Sovereignty as a way out of collective anxiety: the EU’s discourse on money, health, and food

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has developed as an actor that overcomes national sovereignty in global politics. Yet, as of 2017, the EU has used the “sovereignty” category at the supranational level, both in general and in combination with “sectoral” adjectives. The objective of research is to demonstrate that the use of “sectoral sovereignty” can be examined as the EU’s work with collective anxiety, which results from various challenges that can hardly be controlled. The anxiety is examined in the context of emotion culture with the focus on public images of sentiments whereas the incorporation of sovereignty in the EU’s discourse comes out as a “self-identification with an aggressor” - with something that has previously been viewed as a threat to integration. In the EU’s discourse “sovereignty” means a set of actions targeted at drawing a border between the internal and the external, at establishing higher autonomy. Three cases are examined with the help of discourse analysis: challenge of technological companies and monetary sovereignty; pandemic threat and health sovereignty; problems in global agricultural trade and food sovereignty. In each case elements of the EU’s collective anxiety are described; sovereignty as a system of actions to address anxiety is identified; the overall support for this work in the EU is revealed. The conclusions are drawn on when and where “sectoral” sovereignty helps the EU to limit its anxiety. Yet, the successful incorporation of sovereignty in the EU’s discourse does not mean a complete overcoming of anxiety; instead, dialectic relations between collective anxiety and sovereignty emerge.