013, Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3, 2, 127–49 Burnham, P, 2014, Depoliticisation: Economic crisis and political management, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 189–206 Crouch, C, 2004, Post-democracy, Cambridge: Polity Crouch, C, 2008,What will follow the demise of privatised Keynesianism?, Political Quarterly 79, 4, 476–87 Crouch, C, 2009, Privatised Keynesianism: An unacknowledged policy regime, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11, 3, 382–99 Fawcett, P, Marsh, D, 2014, Depoliticisation, governance and political participation, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 171–88 Flinders, M, Wood, M, 2014, Depoliticisation, governance and the state [Introduction to special issue], Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 135–49 Foster, EA, Kerr, P, Byrne, C, 2014, Rolling back to roll forward: Depoliticisation and the extension of government, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 225–41

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Hay, C, 2006, Managing economic interdependence, in P Dunleavy, R Heffernan, P Cowley, C Hay (eds) Developments in British politics 8, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Hay, C, 2007, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Hay, C, 2011, Pathology without crisis? The strange demise of the Angloliberal growth model, Government and Opposition 46,1, 1–31 Hay, C, Smith, N, 2014, The resilience of Anglo-liberalism in the absence of growth, in V Schmidt, M Thatcher (eds) Resilient liberalism in European political economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Jessop, B, 2014, Repoliticising depoliticisation: Theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 207–23 Kuzemko, C, 2014, Politicising UK energy:What ‘speaking energy security’ can do, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 259–74 Monagle, C, 2010,A sovereign act of negation: Schmitt’s political theology and its ideal medievalism, Culture,Theory and Critique 51, 2, 115–27 Mouffe, C, 1993, The return of the political, London:Verso Ranciere, J, 1995, On the shores of politics, London:Verso Roberts, A, 2011, The logic of discipline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Schmitt, C, 2007, The concept of the political, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Wood, M, Flinders, M, 2014, Rethinking depoliticisation: Beyond the governmental, Policy & Politics, Special issue, 42, 2, 151–70

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Thinking big: the political imagination Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

Our aim in editing this collection was to be provocative and to open up a debate, and we appear to have succeeded. Specifically, we seem to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, who makes several abject criticisms of the collection. He is uninspired by Bob Jessop’s ‘neologistic’ approach to the topic, exhausted by the myriad of attempts at conceptual re-formulation, and somewhat aghast at the potential implications of our own discussion of Carl Schmitt’s work. In this very short concluding chapter, we respond to Hay’s critique of our own pieces, and of the broader purpose of this collection, in three senses. First, we defend our invocation of Carl Schmitt’s political theory. Our discussion was only intended to historically and theoretically contextualise the collection, not to adopt Schmitt’s approach.We defend our attempt to broaden out the conceptual terrain of politicisation and depoliticisation. The wider literature we identify does indeed pose problems for how theorists like Burnham define depoliticisation (as important as his seminal contribution is), and if we are to accept the need for broader analysis, then further conceptual work is sorely needed. Last, and relatedly, we defend the need to ‘think big’ in terms of generating broad, cross-disciplinary frameworks in an increasingly hermetic and segmented academic context. While Hay is right that conceptual rethinking is of no value in and of itself, and that empirical analysis is greatly needed, he is wrong to suggest that scholars simply abandon attempts at ‘thinking big’, and settle for more empirical case studies (as important as they are). In this regard, we acknowledge a huge intellectual debt to the work of C.Wright Mills, and in particular his The sociological imagination (1959). Of great significance was Mills’ criticism of what he labelled ‘abstracted empiricism’ – the practice of confining social science to small studies or specific domains without drawing them together in broad generalisations about society as a whole. Stanley Aronowitz’s Taking it big: C. Wright Mills and the making of political intellectuals (2012) traces ‘the scaffolding’ of this approach and its contemporary relevance in ways that dovetail with the aims of this collection.Therefore, the intellectual project we hope to have set in motion with this special issue is to consider the ways that theoretical, conceptual 227

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and empirical insights can be connected from different strands of the discipline to generate interesting and novel insights into the pressing political tensions of our time. In other words, we aim to ‘think big’ in a way that has substantial potential, but must also navigate and deal with a number of risks or misinterpretations.

Invoking Schmitt Hay’s first objection is directed primarily at our introductory piece in which we invoke the work of Carl Schmitt as a way of setting out the context within which the collection is positioned. Hay argues that ‘the case they make for their approach to depoliticisation as a cogent and holistic alternative … is not entirely compelling, and the (Schmittian) concept of politics on which it is ostensibly predicated I find normatively troubling, analytically somewhat confusing and not entirely consistent with the articles that follow’ (p 295, this book). Given the strength of this criticism, it is perhaps useful here to re-state why we discuss Schmitt’s definition of politics in the first place. The reason we give is that we believe ‘a robust rereading of Schmitt’s work can inform contemporary debates concerning the nature of politics’ (p 138). Specifically, Schmitt’s discussion of the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ is useful because it contextualises what is at stake between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ definitions of politics and ‘the political’ offered in the special issue. Schmitt’s critique of broad definitions – that they generate an unacceptably circular focus on ‘the state’ – but also his potentially problematic broader definition – the friend–enemy distinction – provide theoretical points of reflection for those, such as Burnham, who promote ‘incisively specified’ definitions, and also those, such as Bates et al, who (in this book) promote a ‘broader’ definition of ‘the political’. The approach we have taken, contextualising the contributions to the book using Schmitt’s distinction, is supported by a range of literature that recognises how, as Chantal Mouffe (1999, pp 38-9) argues,‘a confrontation with his [Schmitt’s] thought … allow(s) us to acknowledge – and, therefore, be in a better position to navigate – an important paradox inscribed in the very nature of liberal democracy’, namely, the ‘tension between liberalism and democracy’. William Hooker’s (2009) Carl Schmitt’s international thought (Chapter 1), Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore’s (2013) The legal theory of Carl Schmitt (Chapter 4), and contributors to Stephen Legg’s (2011) Spatiality, sovereignty and Carl Schmitt (especially Chapters 7 and 9) use this distinction as a ‘heuristic’ way for picking out these tensions and contradictions in the fields of international politics, law and political geography (see also Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012). Indeed, in a 228

