Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Crown Jewel
“Evaporative things”
Contexts and Conversations
The Political, the Geographical, and the Social: A Roadmap of the Argument
Notes
Chapter One : The Dead Relative: Bounding Europe in Europe
Geopolitics by Nobody
Carving Places out of Space
Embodied Europes
Notes
Chapter Two : Knowledge and Policy in Transnational Fields
Placing Diplomatic Knowledge
Policy Fields
“The work of reciprocal elucidation”
Notes
Chapter Three : Brussels and Theatre: Bureaucracy and Place
Planet Brussels
Those Who Hold the Pen: EU Professionals
The Political and the Technical – and the Social
Notes
Chapter Four : Transnational Diplomats: Representing Europe in EU 27
European External Action Service
Curved Mirrors: Negotiating the National
The Group for Which There is no Term: The New Member States
Notes
Chapter Five : Powers of Conceptualization and Contextualization
A New Object of Knowledge
Fields of Expertise in the European Quarter
“Most people just want to do what they are told”
Notes
Chapter Six : Feel for the Game: Symbolic Capital in the European Quarter
Symbolic Capital
“We are dealing with elites”
“In the third degree of depth”
“An urbane, subtle approach”
Shifts and Spirals
Notes
Chapter Seven : Political Geographies of Expertise
Knowledge From and On the East
Finding a Market
“Things are evolving”
Managing Difference
Notes
Conclusion : Circles of Knowledge
Spaces and Agents of Bureaucratic Knowledge
Less is More
Notes
References
Index
For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com
Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba
Marisa Wilson
Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline
Andrew Barry
Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy
Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner
Working Lives – Gender, MigrAtion and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007
Linda McDowell
Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological History
Andrew Warren
Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey
Edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter
The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
Alex Jeffrey
Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage
Colin McFarlane
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption
Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass
Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities
Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek
Swept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless City
Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen
Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects
Peter Adey
Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines
David Ley
State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere
Mark Whitehead
Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850–1970
Avril Maddrell
Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India
Jeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard
Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town
Andrew Tucker
Arsenic Pollution: A Global Synthesis
Peter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards
Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks
David Featherstone
Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?
Hester Parr
Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability
Georgina H. Endfield
Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes
Edited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren
Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway
Peter Merriman
Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy
Mustafa Dikeç
Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape Change
Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton
Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
Stephen Legg
People/States/Territories
Rhys Jones
Publics and the City
Kurt Iveson
After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change
Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco
Putting Workfare in Place
Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel
Domicile and Diaspora
Alison Blunt
Geographies and Moralities
Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith
Military Geographies
Rachel Woodward
A New Deal for Transport?
Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw
Geographies of British Modernity
Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short
Lost Geographies of Power
John Allen
Globalizing South China
Carolyn L. Cartier
Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years
Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee
This edition first published 2014
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Merje Kuus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-118-29175-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-118-29170-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Jean Antoine Watteau, View through the Trees in the Park of Pierre Crozat (La Perspective), oil on canvas, c.1715 (detail). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA / Maria Antoinette Evans Fund 23.573. Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Art Library. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Workhaus
The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically-informed and empirically-strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge, and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:
www.rgsbookseries.com
Neil Coe
National University of Singapore
Joanna Bullard
Loughborough University, UK
RGS-IBG Book Series Editors
This book investigates expert authority in Brussels in conversations with the professionals who work there. Although my central questions about power and knowledge, structure and agency, have animated the study from the start, a number of the specific angles emerged later, in discussions in Brussels. The 73 individuals who were interviewed for the book over seven years, sometimes several times, are busy professionals who regularly field requests from journalists and researchers on top of their daily responsibilities. That they agreed to a conversation with a scholar from a little-known discipline and with a set of unusual and ambiguous questions, sometimes on the basis of an e-mail out of the blue, is a testimony to their intellectual curiosity. Several interviewees also commented on the articles published out of the project early on; those reflections helped me to sharpen my questions and approaches. My interlocutors spoke on condition of anonymity and they cannot be named, but their essential role in the study is gratefully acknowledged. This account includes little new factual information to these professionals and they may well disagree with some of my claims. I hope that by illuminating familiar issues in uncustomary combinations and from thought-provoking angles, the work is nonetheless of value to them.
