A genealogy of EU discourses and practices of deliberative governance: beyond states and markets?

The paper offers a genealogy of ‘deliberative governance’ in the EU – an important contemporary discourse and practice of ‘throughput legitimacy’ within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s ‘Governance’ reports of the European Commission’s in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission’s 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU’s ‘Open Method of Co‐ordination’, which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid 2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the paper argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation‐state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neo‐liberal, market‐making status quo.