INTRODUCTION ‘Power Investigation: The Political Culture of Nordic Self-Understanding’: Introduction

The idea for this special issue arose within the research project ‘Nordic Openness: Opportunities and Limits of a Consensual Political Culture’, funded by the Network of European Studies at the University of Helsinki and by the Kone Foundation. The contributions exemplify interdisciplinary area studies that examine the concepts and practices that shape the notions of a specific region, in this case the Nordic countries. The authors present a variety of views, including awareness of the affirmative potential of power investigations, their nature as political rather than scholarly projects, their language and their historical and social contexts. The integration of theory and methodology across disciplines shows the potential of area studies and, it is our hope, demonstrates its fruitfulness for the analysis of complex social phenomena. In addition to the six thematic articles in this issue, we are publishing two additional

articles, both of which address the general theme of power, albeit from a distinctive perspective. Alex Prichard, in his article on ‘Justice and EU Foreign Policy’, examines the particular problematic of European claims to ‘an ethical foreign policy’. Using insights taken from virtue ethics, he argues for an approach to evaluating the EU which is based on the idea that justice is relative to the virtues that we pursue in our daily lives, and that these virtues can only be properly understood in relation to the practices through which they are realized and the institutions we build to defend them. Accordingly, he argues that we need to disaggregate the EU’s institutions and the practices of key officials and the virtues they promote or defend. Alexandra Hennessy’s article on ‘Informal Governance and the Eurozone Crisis’ focuses on the inadequacies of the EU’s political architecture and its policy-making processes in the (unforeseen) circumstance of a fundamental systemic crisis. In the absence of appropriate mechanisms of crisis management, consensusformation and popular legitimation, the inherited informal hegemonic system under German leadership has found itself wanting, threatening the very survival of the Eurozone project. As usual, the issue is rounded off with a reviews section, which includes a review article

of three books relating to religion and religiosity in contemporary European society, along with a further 15 reviews of publications in the field of European area studies.