Global Governmentality

8   The political rationality of European integration¹

William Walters

In his influential lecture on ‘governmentality’, Foucault suggests that what is really interesting about our present is not the ‘ étatisation of society’, but rather the ‘governmentalization of the state’ (Foucault 1991: 103). It is now more than twenty-five years since Foucault delivered this lecture at the Collège de France. In the meantime our political culture has found other preoccupations besides the statization of society – most notably, perhaps, ‘globalization’. Nevertheless, as a result of the many studies that have taken up, developed and sometimes challenged Foucault’s work in this area, there now exists a significant body of work exploring this governmentalization ...