by Brice Laurent (Author)
How interventions based on
objects—including chemicals, financial products, and consumer
goods—offer a path to rethink European integration.
Interventions based on objects, Brice
Laurent claims, have become a dominant path for European policy-making.
In European Objects, Laurent analyzes the political consequences of
these interventions and their democratization. He uses the term
“European objects” to describe technical entities that are regulated—and
thereby transformed—by European policies. To uncover the bureaucratic
and regulatory intricacies of European governance, Laurent focuses on a
series of these objects, including food products, chemicals, financial
products, consumer goods, drinking water, and occupational environments.
Laurent argues that taking European objects seriously offers a way to
rephrase the dreams of harmonization and, eventually, rethink the
constitutional strength of European integration.
Laurent doesn’t just clarify how
European regulation works, but also explores ways to realize long-term
objectives for European integration, such as a harmonized market or an
objective expertise. Regulation is best understood as “regulatory
machinery” bringing together various types of legal constraints,
material interventions on objects, and the imagining of desirable
futures. Analyzing European objects enables Laurent to explore what
regulation has become after years of evolution have made it a central
component of the European policy world. He offers practical
illustrations of how the regulatory machinery functions today. If Europe
succeeds at reinventing the terms of its legitimacy with objects that
matter for the European publics, it will provide a telling demonstration
that the opposition of expertise and populism is not the unavoidable
fate of liberal democracies.