Academic colleagues have been equally generous and any note of thanks can only partially acknowledge the insight and guidance that have contributed to this book. As this is an interdisciplinary study, a number of scholars reached beyond their disciplinary networks to engage with my work. My greatest intellectual and personal debt is to the geographers who have commented on various parts of the argument. Recognizing that any list is inadequate, I nonetheless highlight the feedback and advice from John Agnew, David Ley, and Jamie Peck over the years. Support and encouragement from numerous other colleagues has been invaluable. They include Robert Kaiser, Adrian Smith, Alexander Murphy, James Sidaway, Colin Flint, Jason Dittmer, Fiona McConnell, Kathrin Hörschelmann, Alex Jeffrey, Daniel Hiebert, Graeme Wynn, Trevor Barnes, Veit Bachmann, Peter Lindner, Martin Müller, and Alun Jones; each one of them has been generous with their time in some way. Neil Coe as the editor of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers book series has been exemplary in his professionalism. Perceptive comments from Neil, two reviewers, and the editorial board of the series in the prospectus stage, and from Neil and one reviewer in the manuscript stage, made this a much sharper analysis than it would have been otherwise. Outside geography, the influence of the anthropologist Cris Shore is evident in the book: his Building Europe is a pioneering study of the European Quarter and Cris shared his knowledge of the existing work on the place with me early on. Comments from many political scientists, especially Desmond Dinan, Pertti Joenniemi, and Paul Evans, were very helpful in my efforts to engage with that discipline. Feedback from the referees and editors of the journals in which some early parts of the research programme were published is gratefully acknowledged. In addition to numerous conference, workshop, and roundtable presentations, parts of the study have been aired as full-length research and plenary talks and received rich feedback as a result. The venues of such presentations include the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, the Eighth European Urban and Regional Studies Conference in Vienna, the ‘Performing Geopolitics’ workshop at the Department of Geography, Durham University, the EUGEO Congress 2011 in London, the ‘Translating Diplomatic Cultures’ workshop of the Diplomatic Cultures Research Network in Cambridge, and the departments of geography at Simon Fraser University, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, and the University of British Columbia. I am grateful to the organizers of these events for their interest in this work. All errors and misrepresentations are my responsibility. Research support from Duncan Ranslem, Alan Grove, Michelle Drenker, Lindsay Turner, and Colin Sutherland has been of much help. The technical assistance of Jacqueline Scott and her colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell is greatly appreciated. At home, Gregory Feldman’s support has been vital for my efforts to juggle family life and academic career.
Research for the book was funded by two separate grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as a smaller pilot grant from the University of British Columbia. That support is gratefully acknowledged. As social science scholarship is increasingly pushed into the mould of Big Science, with incentives to pursue big teams, large data sets, the newest software, and numerous outputs, this work of slow research is a risky undertaking: no team, no fancy-sounding fieldwork, not even a recorder to buy. Its value to society is no less for that.
It is often said that the European Union is both an institution and an ongoing political project. When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2012 Peace Prize to the European Union and when two representatives of the prizewinner spoke at the award ceremony, they all referred to the union as a process, effort, and work. Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, spoke of the union as an “unrivalled way” of binding the interests of Europeans.1 In big picture terms, integration rests on the forging and maintenance of intergovernmental consensuses as well as the creation of supranational norms and standards. If we are to unpack these processes into their constituent components, what does this production of norms and consensuses actually comprise? What work and what efforts does it consist of, who are doing that work, how do they do it, and with what intended and unintended consequences?
Examined at a closer range and beyond the terminology of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, European integration hinges on the production of new knowledge about how Europe works or ought to work. This knowledge makes diverse places in Europe calculable and manageable in one regulatory space. The often fragile intergovernmental compromises rest on the production of new knowledge that both codifies and re-imagines what is known about Europe, what is desirable or possible there, and how it can be achieved.
