The European Union, state of exception and state transformation - Romania, Turkey and ethnic minority politics

The dissertation argues that the modern national sovereignty is the political expression of modern subjectivity and it dominates as such the contemporary discourse of human life, ethnic minorities included, in world politics. The analytical mechanism is grounded in social constructivist theorisations of discourse analysis. It evaluates whether and to what extent the enlargement of the European Union (EU) and its accession conditionality affect the discursive mechanisms of the national, sovereign subjectivity and its relations with national minorities. The cases studied here have been chosen because of the two states being inscribed in the recent past (Romania) and currently (Turkey) in the enlargement process. The dissertation builds methodologically on Agamben’s understanding of sovereignty as state of exception, interpreted here originally qua exception from the temporality of human life and therefore apt to author political time. In national form, this is understood as the production of the national time of politics, with a double ontological consequence: it constitutes the political nation, while concomitantly and inherently excluding non-national human life from political possibilities. The method of research develops this methodological perspective to analyse national sovereignty, drawing also on Heidegger, as factualisation of two purely theoretical constructs: the nation and the principle of sovereignty.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Nottingham Trent University

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Mateescu, D

Language dc:language

en