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major edited international politics book devoted to Schmitt’s thought, Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito (2007, p 3) even argue: Schmitt’s insights can provide scholars from social, legal and political sciences with a new common multidisciplinary research platform that helps to analyse the rise of global terrorism, the current international political environment of the global “War on Terror”, the crisis of international legality, the emergence of US “imperial” hegemony, and the prevalence of global interventionist liberal cosmopolitanism. From this perspective, as Koskenniemi (2004, p 493) notes, ‘Whatever Schmitt’s political choices, readers have been struck by the expressive force of his critiques when applied to contemporary events.’This resonates with our own argument that Schmitt provides, in places, ‘a more subtle and arguably insightful line of thought that resonates with contemporary concerns regarding the decline of civic life and the future of the public sphere’ (p 7, this book). In other words, the purpose of our discussion of Schmitt was not to set in train a single theoretical approach, but to provide a contextual and historical backdrop to the collection as a whole.At no point do we suggest adopting (even partially) Schmitt’s pessimistic and deleterious view of politics as involving conflicts between ‘friends and enemies’. Here we would heed David Chandler’s (2008, p 35) dire warning to international relations scholars that ‘to use Schmitt uncritically would be to fall into the … error of being an apologist for the crimes of sovereign states against their own people.’ In fact, from our own conceptual and normative perspective, we side with Hay himself, and the sophisticated and nuanced middle way he finds between broad and narrow definitions of ‘the political’ in Why we hate politics (2007a, Chapter 2). ‘Political’ situations are defined as those in which there is a recognised capacity for collective human agency. It is for precisely this reason that we eschew any discussion of Schmitt when we come to make our substantive contribution to the edited collection in our second chapter, ‘Rethinking depoliticisation’ (on which see below). Our invocation of Schmitt’s work, then, was not, as Hay suggests, an attempt to advocate his theory of politics. It was instead to place the conceptual debates between the chapters in this collection in historical and theoretical context.

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In praise of diversity We also hoped, in this contribution and in our second chapter, to broaden out discussion of depoliticisation from an arguably narrow literature dominated by British political economy and state theory. Pete Burnham’s (2001) contribution in this stream of literature is seminal and his definition is important, but it is also far from a final definition that all should follow. Indeed, as we show with our critical literature mapping exercise, if we take a cross-disciplinary perspective (as we believe analysts should), then Burnham’s definition becomes more problematic. We advocate building conceptual tools from such a systematic, cross-disciplinary review, which to date has not been done, rather than privileging one particular body of literature. However, it also seems that Hay finds this argument problematic. Hay’s second major objection is therefore that we do not need to ‘reject’ established definitions within the depoliticisation literature (inspired by Burnham’s work), and that authors in this collection (including ourselves) calling for a ‘second wave’ of conceptual reformulation overstate the need for such reformulation. Hay (p 302, this book) therefore defends Burnham’s definition of depoliticisation as ‘important and extremely useful.’ He writes of the assumptions in existing literature that ‘each is better than the alternative at the time, each is explicitly acknowledged (and justified) as a simplifying analytical device and, as a consequence, one does not need a bout of rethinking and reconceptualization to correct such distortions’ (p 294, this book). And yet, paradoxically, Hay also fervently agrees with the empirical pieces of Kuzemko, Beveridge and Naumann and Bates et al, lauding them as ‘universally excellent’ – and we would agree they are (p 308, this book). The paradox here is that all three of these latter contributions adopt the kind of fresh and ‘broader’ definitions of depoliticisation that Hay appears to object to. It is therefore insightful that Hay writes that he finds himself ‘identified as part of a “first wave”’ [our emphasis], and hence defends its assumptions. Indeed, the way in which Hay (p 294, this book) identifies with the ‘first wave’ of literature is instructive, as he argues that it highlights ‘the urgent need to come to terms with a recently identified problem, pathology or societal condition’ rather than its conceptual or theoretical presuppositions.We might hence suggest that Hay’s objections arise not from a substantive preference for one definition over another, nor necessarily their conceptual or theoretical basis (indeed, his own well-known constructivism and his comment that our own conceptual map could include more of a discursive element would bely any newfound appreciation for Burnham’s unapologetic Open Marxism). Rather, 230

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the objections Hay voices arise more from a concern that by launching a ‘second wave’ of research, we risk neglecting the substantive research problem of detecting the causes of anti-politics and declining levels of political participation. Hay’s intervention here is a very insightful and valuable one, and, as with so much of his voluminous scholarship, drills right down in a thoughtful yet incisive manner to interrogate the very foundations of the enterprise we, as political scientists, undertake. In doing so, he raises a fundamental question: What value can conceptual and theoretical reflection/reformulation have if it does not address or attempt to solve substantive empirical problems of analysis? For Hay to be raising this question is perhaps surprising, particularly for someone who has consistently argued that we should all be attentive to the analytical implications of our ontological and epistemological assumptions (Hay, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007b, 2011, 2014). It is nonetheless a very salient question, and we would agree that ‘problembased research’, as Gerry Stoker (2013) has recently advocated, should be central to our work as political scientists. However, as very recent contributions to the depoliticisation literature show, nuanced theoretical/ conceptual reflection and problem-driven empirical research need not be mutually exclusive (for a discussion, see Wood, 2015). Most prominently,Tom Willems and Wouter van Dooren (2014) adopt a nuanced conceptual perspective built on our map of (de)politicisation processes, in order to show how public–private partnerships (PPPs) depoliticise decision-making by limiting the scope of future budgetary discretion by governments, and to advocate their repoliticisation in the public arena. They argue that these partnerships need to be ‘repoliticised’ in a ‘societal’ sense (raising awareness) and ‘discursive’ sense (promoting critical debate over their outcomes):‘it is important that the political nature of PPP projects is recognized and that policy alternatives are debated in the public forums’ (Willems and van Dooren, 2014, p 19). Willems and van Dooren’s excellent analysis shows how adopting our variegated map of depoliticisation processes can be coupled with critical analytical interrogation of arguably anti-democratic policy decisions.