This knowledge production rests fundamentally on the expertise of European Union (EU) institutions: their ability to make other actors inside and outside the union use their data and their analytical tools. Technical and administrative expertise is thus a central pillar of European integration and the crown jewel of its institutions. There are good reasons for this. To build consensuses among the member states – 28 today – the EU needs a coordinating centre equipped with sophisticated technical expertise. Its institutions serve that purpose. Their practices rest on the claim that their expertise is required to synchronize the interests and actions of the member states; that it is brought about by the sheer technical complexity of the integration project. To comprehend EU policy-making, we must grasp what counts as expertise in Brussels: whose expertise, from where, succeeds, and whose fails, and why and how this is so. We must understand how EU policy professionals know what they know, how they know that it is them who know, and how others know that this is so. Although expertise is a category of everyday speech in Brussels, it is too broad and too vague to be a category of analysis.
This book investigates the production of expert knowledge in Brussels. It traces how geopolitical arguments are deployed by policy professionals there and how these practices fit into and transform the social milieu of the European Quarter. It thereby tackles the social struggles through which expert authority is created in that place. For expertise in Brussels is subject to a constant tug-of-war over what claims, by whom, are the most expert among the many. The content of this negotiation may be political power and national interest, but its medium is technical expertise. The phrase “crown jewel” was used with irony by an official at the EU Council – an intergovernmental body – to challenge the expert authority of the European Commission – the union’s civil service. Viewed from the council, expert knowledge in Brussels is less about objective technical know-how and more about national and institutional power struggles than many commission officials would readily admit. The commission does get its wording into EU regulations, but this happens not simply because of its technical expertise. Rather, the commission tries to tilt the playing field toward its own corporate interests as it manoeuvres within the parameters set by the member states. Yet moving out of EU institutions into the representations of these states, a similarly ironic remark could be made of EU bodies more broadly. From national vantage points, a great deal of the technical wrangling in the European Quarter serves to promote the corporate interests of Planet Brussels over the member states.
I illuminate some of these struggles. To do so, I examine expertise in Brussels not in terms of right or wrong answers but in terms of the social processes by which certain knowledge claims come to be considered authoritative. Viewed through this processual lens, expertise is not a thing but a social relation: not something that one has but something that one uses or performs. Expert authority functions as such only when it is accepted by both sides, and distinguishing some claims as expert necessarily designates others as non-expert. I thus investigate how EU professionals use or deploy specific claims of expertise in their daily work: not what the various claims ‘really’ mean but how they function in EU policy-making. The catchwords of that policy-making – the omnipresent evocation of balanced, prudent, considered, objective, or evolving perspectives – perform specific types of work. Their repetitive use channels discussions in particular ways and we need to understand how this happens. Many of the claims advanced in Brussels are about places and are derived from places: these are geographical and comparative claims that articulate how practices from different parts of Europe should be incorporated into EU standards. To understand how European integration works, we must untangle the ways in which different places are brought together through knowledge claims in EU policy-making.
Viewed as a social practice, expertise is made in particular places by particular people. Central to these places in Europe is the European Quarter in Brussels and the policy professionals who work there. The frame and vocabulary of EU policies does not emerge from some general EU interest codified in the political mandate; it is rather laboriously devised phrase by phrase by career civil servants. There is a political and social geography to EU-level expertise and there are explicit and implicit rules for how it can and should be made on a daily basis. I try to understand these rules – the networks, conventions, habits, and approaches on which accepted practices rest – while also recognizing their contingency and indeterminacy. In so doing, I people the scene of expert authority in Brussels with the professionals who actually produce it. EU knowledge creation operates through them and often pivots on their skill; we must understand their agency or capacity to act in this infamously cryptic process.
