The ambiguous personality of the European economy

The notion of the existence of ‘the economy’ as a separate domain of social life and an apparently self-evident spatial entity is very much imagined. This paper addresses a specific aspect of the processes through which imagined economic spaces are created and consolidated, namely, the discursive construction of what Ben Rosamond in 2012 called the ‘personality’ of an economic space, and it does so by using the empirical example of the emergence of an imagined European economic space since the late 1980s. It is argued that the European social model (ESM) is central to the personality of the imagined European economy. However, drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and their successors in the so-called ‘Essex School’, this personality is conceptualized as a floating signifier, since different actors, in different contexts, often attribute different meanings to this term. Furthermore, it is argued that it is the very ambiguity at the heart of the ESM that ensures its legitimacy–it allows a multitude of actors to adhere to the common reference frame of an apparently European model, while they simultaneously hold on to their own specific interpretation of that model.