Towards the European Panopticon: EU Discourses and Policies in Education and Training 1992–2007

Abstract

The 1990s were marked by various challenges, changes and transformations at the economic, geopolitical, social and technological levels (Held & McGrew, 2000; Adam, Beck & van Loon 2000; Reich, 1991) which, in several instances, affected the ongoing transformation processes of the European Union (EU). These challenges were often related to factors such as the globalisation of the economy, the growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the rapid development of ‘techno-science’ and the immigration infl ux to Europe. At the economic level in particular, changes were dominated by the widespread effects of the new technologies in the industries and the enterprises, and by international agreements for the liberalisation of markets and trade (e.g. the World Trade Organisation General Agreement on Trade in Services – WTO/GATS), which changed both the relative signifi cance of the production factors and the international division of labour (Aglietta, 1998). The perceived challenges of this new economic order were underlined in the new ‘human and social capital’ theory (Baron et al., 2000), which argued for a new, knowledge-based distribution of labour, fl exible production forms and relationships, high specialisation, performativity and mobility of the workforce (Lyotard, 1984; Burton-Jones, 1999; Hargreaves, 2003). In the early 1990s, the structural and social consequences of these economic and technological changes were acknowledged at the EU level, with special reference to the ‘technological/competition gap’, the ‘regional inequalities’ between the member states, the ‘demographic problem’ and ‘unemployment’ and ‘social exclusion’ in the European societies (Maravegjas & Tsinisizelis, 1995). These transformations accelerated the decisions concerning the institutional, political and economic statusquo of the European Union, and they led to changes in the economic dimension (e.g. the establishment of the EMU and the Euro zone, 2001), in the geopolitical dimension (e.g. the enlargement with the Eastern and Central European countries in 2004), in the political dimension (e.g. the process for establishing a EU Constitutional Treaty between 2004 and 2006) and in the social dimension (e.g. accounts of demographic ageing, modernisation of pension systems and employment). All these developments gave new meaning to signifi cant concepts like European Union, European citizen, economic and social cohesion, European governance, and