To make any expert claim operational, in Brussels or elsewhere, technical knowledge is not enough. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 409) reminds us: “‘technical’ competence depends fundamentally on social competence and on the corresponding sense of being entitled and required by status to exercise this specific capacity, and therefore to possess it”. Expert authority requires a successful embedding within the social group that codifies the expertise in question (Collins and Evans 2007, 7). Power and institutions are not the same thing: analyses of power must include but not stop at formal institutional structures. We need to grasp the social lives of expertise: the informal social conventions that shape what claims are put forth, by whom, where, when, and how. Such conventions are “evaporative” matters, as one EU professional puts it: they crystallize for brief moments but then recede from view again. This does not make them unimportant; it only makes them difficult to study.
The social lives of geopolitical expertise are particularly complicated in Brussels because of the quasi-diplomatic character of EU institutions. An EU professional remarks: “Brussels is a tough place. You have to be a very smooth operator. If you are a smooth operator, you can get even bad ideas through. If you are not, you cannot achieve anything.” Being such an operator is especially important in diplomacy, a field governed by tacit conventions and indirect forms of argument. In the words of Lester Pearson, former Foreign Minister of Canada: “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way” (quoted as epigraph in Pouliot 2010).
Change and transformation are likewise central to my account. For decades now, the European Union has inspired books about “New Europe”. In the 1990s, when I started paying attention to this ‘new’ political entity, the characterization seemed apt. Over the years, the stream of such accounts remained steady but their story of novel dynamics became too familiar. Change too, although a ubiquitous category of everyday speech, is too broad to be a category of analysis. I thus specify and complicate the notion of change by disentangling what has changed and what has not, and how and with what effects.
The ambiguities of social change and the difficulties of such an unpacking effort are illuminated brilliantly by a light remark in Luchino Visconti’s film The Leopard: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.”2 Set in the context of the imperceptible but consequential power struggles between the aristocratic and bourgeois classes in 1860s Sicily, the quip captures the circuitous ways in which stability and change are wrapped up in each other. The question is not whether things are changing – of course they are – but what is changing, how, and why. Mindful of this deliquescence of continuity and change, transformation and adaptation, I move from the general category of change to a more detailed sketch of the social transformations afoot in Brussels and in Europe.
Today’s Brussels is a particularly fascinating scene of stability and flux because of the specific institutional configurations there. Within a few years after the Big Bang enlargement in 2004, EU institutions increased their workforce by a fifth. By the end of the decade, the immediate impact of this influx of new professionals was over: procedures and expectations had stabilized and a new normal had been found. Those who had entered the institutions in the mid-2000s as junior professionals had learned the lie of the land and were being promoted, those who had come in at senior levels had made their mark, and those who had arrived in the late 2000s as a second wave of ‘new’ colleagues had been trained for the institutions by the fellow nationals who had preceded them. Pieces were falling into place and new habits were forming. Yet both at the beginning of my work in 2007 and at the end of it in 2013, the reverberations of this wave of hires were still felt in Brussels. The post-2004 states were still called new, in part because professionals from these states still functioned as relative newcomers in the overall milieu of the European Quarter. A period of transformations was still underway. The patterns in which social relations stabilize now will be felt for years to come. This post-enlargement period is thus an important object of analysis: not as a mere prelude to the integration to come but as a touchstone by which to illuminate long-term social processes in Brussels. The terminology of ‘return to Europe’ is too generic. We need to sort out in more detail how professionals from the ‘returned’ states perform their dual status as insiders and as newcomers, how they participate in the creation of the new normal, and what comes to be solidified as new and as normal in it.
The struggles over the terms of EU knowledge production are especially pronounced in the sphere of external relations now that the EU is building up its own diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service or EAS. The service was established after the Lisbon Treaty made the union a legal person under international law in 2009. It is a uniquely transnational institution, whose staff is transferred to it from other EU bodies as well as the diplomatic services of the member states. EAS is the first diplomatic corps anywhere that is not in the service of a nation-state: its institutional culture cannot be modelled on any national one. It is being forged in Brussels now out of intergovernmental and inter-institutional compromises. A European diplomat reflects, diplomatically: “At EAS, we are not in the stage yet where we have our own style. I’m not sure whether we want to have it. Maybe this [ambiguity] is built into the institution. Maybe it’s too early to tell.” EU external relations thus bring the variegated geographies of expert knowledge and authority into a particularly sharp focus. An analysis of this first decade of ‘Europe whole and free’ can thus cast light at the formation of a specific political culture at the heart of the European project.