Thinking big In the late 1950s, C. Wright Mills wrote a note to himself on the state of the social sciences: Hopeful interpretations are readily seen as an escapist fantasy. The general danger of this … is simply the collapse of all radical imagination. The specific danger is that we abdicate all 231

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imagination to the technologists who, without the guidance provided by interplay with other cultural workmen, simply project more of the one thing they know. (quoted in Dandaneau, 2001, p 81) This plea is not merely for ‘interdisciplinarity’, but for social scientists to expand their horizons beyond their ever narrowing professional trajectories, which today are almost always focused on the next big research grant. Echoing Mills’ concern, we suggest that approaches are needed which ‘think big’ about the future of our liberal democratic capitalist societies. Some scholars are doing this empirically, in ‘big data’ studies (Monroe, 2011), or large quantitative analyses of democratic development (Bochsler and Kriesi, 2013), and of course, magisterial historical treatises like John Keane’s (2009) sweeping Life and death of democracy and Thomas Pikkety’s (2014) seismic Capital in the twenty-first century.These projects and books are breath-taking in their ambition and scope, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Attempts at bringing theoretical and conceptual insights together from across the social sciences, speaking to multiple audiences using a common language and eclectic set of concepts, remain rare. Perhaps, ultimately, the eclecticism and diversity of this collection is the reason behind Hay’s objections. We invited what we knew would be an eclectic, even contradictory, range of scholars because we thought the concepts of (de)politicisation have the potential to connect a diverse range of approaches and analytical levels, and we aimed to unleash this diversity and develop what we might call, echoing Mills, a ‘political imagination’ to complement his ‘sociological imagination’. We were reaching for something more.We believe that political science is becoming increasingly narrow in its horizons, with ever more pressures for scholars to hide away in their hermetic sub-fields.We did not offer a ‘research agenda’ or attempt to impose one theoretical approach. This approach is perhaps risky, and open to misinterpretation. One, which Hay rightly identifies, is the accusation of reinventing the wheel. ‘Whether or not we live in “exceptional times”’, he writes, ‘and whether or not the crisis marks the passage from a “normal” to an “exceptional” phase of the political, it is problematic to assume that each such historical juncture requires new theoretical perspectives or even new conceptual resources’ (p 295, this book).This is surely right. But in attempting to think big, we weren’t suggesting that we need brand new, never before seen conceptual resources. Rather, we were suggesting we need to imaginatively combine or leverage existing perspectives and resources to produce more common linguistic tools and eclectic frameworks for tackling in flexible and compelling ways some of the big problems of our times. 232

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References Aronowitz, S, 2012, Taking it big: C.Wright Mills and the making of political intellectuals, New York: Columbia University Press Bochsler, D and Kriesi, H, 2013, Varieties of democracy, in H. Kriesi, D. Bochsler, J. Matthes, S. Lavenex, M. Bühlmann and F. Esser (eds) Democracy in the age of globalization and mediatization, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 69-104 Burnham, P, 2001, New Labour and the politics of depoliticisation, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 3, 2, 127-49 Chandler, D, 2008, The revival of Carl Schmitt in international relations: The last refuge of critical theorists? Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 37, 1, 27-48 Croce, M and Salvatore, A, 2013, The legal theory of Carl Schmitt, London: Routledge Dandaneau, S, 2001, Taking it big: Developing sociological consciousness in postmodern times, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Hay, C, 2002, Political analysis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Hay, C, 2004, Theory, stylized heuristic or self-fulfilling prophecy? The status of rational choice theory in public administration, Public Administration, 82, 1, 39-62 Hay, C, 2006, Political ontology, in C.Tilly and B. Goodin (eds) The Oxford handbook of contextual political analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 78-96 Hay, C, 2007a, Why we hate politics, Cambridge: Polity Hay, C, 2007b, Does ontology trump epistemology? Notes on the directional dependence of ontology and epistemology in political analysis, Politics, 27, 2, 115-18 Hay, C, 2011, Interpreting interpretivism interpreting interpretations: the new hermeneutics of public administration, Public Administration, 89, 1, 167-82 Hay, C, 2014, Neither real nor fictitious but “as if real”? A political ontology of the state, The British Journal of Sociology, 65, 3, 459-80 Hooker, W, 2009, Carl Schmitt’s international thought: order and orientation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Keane, J, 2009, The life and death of democracy, New York: Simon & Schuster Koskenniemi, M, 2004, International law as political theology: how to read Nomos der Erde?, Constellations, 11, 4, 492-511 Minca, C and Vaughan-Williams, N, 2012, Carl Schmitt and the concept of the border, Geopolitics, 17, 4, 756-72 Monroe, B, 2011,The five Vs of big data: political science introduction to the virtual issue on big data in political science, Political Analysis, 19, 66-86

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Mouffe, C, 1999, Carl Schmitt and the paradox of liberal democracy, in C. Mouffe (ed) The challenge of Carl Schmitt, London:Verso, 38-53 Odysseos, L and Petito, F, 2007, Introduction, in L. Odysseos and F. Petito (eds) The international political thought of Carl Schmitt, Abingdon: Routledge, 1-18 Pikkety,T, 2014, Capital in the twenty-first century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Stoker, G, 2013, Designing politics: a neglected justification for political science, Political Studies Review, 11, 2, 174-81 Willems, T and van Dooren, W, 2014, (De)politicization dynamics in public–private partnerships (PPPs): lessons from a comparison between UK and Flemish PPP policy, Public Management Review, 1-22 Wood, M, 2015, Politicisation, depoliticisation and anti-politics: towards a multi-level research agenda, Political Studies Review, http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1478-9302.12074/abstract Wright Mills, C, 1959, The sociological imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Index

