ABSTRACT
This chapter follows Baudrillard’s view that the ‘dissolution of the political subject’, i.e. the end of political projects of Left and Right, has created a crisis of representation and that the location of power is no longer clear, that in fact, political elites can no longer generate and externally project power, only simulate it (see, for example, Baudrillard 1987).1 In the absence of any connection with the masses, with their own society, elites are unable to give policy-making a broader social meaning, enabling them to engage and mobilize social support for a political programme.2 Baudrillard’s framework enables the articulation of a critique of traditional Realist or Critical understandings of democracy export as dissimulation, feigning ‘not to have what one has’, i.e. as a pretence that policy is not driven by self-interest or the needs of capital accumulation,3 through an understanding of policy practice in terms of simulation, which ‘is to feign to have what one hasn’t’: i.e. the pretence that there are clear instrumental interests and ideological values being asserted by the EU (1983b: 5).