The effort to qualify and specify the dynamics of EU knowledge production leads me to focus not on institutional structures but on the contexts and practices that underpin and support these structures. I accentuate the circumstantial and the contingent: not the content of what is said but the context in which it is said. To stress context is not merely to add a thin layer of additional detail on top of an institutional analysis. Context is not a background. Rather, the structuring of the context and the power relationships at work in it are central to explanation (Sayer 1992, 248). A carefully contextualized enquiry is necessary to avoid a linear narrative of clear trends and remain alert to the idiosyncrasies of the Brussels scene. The investigation appears less straightforward perhaps, but it can better account for the many inconsistencies and contradictions of EU policy-making. Ambiguity and contradiction do not detract from analytical rigour but add to it. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche (1969, 119): “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be” (quoted in Bourdieu 1990a, 28, emphasis in original). Contextual depth enables us not only to answer questions better but also, and as importantly, to ask better questions. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, my argument is not simply about how the European Quarter works but also about what questions we should ask about it.
This is a story of small things: the specificities, nuances, and mess-ups that constitute the fabric of European integration just as much as the broad strokes that receive most attention in popular media and specialist literature alike. To highlight the small and the circumstantial is not to ignore the big picture of inter-state power struggles. Events in Berlin, London, or Paris – or Washington, Beijing, or Moscow – are certainly important. It is rather to substantiate the broad-brush explanations with a finer-grade analysis of daily work in the European Quarter. By accentuating social practices like document drafting, e-mail, meetings, lunches, and chats in the hallway, I bring into focus some of those “trifles that only seem like trifles when they are set down in a book, but while circulating the world are regarded as very important matters” (Gogol 1997, 228). In counterpoint to the fast-paced policy environment examined, my project is of slow knowledge: of stepping back from the existing terminology so as to avoid the illusion of contingency that privileges events over processes. I examine the social space from which my object of analysis derives its distinctive, differential, and relational properties (Bourdieu 1996, 180, 188). My goal is to move between local details and transnational structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view.
Although immersed in Planet Brussels, the book is not about that place as such. It rather uses the geographical framing of political struggles there to anchor a study of knowledge and power in bureaucratic and especially diplomatic institutions. The analysis thus contributes to our understanding of transnational regulatory institutions. Technologies of expertise in Brussels are important for that broader enquiry because they are central to the nexus between power, right, and truth in Europe and beyond. The production of such specifically transnational knowledge inside bureaucratic structures needs to be studied in its dispersed and diffuse character. This contributes to a discussion of expert authority that is more precise, more thoughtful, and more imaginative.
The account draws in part from interviews with policy professionals in the European Quarter. The 110 interviews were conducted with 73 such professionals in ten rounds between October 2007 and May 2013, in sets of around 10–20 conversations per year. My goal was not to find out what EU professionals think about substantive issues – the traditional focus of expert interviews. I rather sought to elucidate the entanglements of the technical, the geographical, and the social in the daily production of expertise in Brussels. I likewise tried to move beyond a few semi-random snapshots of the exceedingly complex policy-making settings: by re-visiting the same themes year after year, by speaking to the same individuals several times, and by interviewing professionals who rotated through the same positions over the years, I obtained a more focused series of glimpses into the broader social field of EU policy-making. To anchor the analysis empirically, I concentrate on one specific issue: the EU’s relations with its eastern neighbours and the role of the post-2004 member states in that sphere of EU policy. That example undergirds a broader argument about knowledge and authority inside European institutions.
My methodological approach is explained in Chapter 2 but one point must be stressed now. All interviews are non-attributable, all individuals speak in a personal capacity, and all material is used in a manner that preserves the anonymity of the sources. I phrase my account in such a way that interviewees cannot be identified by nationality, native tongue, or specific institutional location: hence the references to EU officials, professionals, interviewees, observers, interlocutors, and so on. These measures anonymize the primary material; they do not alter the analysis. “An interviewee” is often a more accurate reference than “commission official” or “EU diplomat”: many interviewees have extensive experience in multiple parts of EU institutions or in different diplomatic services.