A Abolafia, M 37 Abrams, P 79–80 ‘abstracted empericism’ (Wright Mills) 227 Adams, T 37 adversarial politics see antagonism and conflict politics Agamben, G 4–5, 11–14 ‘the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’ (Schmitt) 4–6, 7–10 Ahlers, R 188 Alberti, S 195 Alton, Lord 152 ‘analytical eclecticism’ 176 Anleu, SR 144 antagonism and conflict politics 61–2, 96, 98, 206–9 promotion of 35 in search for new neutral domains 9–10 anti-privatisation and remunicipalisation discourses181–97 Arditi, B 6 Arendt, H 96 Aronowitz, S 227 Asset Purchase Facility 84 assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) background politics 143–6 politicisation of 143–6, 147–9 subsequent depoliticisation 149–55, 222–3 austerity politics 78–9, 80–2, 88, 105, 110, 112, 208–9, 216–17

B Baker, K and Stoker, G 58 Bakker, K 187, 191–2 Balzacq, T 37–8 Bang, HP 47, 54–5, 61–4, 66, 213–14 Bang, HP and Esmark, A 61 Bang, HP and Jensen, MJ 54–5 Bang, HP and Sørensen, E 61 Bank of England 84 financial stability regulation 85 Banking Act-2009 84–5

banking crisis 80–1, 83 depoliticisation strategies 83–8 vs ‘nationalisation’ of banks 86–8 and ‘scientisation’ trends 37 as separate from crisis of capitalism 80 stability mechanisms post–2011 85–8 Barker, Baroness 151 Barraqué, B 186 Barry, A 105–6 Bates, S, Jenkins, L and Amery, F 15, 222–3 (de)politicisation of the Father’s Clause (HFE) 139–57 Bauman, Z 10, 35, 38 BBC 146 Beck, U 38 Behnis, M 192 beliefs and traditions, role in discursive depoliticisation 36 Bell, S and Hindmoor, A 4, 58 Bendersky, J 5 Berkhout, J et al 32 Berlin, utilities privatisation and remunicipalisation 181–97 Beveridge, R 22, 37, 189–90 Beveridge, R and Naumann, M 15, 224–5 on utilities privatisation and remunicipalisation 181–97 Hay’s critique of 224–5 Bevir, M 4, 58 Bevir, M and Rhodes, R 36, 58 ‘biopower’ (Foucault) 126–7 Blair, Tony 173 Block, F 90 Blühdorn, I 28, 30, 32 Blunkett, David 149 Blyth, M 217 Bochsler, D and Kriesi, H 232 Bode, I and Firbank, O 30 Boggs, C 3, 31–2 Bonefeld, W 88, 90 Bonefeld, W and Burnham, P 29, 81 Börzel, TA 60 Bourdieu, P 10, 13, 35 Bowles-Simpson Commission 109 Brändström, A and Kuipers, S 28, 33

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Tracing the political Brown, Gordon 86 Browning, CS and McDonald, M 162, 166–7, 171 Brown, W 131 Bryant, Chris 151 Buller, J and Flinders, M 81–2, 141, 161 Buofino, A 37 Burchell, G et al 35–6, 126 Burke, E. 31–2 Burnham, P 14, 21–2, 28–9, 50–3, 72, 78, 80–3, 117–19, 121–3, 141–2, 161, 163–5, 205, 215–17, 230 on capital, crisis and the state 72–8 on depoliticisation as governing strategy 78–83 and limits to 88–90 critique of (Hay) 214–17 Butler-Sloss, Baroness 154 Buzan, B et al 37, 162, 166–8 Byrne, C 117

C Caldwell, PC 5 Cameron, David 35 capitalism, Marxist perspectives 72–4, 89–90 Caplan, AL 144 care for the elderly 30 Carvelho, A and Burgess, J 38 Castoriadis, C 96 Castro, JE 187, 194 CBI 171–2 central banking promotion of independence 81 ‘scientisation’ of 37 CEPMLP 174 Cesare Borgia 51 Chacón, B 192 Chandler, D 229 Chhotray,V and Stoker, G 47 Chile, declining electoral turnout 33 China, and resource nationalism 168–9 choice-less democracies 32–3 Chomsky, N 104 citizenship, and subjectification 131–3 civil service and state governance 29–30 ‘civil society’ 100 Clarke, S 72–3, 77, 89 climate change 38 as ‘crisis state’ 13 Cochrane, A and Passmore, A 189 Coen, D and Thatcher, M 29 Cohen, S 34 Collapse (Diamond) 13 ‘common sense’ narratives 36 commissions of inquiry 105 The concept of the political (Schmitt) 4–16

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analytical themes 5–6 key ideas 6–7 on neutralisation and depoliticisation 7–10 states of exception 10–13 towards a new ‘neutral domain’ 14–16 Conference of Socialist Economists (CSF) 71–2, 76–8 conflict politics see antagonism and conflict politics Conrad, P 37 constitutional law 104 consumer-based democracy 10 Coole, D 143 Copenhagen School scholars 162, 166–8 Cormack, Patrick 150 Corrigan, P and Sayer, D 72, 79, 89 Corry, O 38 Counter democracy (Rosanvallon) 3 crisis states and politics 75–6, 103–4 see also ‘emergency’ states; financial crisis Cristi, R 5 Croce, M and Salvatore, A 228 Crouch, C 3, 182, 205 CSE see Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE)

D Dalton, R 47, 55, 61 Dandaneau, S 231–2 Darling, Alistair 86–7 Davis, K et al 21 De Goede, M 37–8 Dean, M 36, 127–8, 131 Deech, Baroness 152–3 Defending politics (Flinders) 31 dehumanisation of society 9–10 dementia care 37 democracies, limited nature and duration of 120–1 Democratic deficit (Norris) 3 demonising of politics 61–4 Denning, Lord 147–8 Denver, D 32 Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) 174–5 Department of Health 145 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) 168, 172–4 depoliticisation conceptual frameworks overview 1–3, 24, 118–20 concerns and critiques 120–3 Foucauldian 117–19

