Market Creation in the European Union: The Case of the Public Procurement Directives

The thesis tackles two major components of modern statehood; the creation of markets, and public procurement. The context is the European Union’s efforts to create an integrated market for public procurement as an effort to bind the notion of what it means to realise the state into a single concept within the European project. The thesis in particular studies the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) that has been a major component of the modern version of the procurement market and constitutes a major effort to control the discursive construction of the act of procurement. The thesis concludes that through market structures there exists the opportunity for perpetuation of ideational hegemony. This may have a significant impact on the conceptualisation of statehood in modern Europe.