(De)politicisation: Shifting Dynamics in an Emerging European Political Field and Public Sphere

This chapter proposes an understanding of politicisation as the feld of contestation about the political. Applied to the contested feld of European Union (EU) governance, the argument is that EU politicisation cannot be understood without analysis of its synergy with EU depoliticised governance (see also Chap. 10 in this book). We start with a discussion of some of the dimensions and modalities of (de)politicisation and follow with analysis of EU (de)politicisation in relation to the political feld and public sphere. To understand the ‘politics of politicisation’, we demarcate the feld of political struggle and locate the wider public and societal resonances of such a struggle over the political. The research programme for the analysis of the ‘politics of EU-politicisation’ then refers to the wider processes of how political conficts are selectively amplifed to create public visibility, how attention among relevant publics is unequally distributed, how opinions of these publics are formed and, ultimately, as well, how legitimacy (or de-legitimation) is generated. After delineating possible research directions, we fnish with some comments on EU (de)politicisation as a rupture from national politics and the competitive and multi-level merging of political felds and public spheres through the transnational encounter of agents and publics. This chaotic process has unpredictable outcomes for EU-legitimacy, but it nevertheless opens a European feld where political contestation meets with societal resonance with possibilities of refexivity and democratic learning for both institutional agents and publics involved.