Index Hay’s mapping of 24–39 interplay between and interdependency of 38–9 three faces critique (Fawcett and Marsh) 48–50 development influences 71–8 Habermas on politics as ‘solution’ 74–6 Marx and theories of capital 72–4 restructuring and crisis perspectives (CSE) 76–8 discourses as ‘analytical’ tool 14–16 as ‘anti-politics’ 120 as governing ‘strategy’ 78–83 and neutral domaines 8–10 politicisation and repoliticisation 61–4 and polity (Jessop) 97–102 as ‘statecraft’ 1–2, 22, 28–30, 48–9, 57–9, 97–9, 127–9, 141–2 as a ‘technique of government’ 11–12 extending mapping framework interests served by depoliticisation 55–6 narrowness of ‘politics’ concept 54–5 newness of the phenomenon 50–2 normative view of politicians 53–4 further reframing of (Foster, Kerr and Byrne) 129–34, 134–5 modes of governance interplay between hierarchy, markets and networks 56–8 and metagovernance of 58–9, 64–5 and the shadow lands of statecraft 59–61 responses to extending conceptual framework (Hay) 203–25 responses to extending conceptual framework (Flinders and Wood) 227–32 second wave reappraisals 222–5 studies of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) 139–55 energy security 161–76 water privatisation 181–97 tactics 29–30, 163–5 desecuritisation 37–8 Deutsch, K 112 Deutsch, K and Fornieri, J 51 Diamond, JM 13 Die Linke 191–6

Disaffected democracies (Pharr and Putnam) 3 discursive depoliticisation 26, 34–8 concept definitions 27–8, 39, 141 ‘Gramscian’ perspectives 28, 34–5 key texts 28 distrust in politics see public distrust of political processes Don’t vote: It just encourages the bastards (O’Rourke) 31 Douglas, M 38 drunkenness, medicalisation of 36–7 DTI see Department of Trade and Industry Durkheim, E 12 Dyson, K 29–30 Dyzenhaus, D 5

E Eastern Philadelphia Organizing Project (EPOP) 132–3 Eberlein, B and Newman, A 30 ecological crisis 13 Ecology and the politics of scarcity (Ophuls) 13 economic policy and political management 71–90 background discourses capitalism and the state (Marx) 72–4, 89–90 regulation vs dysfunctional tendencies (Habermas) 74–6 restructuring through monetarism (CSE) 77 depoliticisation as governing strategy 78–83 and the financial crisis 83–8 limits to 88–90 promoting ‘austerity’ 78–9, 80–2, 88, 105, 110, 112, 208–9, 216–17 ‘scientisation’ of 37 The Economist 170 Edkins, J 37 elderly care 30 electoral turnouts 33, 52 Ellger, C 189 ‘emergency’ states 10–13, 103–4, 112 see also crisis states and politics The end of politics (Boggs) 3, 32 Energy Act (2004) 173 energy governance 161–76 conceptual frameworks for politicisation discourses 162–8, 223–4 security and political priority 165–8 UK depoliticisations 163–5

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Tracing the political understandings through ‘eclecticism’ 175–6 national agendas and security 168–72 politicisation processes 172–5 environmental governance 36 European Policy Forum (2001) 1 Eurozone crisis 111–12 see also financial crisis ‘the exception’ (Schmitt) 10–13

F Falconer, Lord 2 ‘the family’, (de)politicisation of 143–57 Father’s Clause 139–41 parliamentary debates on introduction 147–9 parliamentary debates on the removal 149–55 scrutiny through the lens of (de) politicisation 155–7, 222–3 Fawcett, P and Marsh, D 14, 211–14 deconstructing Flinders and Wood 48–50 issues for further reflection 50–6 modes of governance and depoliticisation 56–61 politicisation and repoliticisation 61–4 Ferguson, J 32 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 85 financial crisis 12–13, 80–1, 83, 107–12 analysis of politics and policy backgrounds 107–12 eurozone and the fiscal compact 111–12 fiscal cliff debate (US) 107–11 depoliticisation strategies 83–8 as means of re-establishing law of value 80–3 and political/administrative crisis (Habermas) 74–6, 80–1, 88–9 stability mechanisms post-2011 85–8 Financial Policy Committee (FPC), role and remit 85–6 Financial Services Bill–2012 85 Finlay, Baroness 152 fiscal cliff debate (US) 108–11 The Fiscal Compact 111–12 fiscal policy see economic policy and political management Fischer, F 105 Fisher, Paul 85–6 Fitch, K 190 Flinders, M 21, 23, 72, 79, 81, 117 Flinders, M and Buller, J 21–3, 25–6, 28, 35, 50–1, 117, 119, 123, 141–3, 161–5, 181

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Flinders, M and Wood, M 47–50, 54, 60, 118, 166, 206–9 analysis of politicisation / depoliticisation frameworks (Hay) 21–39 deconstruction arguments (Fawcett and Marsh) 48–50 Hay’s critique of 204–9 Floyd, R 162 ‘folk devil’ politics 37–8, 133 food safety standards 30 Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) 172 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 172–5 Foster, EA 117 Foster, EA, Kerr, P and Byrne, C 15, 205, 219–22 depoliticisation as bringing government back in 118–23 on neoliberalism and governmentality 123–6, 126–9 reframing (de)politicisation 129–34 Hay’s critique of 219–22 Foucault, M 35–6, 99–101, 118–19, 126–31 on governmentality 126–7, 128 on statecraft 99–100, 127 on ‘the political’ 129–31 Foucault, M et al 126 Fox, Liam 173 Fox, M 146 Frankfurt theorists 74–6 Franklin, S 145, 154 Fukayama, F 32 Furedi, F 16, 38

G Gamble, A 28, 142, 163 Gamble, G 121 Gamble, N 146–7 Garland, D 127–8 Gaynor, N 32 Germany, utilities privatisation and remunicipalisation 181–97 Giddens, A 13, 26 Gill, S 104 Gitlin, T 104 Global security: Russia (FAC) 172 Glynos, J and Howarth, D 106 Gold Standard 81 Golombok, S et al 150 Gornig, M and Häussermann, H 189 governance and the ‘logic of discipline’ 3–4 modes of 56–61 interplay between hierarchy, markets and networks 56–8

