A significant singularity of European peace: how accounting altered the possibilities for administrative transformation, coordination & dispersion of the early twenty-first century (1989-2015) French & German defences

Buttolo, Jean-Charles (2021). A significant singularity of European peace: how accounting altered the possibilities for administrative transformation, coordination & dispersion of the early twenty-first century (1989-2015) French & German defences. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This research returns one to fundamentals – the sheer absence of interstate conflicts in Europe since the end of the world wars, the compulsion that accompanies accounting statements and their intimate relations with administration. It asks (un)expected questions such as ‘How can administration alter the possibilities for European defence?’, ‘What makes European defence administration?’ and ‘Why is there a defence of Europe after all?’. In a wide-ranging discussion both immersed in the past and attuned to current scholarship about defence and accounting, it attends to the administrative transformation-and-(in)coordination of contemporary French and German defences. It shows that administrative conceptions are shared and how shares in administrative activities are exchanged beyond the nation-state. It evinces how the writing of accounting serves modern ‘governmental reason’ by enabling readers to know mathematical relations in naming and to argue matters all at once. Governmental reasoning is a learning by writing-and-grading that is responsive to change. The research establishes in its movement a typology of genres of administration: rule-following or bureaucratic administration on one side and mission-oriented, management by objectives and mission command on the other. These are distinguished by their combinations of statement types (including accounting statements) and articulate together defence planning, supplying and controlling concerns. Since accounting makes only indirect claims, the thesis argues, it cements European defence more effectively than professional training or national interests. Using an extended stock of spoken and written statements – speech-following and unspeakable (or, to use the terminology of historians of writing, written glottographic and non-glottographic statements) – and analysing it from many conceptual points of views, the thesis hopes to engage its readers to make their own guesses as to what is coming soon about European defence.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):