In this contribution an account is given of an ongoing ethnographic study of Europe’s governance practice of comitology. Situated between the executive power of the European Commission (whose implementation they overview) and the legislative branch of the Council (whose decisions they prepare), such committees have typically been criticised for their opaque character and democratic deficit (one for many: Meyer 1999). My argumentation limits itself to a different question and asks how such regional, if not global decision-making mechanism relates to the societal domain that it seeks to steer. Following the iterative creation of European regulation and recommendations, it explores what kind of educational order is imagined and constructed through the legal hermeneutics of such committee. In line with other authors (notably Heintz 2014), I will start from the observation that face-to-face interaction is central to comitology’s deliberative supranationalism (Joerges and Neyer 2002), underlining how interactional procedures are in place to produce an impression of mutual agreement. The stress will fall, however, on the observation that such consensual outcome relies strongly on a shared vocabulary, centred around the lexis of learning. The Euro-speak of (lifelong) learning has a double effect. It allows to dissolve the double bind (Bateson 1972) emerging from the opposite requirements to negotiate national interest and to reach supranational consensus. It also provides a semantics by which both national representatives, experts and supranational officials engage in a continuous, often self-expanding redefinition of Europe’s principle of subsidiarity (cf. Dehousse 2011; Jasanoff 2013).

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine. Dehousse, R. (2011). Comitology: who watches the watchmen? Journal of European Public Policy, 10(5), 798–813. Heintz, B. (2014). Die Unverzichtbarkeit von Anwesenheit. Zur weltgesellschaftlichen Bedeutung globaler Interaktionssysteme. In B. Heintz & H. Tyrell (Eds.), Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft revisited (pp. 229–250). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Jasanoff, S. (2013). Epistemic Subsidiarity – Coexistence, Cosmopolitanism, Constitutionalism. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 4(2), 133–141. Joerges, C., & Neyer, J. (2002). From Intergovernmental Bargaining to Deliberative Political Processes: The Constitutionalisation of Comitology. European Law Journal, 3(3), 273–299. Meyer, C. (1999). Political Legitimacy and the Invisibility of Politics: Exploring the European Union’s Communication Deficit. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 37(4), 617–639.