Index and metagovernance of 58–9, 64–5 and the shadow lands of statecraft 59–61 see also governmentality; politicisation ‘government’ 126–7 Government by commission: Dangerous and pernicious (Smith) 30 governmental depoliticisiation 25, 28–30 concept definitions 25, 27–8, 39 as governmentality 219–22 key texts 28 mapping framework for (Hay) 24, 25 as ‘statecraft’ 57–8 through technical / economic crisis (Habermas) 74–6 governmentality 15, 48–9, 126–7 contesting ‘rolling forward’ 219–22 and understandings of depoliticisation 127–9 Gramsci, A 14, 99–101, 105 and discursive depoliticisation 28, 34–5 Grant, W 81 Greece, financial crisis 12–13, 88–9 Greenpeace 171 Gregory, R 36 Grzymala-Busse, A 28 Gunther, R et al 33

H Habermas, Jurgen 16, 35–6, 71–2, 74–8, 88–9 Haines, H 36 Hall, D et al 187–8, 194 Hamann, TH 125 Hamilton, C 13 Harder, L 30, 141 Hardt, M and Negri, A 187 Harris, A 128 Harris, Evan 151 Harriss, J 31, 32 Harvey, D 187 Hasnas, J 30 Hassner, P 12 Haumann, TH 131 Häussermann, H and Colomb, C 189 ‘Have I Got News for You’ (BBC) 170 Hay, C 3, 10, 16, 23–7, 30, 33, 57, 60–4, 81, 117, 120–1, 129–31, 141–4, 150, 161–8, 170, 182–6, 189–90, 196–7, 205–6, 209, 230–2 politicisation and depoliticisation framework 24–7

responses to extending depoliticisation 203–25 Hay, C and Smith, N 205–6 Hayes, MH and Victor, DG 168 Health and Social Care Act–2012 2 Heidenheimer, AJ 14, 96 Hell and high water (McIntosh) 13 Helm, D 163–4, 173 hierarchy and power 59–61 Hindess, B 130 Hirst, P 6 HM Treasury 83, 85–6, 87–8 Holloway, J 80 Holloway, J and Picciotto, S 76–7 Holm, A and Kuhn, A 193 Honig, B 152 Hooghe, L and Marks, G 31 Hooker, W 228 Hoppe, R 37 House of Commons 171–4 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2005) 146, 172–3 Hout, W and Robison, R 29 Howarth, Baroness 154 Howarth, D et al 142 Howell, A 37 Hüesker, F 190–1, 194 Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Acts background politics of 143–6 insertion of ‘Father’s Clause’ 139–41, 147–9 removal of Clause 149–55 Huysmans, J 11–12, 38 hyper-politicisations 37–8

I identity politics 63 illegal immigration 38 IMF, on recessionary policies 81 In search of politics (Bauman) 35 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) politicisation 143–6, 147–9 subsequent depoliticisation 149–55, 222–3 Industrial Relations Act-1971 81–2 ‘input’ politics 54–5, 60–4, 213–14 beneficiaries of depoliticisation 55–6 International Energy Agency (IEA) 169 International Relations, constructivist approaches 36 Ireland, national recovery plan 12–13 Irish Times 12 Is democracy a lost cause? (Mastropaola) 3 Italy, financial crisis 13 ITPOES 169, 171

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J James, S 22, 30 Jasper, M 32 Jenkins, L 22–3, 28, 34, 36, 117, 119, 120, 129–31, 142, 161, 165 Jessop, B 14, 58–9, 65, 97, 102, 107, 127, 205, 217–19 critique of (Hay) 217–19 on polity, politics and policy 95–7 and depoliticisation 97–107 on US fiscal crisis 107–11 on eurozone fiscal crisis 111–12 Joyce, M et al 84

K Kalyvas, A 5 Katz, R and Mair, P 32 Kay, JA and Thompson, DJ 186 Keane, J 3, 21, 232 Kenny, Enda 12 Kerr, P et al 35, 117 Kettell, S 22, 29, 81, 117, 123, 141, 144 Khodorkhovsky, Mikhail 169 Kinchy, A 37 Kinnvall, C and Nesbitt-Larking, P 37 Klare, M 169 Klein, R 153 Klijn, E-H and Edelenbos, J 58 Kolbert, E 13 Kooiman, J and Jentoft, S 58 Koskenniemi, M 229 Krippner, G 22, 29, 32–3, 80–1 Kuhn, T 8 Kunz, R 30 Kuzemko, C 15, 165, 173–4, 223–4 on energy governance 161–76 Hay’s critique of 223–4

L Landwehr, C and Bohm, K 29 Langer, A 32 language use closing down debate 35–6 for different audiences 38 Lansley, Andrew 152 Lanz, K and Eitner, K 190 Lasswell, H 96 Lauriat, B 52 Lawson, Nigel 81, 164 Leake, J 172 ‘lean state’ 105–6 Lederer, K and Naumann, M 189, 193 Leftwich, A 122 Legg, S 228 legitimation crisis 76 Lemke, T 36, 117, 124–6, 128–31 240

Levi-Faur, D 47 Lienert, I 87 lifecycle approaches 33–4 Lipschutz, R 96 Liquid fear (Bauman) 10 Listowel, Earl of 150 Lloyd, J. 31 Lyons, GM et al 31

