In this presentation, Marylou Hamm will discuss her research on European experts engaged in crisis policies, focusing on the European Commission’s task force for Greece, a technical assistance service set up in 2011 in the context of conditionality. Adopting a practice-based approach, and using diverse empirical materials—internal documents, a press corpus, sociographic data, observations, and interviews—she examines the often opaque workings of European ‘crisis expert’ teams.
Marylou argues that, contrary to the portrayal of a homogeneous group of technocrats, significant tensions emerged during the conditionality process, both between and within institutions. Facing the trial of the crisis, EU staff were compelled to navigate ambiguous and sometimes contradictory mandates. This generated divisions within the Commission, where conflicting views surfaced on how to intervene in a member state’s crisis and how to link modernisation reforms to economic imperatives.
This inductive approach led Marylou to ask: How can one act in accordance with the EU’s legal and moral principles in a context that fundamentally challenges them? Moving beyond the simplistic image of austerity-driven technocrats, her research aims to: (1) examine the inner workings of emergency regime, involving a wide variety of personnel and priorities; and (2) explore how internal critiques emerge within such contexts, how they are addressed, and their (non-)effects on the institution.
In this seminar, Marylou will first outline the analytical framework that integrates practice-oriented approaches to international organisations, the study of emergency regimes, and the sociology of the EU field, focusing on the interplay between practices, actor status, skills, and their normative interpretations of situations. In the second part of the seminar, she will present findings from two case studies: the genesis of the task force for Greece in 2011; and the negotiations that led to the service’s routinisation in 2015, when it evolved into a permanent Commission body, intervening across all EU member states.
By offering insights into the everyday experiences of actors in a crisis service seemingly removed from ‘high politics’—from its inception to its institutionalisation—she presents a perspective that places politics and internal critique at the centre of the study of experts.
Marylou Hamm is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, affiliated with the School of Transnational Governance. She also serves as a scientific collaborator at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Before joining the EUI, she was a doctor-assistant at the College of Europe in Bruges and a lecturer at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris-Dauphine. Marylou holds a PhD in political and social sciences from both the Université libre de Bruxelles and Sciences Po Strasbourg (joint degree).