Description
Panel discussion: Between Activism and Indifference:Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consumer Citizens in European Integration
Over the past decades, the consumer has become an increasingly central figure in the making of the internal market. EU institutions have sought to engage consumers, claimed to speak on their behalf, and mobilised the image of the consumer as ‘citizen’ to legitimize various policies protecting and/or unshackling consumers. Yet as recent historical research has shown, experiences of consumers in European integration have been widely divergent, even potentially conflicting.
On one end of the spectrum, some consumers took on the role of activists, resisting unwelcome repercussions of creating the single market from the 1980s, for example, concerning the environment. On the other end of the spectrum, consumers appear as indifferent and passive; while they were being exposed to increasing product choices and lower prices accompanying market creation, they rarely actively engaged with, or reflected on these changes.
This panel wishes to bring new historical scholarship into dialogue with other disciplines including law and politics to reflect on the roles that consumers have played in European integration and how consumers have been perceived and framed by EU institutions. To what extent do law and politics benefit from historical perspectives on the engagement of consumers with the single market? Does an understanding of the construction of consumer citizenship ‘from the bottom up’ have the potential to feed into current debates on the contested legitimacy of European integration?
| Period | 27 Jun 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Reykjavik, IcelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |