Imagining a Market: Symbols, Practices, and the Fate of the European Union

The EU’s Single Market, a vast multi-year program to integrate markets for goods, services, capital and labor across European national borders, has fundamentally changed the experience of consumers, businesses, and investors when they transact, choose, or use products.  The Single Market is a powerful generator of a myriad of symbols and experiences that create a sense of a territoriality bounded political entity, with standardized rules and practices for those “internal” to the EU.  From the Italian hair stylist who cuts hair in Amsterdam without having to get a Dutch license to do so, to the German families that buy their children toys labeled with the ‘CE’ symbol of EU safety standards, to the German bankers who (over)invested in Greek banks in Europe’s one unified financial market, the Single Market has redrawn national economies into a common European space.  What is often missed, however, is how much that market integration is built on and builds social interactions, and how the symbols and practices of markets constitute a particular cultural infrastructure for governance.  Markets provide powerful vehicles for symbols and practices that shape perceptions and the ‘taken for granted’ everyday reality of citizens.  Looking more closely at the development of this “European economic space” can help us see the underlying dynamics of cooperation and contestation that bind some within the EU, and while pushing others apart.   My paper probes how the economic sites of everyday cultural interactions in Europe help “naturalize” European political authority through political technologies of labeling, locating and narrating, creating a very particular, and tenuous, imagined community.  In turn, the limits and the opportunities presented by these symbols and practices will help define the future path of Europe.