Conditionality and the Ambitions of Governance: Social Transformation in Southeastern Europe

As the European Union is continually remade through periods of crisis, conditionality emerges as the technique of governance tasked with realizing cohesion through 'social transformation' in the candidate states of the European periphery. Drawing on EU documents, field research, and the tradition of political economy, Shelton investigates the ambitions and limits of the instruments of conditionality currently at work in the Republic of Macedonia and throughout Southeastern Europe. Exploring the emergence of the ideas and practices that drive conditionality in its latest phase, the author challenges existing accounts of conditionality in IPE that focus on formal bargaining and institutional reform but neglect the social and subjective dimensions of the 'European project'. Shelton traces anxieties about the need to govern social and subjective sources of disharmony to canonical works in political economy. He argues that EU-funded efforts to develop 'human resources' in the Republic of Macedonia reflect a neoliberal modification of much older preoccupations, aiming to remake persons as workers, citizens, students, and administrators. Yet these ambitions often remain unrealized. Conditionality necessarily encounters limits that exceed technical impediments - reaching back to the origins of political economy itself, with implications for the politics of 'Europe' and beyond.

Shelton investigates the conditionality regime directed at 'transforming societies' inside EU candidate states. He offers a new understanding of conditionality that incorporates the social and subjective dimensions of the 'European project', locating the ambitions and limits of conditionality in the ideas of political economy.

Joel T. Shelton is Visiting Assistant Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, USA, where he teaches courses in international political economy, international politics, and political theory. His research focuses on the political economy of conditionality and global governance in historical and theoretical perspective.

1. Introduction: Conditionality in Crisis?

1.1. From Crisis to Conditionality

1.2. A Brief History of European Union Conditionality

1.3. The Political Economy of Conditionality

1.4. From Smith to Foucault: Poststructuralist Readings of Political Economy

1.5. The Ambitions of Political Economy

1.6. Plan of the Book

PART I: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CONDITIONALITY

2. The Limits of International Political Economy

2.1. Disciplining Political Economy

2.2. The Calculations of Rationalist IPE

2.3. Conceptualizing Conditionality

2.4. Re-thinking Political Economy

2.5. Conclusion

3. The Anxieties of Classical Political Economy

3.1. Towards a Political Economy of Disharmony

3.2. James Steuart and the Ambitions of Governance

3.3. Adam Smith and the Fragility of Social Exchange

4. Political Economy and the Problem of Conduct

4.1. Managing Disharmonious Spaces

4.2. Karl Marx and the Subjective Requirements of Accumulation

4.3. Max Weber and the Habits of Bureaucracy

4.4. Neoliberal Anxieties: Continuity and Innovation

PART II: CONDITIONALITY AS TECHNIQUE OF GOVERNANCE

5. Assembling Conditionality in the Republic of Macedonia

5.1. Conditionality in its Latest Phase

5.2. Instruments of Conditionality

5.3. Prioritization

5.4. Programming

5.5. Evaluation

5.6. Conclusion

6. Ambitions Interrupted: Conditionalizing Human Resources Development

6.1. From Average Laborer to Adaptive Entrepreneur

6.2. Normalizing Entrepreneurial Subjects

6.3. Socializing Inclusive Individuals

6.4. Rationalizing Organizational Behavior

6.5. Evaluating Conditionality: Technical Constraints

7. Conditionality and the Future of 'Europe'

7.1. Conditionality Dispersed: Agencies and Interventions in Southeastern Europe

7.2. Political Economy and the Limits to 'Social Transformation'

7.3. Conditionality and the Politics of Inevitability

7.4. Conditionality as Universal Imperative