Governing Public Services in Europe by Discourse: The Formula Services of General (Economic) Interest Seen as a Discursive Instrument of European Governmentality

Our proposal consists on discussing the existence and the role of “discursive instrument” in the policy process which is composed of relations of sense that can not be seperated with power relations. Therefore, we considerer that analyzing the role of such “discursive instrument” should be linked with the Foucaldian governementality hypothesis. To do so, we use the notion of “Formula” (A. Krieg-Planque, 2009) developped in the French Discourse Analysis as an heuristic tool to understand the complex relationship between argument and power. The discursive instrument our empirical case study focuses on is the “discursive formula” of Services of General (economic) Interest. Raised in the European context of sectorial liberalization of public undertakings, this institutional formula is used by the European Commission since the mid-90’s pretendly in order to speak a “common language” and to fix an “European doctrine” about Public Services in EU.