M Macartney, H 81, 88 McCandless, J and Sheldon, S 146–7 McCormick, JP 5 McDonald, M 162, 166–7 Machiavelli 51 Madaleno, I 187–8 Majone, G 4, 29 Maman, D and Rosenheck, Z 22 Marcuse, P 187 Marcussen, M 37 market domination and depoliticisation 60, 123–6 see also neo-liberal discourses Marquand, D 3 Marsh, D 22, 56 Marsh, D and Vromen, A 61 Marsh, D et al 122 Marx, Karl 71–4, 89–90, 99–100, 103 Maskovsky, J 132–3 Mastropaolo, A 3 media involvement 31 medicalisation trends 36–7 Meier, H 7 Meiksins Wood, E 72–3 metagovernance of depoliticisation 58–9, 64–5, 100–1 Meulemann, L 58–60, 102 Meyer-Sahling, JH 28 Miller, P and Rose, N 99, 105–6 Minca, C and Vaughan-Williams, N 228 Mirosa, O and Harris, L 188 Mishra, N 22 Mitchell, C 165, 168 Mitchell, TJ 14, 99–101 Monagle, C 206 Monroe, B 232 ‘moral panics’ 37–8, 133 Mouffe, C 10, 16, 35, 96, 206, 228 Mügge, D 161–3 Mulkay, M 144, 153 Murdoch, J 126

N National Health Service Commissioning Board 2 Needham, C 30

Index Negri, T 80 neo-liberal discourses key policy sets 107 and the depoliticising of monetary policy 107–8 and governmentality 126–7, 128–9 as inevitable force 221 and lowering public interest 60 as ‘political project’ 123–6 and rising public mistrust 57–8 and violence 128–9 see also privatisation network governance 60 ‘neutral domains’ (Schmitt) 9–10 New Monetary Policy Framework 84 New Public Management 79–80 Newman, P 22, 29 ‘newness’ of depoliticisation phenomenon 50–2 Niblett, R 171 Norris, P 3, 21, 31, 47, 54, 61 North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC) 107–12 Norval, AJ 142 Nowakowski, G 195

O Oakley, A 153 Obama administration 110–11 O’Cathain, Baroness 151–2 Occupy movement 104, 129 Ochs, A 171 O’Connor, J 77, 80 Odysseos, L and Petito, F 229 Offe, Claus 57, 75, 77–8, 108 Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 87–8 Ofgem 164, 172–4 Oksala, J 117, 124, 128–9 ‘On the Shores of Politics’ (Rancière) 26 Ophuls, W 13 O’Rourke, PJ 31 Osborne, George 88 Osborne, Sandra 151 Ostrom, E 2–3 Ostrovsky, A 170

P Page, B 187 Palonen, K 95–6 Papadopoulos,Y 30 Parnaby, P 38 Patten, Lord 152 ‘peak oil’ arguments 169–70 Peck, J 105

Pellikan, H et al 31–2 Peters, G and Pierre, J 28, 66, 101 Peterson, A and Bunton, R 128 Pflug, T 188 Pharr, S and Putnam, R 3, 10 Pickering, S 36 Pikkety, T 232 PIU (Performance and Innovation Unit) 168 Plesch, D et al 172 policing 30, 129 ‘policy’ 97 and depoliticisation 106–7 models of 98 ‘the political’ 6–7 and depoliticisation 120–1 as reproduction of political rationality 130–1 as ‘theatre of war’ (Foucault) 130 see also ‘politics’ political lifecycles 33–4 political participation trends 33, 52 political rationality 130–1 political science, need for ‘output’ studies 63–4 politicians, othering of 61–4 politicisation chronology of 222–4 mapping frameworks for 24–7, 141 dynamics of 135, 141 as ‘statecraft’ 1–2, 22, 28–30, 48–9, 57–9, 141–2 reframing of 129–34 of the subject/individual 131–3 see also depoliticisation; governmentality; ‘the political’; ‘politics’ ‘politics’ concepts of 61–4, 97 and identity 63 and depoliticisation 102–6, 120–3 models of 98 input / output discourses 62–4, 213–14 ‘politics of denial’ 26, 31, 35 politics-policy / policy-politics (Bang) 62–3 ‘polity’ 96–7 and depoliticisation 97–102 models of 98 Pollitt, C and Talbot, C 25 Poole, RW 186 Post-democracy (Crouch) 3 Poulantzas, N 103, 113 poverty and politicisation 132–3 power and the state 59–61 and governmentality 128 Power, T 31 241

Tracing the political The precariat (Standing) 10 privatisation as tool of depoliticisation 186–7 ‘selling off ’ water utilities 187–9 study of Berlin’s BWB 189–97 Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) 85 public distrust of political processes 3, 29, 57 public-private partnership arrangements 105 Purdy, LM 144

R Rallings, C and Thrasher, M 52 Rancière, J 4, 10, 21, 26, 35, 96, 123–4, 182, 206 Randeria, S 29 Rasmus, J 108 rationality crisis 75–6 Raymond, J 153 re-politicisation 16, 35, 38–9, 65, 98, 100, 123, 161 Rebel cities (Harvey) 187 recessions 81 see also austerity politics; economic policy and political management Rees, R 52 Requiem for a species (Hamilton) 13 resistance politicisation 134–5 ‘retreat of the state’, myth of 125–6 Rhodes, RAW 57–8 Rich, A 153 Richardson, Jo 149 risk and hyper-politicisation 37–8 Roberts, A 1, 4, 37, 181, 205 Rodgers, P 169–70 Rogers, C 22, 35 ‘rolling back’ of politicisation myths of 105–6, 117–35 contesting claims 219–22 Rosanvallon, P 3, 21 Rose, N 117, 128 Rose, N and Miller, P 117, 124, 128, 134 Rose, N et al 117, 128 Rosenberg, J 72 Rowland, R 153 Royal Commissions 51–2 Rubin, E 2 Ruiz-Rodriguez, L 33 Russia emerging resource nationalism 168–72 energy security concerns 172–5

