Yanis (Varoufakis), the Minotaur, and the Field of Eurocracy

In: Historical social research: HSR-Retrospective (HSR-Retro) = Historische Sozialforschung, Band 43, Heft 3, S. 216-247

Abstract

This paper aims to show the binding force within the social field of Eurocracy and, more specifically, the subfield of the European economic governance, through the singular case of Yanis Varoufakis's experience as Greek minister of finance. Why is it that, while many elements might have suggested that Varoufakis was not lacking resources, his passage from economics into politics ended up in a fairly brutal shock and a mutual exclusion so extremely invested in on the symbolic level? The paper's hypothesis is that a substantial part of the strategies of the epistemic agent Varoufakis - an experienced economist as well as new ruler and new politician in the EU game - were completely out of tune with the structure of the field. To show this, the paper deliberately breaks with the causal analysis of the bargain inside the Eurogroup to build on the use of two multiple correspondence analyses (MCA). The first describes a view of (and from) the silent fraction of the field, composed of insiders in the European administrations. The second reconstructs Varoufakis's own relational position and vision of the game from the book he wrote on his experience. Thanks to these two approaches, we combine a descriptive-institutional and a narrative-individual construction of the same social space to explore its deep structure and effects in an innovative way.