CES: Imagining Europe: Culture, Legitimacy and the EU in Crisis

As economic and political crises have stretched European social solidarity to the breaking point, McNamara’s new book, "The Politics of Everyday Europe: Constructing Authority in the European Union,” offers a way of understanding the foundations of the EU’s political authority. Examining a broad range of EU policy areas, she shows how everyday culture matters, and how the construction of meaning can be a potent power resource for the EU as a innovative political form--albeit one open to contestation and subversion by the very European citizens it calls into being.