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S Sagarika Dutt, S 31 Salter, M 37–8 Salter, M and Piche, G 37 Saltoun, Lord 147 Sartori, G 2, 6, 27 Scharpf, F 57, 60 Scherr, J 170 Schmidt,VA 36, 167, 170 Schmitt, C 2, 4–11, 14, 16, 21, 96, 166, 204–9, 212, 227–9 ‘the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations’ 4–10 and the state of exception’ 10–13 characterisation of depoliticisation 5, 7–10 concepts of the political 6–7, 208, 228–9 critique of (Hay) 204–9 defence of (Flinders and Wood) 227–9 ‘scientisation’ trends, and fiscal policy 37 Scrase, I and Ockwell, D 165, 171, 174 securitisation theory 37–8, 162, 167–8, 176, 224 and ‘desecuritisation’ 37 ‘sedimentation’ mechanisms 106–7 Shapiro, I 2 Sharone, O 26 Shearman, D and Smith, J 13 Shildrick, M 153 Shin, M 31 Short, Renée 148 Sil, R and Katzenstein 176 Sim, SF 32 Simons, J 132 Sinclair, TJ 105 Smith, Geraldine 151–2 Smith, JT 30 Smith, M 30 societal depoliticisation 24, 26, 27–8, 30–4, 39, 141 society, dehuminisation of 9–10 The sociological imagination (Wright Mills) 227 Sørensen, E 58–9 Sørensen, E and Torfing, J 58–9 Spain, declining electoral turnout 33 Standing, G 10 Stanworth, M 153 ‘the state’ as agent of ‘the market’ 124–5 as metagovenor 60–1 the myth of ‘retreat’ 125–6, 126–35 as vehicle for the accumulation of capital 76–7 ‘the state of exception’ 5, 10–13

Index state violence 128–9 statecraft and depoliticisation 1–2, 22, 28–30, 48–9, 57–9, 141–2, 212, 214 Steans, J 153 Stern Review (2006) 168 Stern, J 164 Stevenson, H and Dryzek, JS 49–50 Stoker, G 10, 61–2, 231 Straw, Jack 172 Strom, E 189 student protest 75–6 subjectification and citizenship 131–3 Sullivan, H and Skelcher, C 78 Swanson, J 36 Swyngedouw, E 186–7, 190 systems theory 75–6

T Taking it big (Aronowitz) 227–8 Tarrow, S 104 Taylor, Dari 150 ‘technicity’ (Schmitt) 8–10, 16 technocratic governance trends 3–4 technological progress politics as the ‘solution’ (Habermas) 74–6 and striving for a neutral domain 8–10 Technology and science as ‘ideology’ (Habermas) 74–5 territorialisation of political power 102 the politics of denial (Flinders) 31 Thatcher government, on independence for central banking 81 Thatcher, M and Stone Sweet, A 29 Thiele, LP 130 Thompson, DF 30 Thornberry, Emily 151 Throsby, K and Gill, R 153 Timmermans, A and Scholten, P 37 Torfing, J 58 Torfing, J et al 47, 58, 66 Tosa, H 117, 129 Treasury and Civil Service Committee (1993) 83 Trilateral Commission report (1975) 31 Trombetta, M 38

US, fiscal cliff debate 108–11 utilities privatisation and remunicipalisation 181–97

V ‘valence politics’ 32 Vibert, F 11 violence and neo-liberalism 128–9

W Wæver, O 162, 166–8 Wagstyl, S 169–70 Warner, J 172 Warner, M 188 Warnock, Mary 145 Watson, M 37 Webb, D 32 Weiss, G and Wodak, R 26 What the media do to our politics (Lloyd) 31 Why we hate politics (Hay) 3, 23–7 Wicks, M 175 Widmaier, W et al 36, 167–8 Willems, T and van Dooren, W 231 Williams, Baroness 152 Wilshire, David 145 Winterton, Ann 148 Wissen, M and Naumann, M 187 Wodak, R 36 Wolff, R 107 Wood, M 165, 231 Wood, M and Flinders, M 71, 117, 119– 20, 129–31, 133, 141, 143, 209–10 World Bank (2000) 1 Wright Mills, C 227, 231–2 Wu, X and Malaluan, NA 187–8

Y Yukos 169–70

Z Zaki, S 188 Žižek, S 12–13, 35

U UK declining electoral turnout 52 energy security 163–76 financial crisis 80–8, 111–12 UK Financial Investment Ltd (UKFI) 86–7 Ulrich, M and Weatherall, A 153

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The changing nature of politics and the contemporary challenges facing public and social policy demand new perspectives that contest existing assumptions and deliver new ways of understanding a changing world. From institutional reform to network governance and from public expectations to political inequality the New Perspectives in Policy & Politics book series will focus on state-of-the-art contributions that aim to reorient perennial debates or open up emerging seams of research. The series is interdisciplinary in approach, international in scope and seeks to publish books that are both theoretically informed and policy relevant. Most of all, the New Perspectives in Policy & Politics series seeks to challenge and redefine debates concerning both politics and public and social policy through fresh and innovative contributions to the field.

Tracing the political uses a broad range of international case studies to chart the politicising and depoliticising dynamics that shape debates about the future of governance and the liberal democratic state. The book is part of the New Perspectives in Policy and Politics series, and will be an important text for students of politics and policy, as well as researchers and policy makers. Matthew Flinders is director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is also chair of the UK Political Studies Association and visiting distinguished professor of governance and public policy at Murdoch University, Australia.

Edited by Sarah Ayres and Matthew Flinders

Tracing the Political

Over the past two decades politicians have delegated many political decisions to expert agencies or quangos, and portrayed the associated issues, like monetary or drug policy, as being technocratic or managerial. At the same time an increasing number of important political decisions are being removed from democratic public debate altogether, leading many commentators to argue that they are part of a ‘crisis of democracy’ marking the ‘end of politics’.

New Perspectives in Policy & Politics

Matt Wood is a fellow of the ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He has published articles on depoliticisation in several journals.

“This important edited volume takes one of the most heated debates among contemporary British students of politics and public policy one step further and provides important theoretical and empirical insights that can qualify further research into the role and function of the political in Western liberal democracies.” Professor Eva Sørensen, Roskilde University, Denmark

POLITICS / PUBLIC POLICY

ISBN 978-1-4473-2660-1

Edited by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

“An excellent group of scholars tackle the complex issue of depoliticisation and leave the reader with still a few puzzles but also a considerable advance in understanding and insight.” Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Canberra, Australia, and University of Southampton, UK

Tracing the Political

Depoliticisation, governance and the state

www.policypress.co.uk 9 781447 326601 /Policy-Politics

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Edited by Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

8/7/2015 2:18:32 PM