The rest of the book proceeds through seven chapters and a brief conclusion. All of these sections investigate the bundling up of political power and geographical definition, but they do so from different angles. Chapter 1 sets up the puzzle about geopolitics and agency. It starts in an unlikely place – the concept of Europe as a central and yet highly ambiguous axis of EU policy-making. Europe is both a cause and an effect of EU: its putative cultural basis and its desired goal. As a term and a metaphor, Europe has a phantasmagoric presence in Brussels: it is invoked but not defined, assumed but not explained. This nebulous idea may seem an odd entry-point into everyday professional practices in the European Quarter. It is a fine starting point, however, if we wish to understand the rationalities of European integration: the systems by which the categories of everyday practice come into being as objects of politics. I use Europe as a touchstone to highlight the unnoticed operation of geographical assumptions in the European Quarter. Foregrounding the explicit and implicit uses of Europe in the European Neighbourhood Policy, I highlight geographical knowledge claims at the heart of the policy and I explain how these claims can illuminate the long-term dynamics in EU policy-making. A close-up study of Europe inevitably raises the question of whose Europe and vice versa: an analysis of political agency in Brussels must unpack the different conceptions of Europe that undergird the work of EU professionals.
Chapter 2, the most explicitly theoretical section, situates the enquiry in political geography and related fields. Conceptually, I argue that despite the substantial bodies of work on both geopolitics and EU policy-making, this scholarship gives us little sense of the daily hum of these processes. There is a great deal on institutions and discourses but little on the agents who build, operate, reproduce, and contest these structures. The dearth of agent-centred research, geographical or otherwise, is particularly noticeable when it comes to diplomatic institutions. Chapter 2 thus clarifies what a more ‘peopled’ view of EU institutions entails conceptually and what gains it delivers analytically. The chapter also details my use of primary interview material. It thereby highlights some methodological questions and dilemmas about interpretative methods in the study of geopolitical and diplomatic practice.
The knowledge production at hand takes place first and foremost in Brussels, and Chapter 3 concentrates on the European Quarter as the place where most of this activity unfolds. I give the reader a sense of the area and its milieu: its peculiar mix of nationalism and transnationalism, idealism and instrumentalism, and the incessant inter-state and inter-personal competition that relies heavily on social networks and symbolic capital. The picture is one of a tight entanglement of political and technical claims and the crucial role of symbolic resources in the success of some knowledge claims and the failure of others.
The analysis then turns to EU diplomacy and the role of the post-2004 member states in its institutions in Chapter 4. I highlight the ever-present struggles between national and supranational tendencies in European politics and the role of the new member states in these dynamics. My account is not simply one in which supranationalism and intergovernmentalism vie for dominance in EU policy-making; I rather accentuate the ways in which these two tendencies bleed into each other in Brussels. The national is always visible inside the supranational, and the other way around, but in curved mirrors: the national becomes something else once it hits the ground in Brussels and the supranational crafted there bears the imprint of national agendas in ways that are not always easy to detect. The chapter also explores the impact of the 2004 or Big Bang enlargement (and its follow-up in 2007) on EU institutions in general and its external relations bureaucracy in particular. I cite the magnitude of the quantitative change in the numbers and diversity of staff and I highlight the ways in which this has affected professional climate in the European Quarter.
Chapter 5 takes the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as an example to investigate the field of technical expertise in Brussels through the contextually more sensitive lens crafted so far. I do not offer new facts about the neighbourhood policy. That policy rather serves as an empirical hook on which to hang an examination of the overlapping fields of political and institutional power in Brussels. The account accentuates the role of EU policy professionals in the process and their ability to manoeuvre in the field of power.
Chapter 6 turns to what might be called the social alchemies of EU knowledge production. Drawing especially on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the chapter investigates the symbolic resources that a field like the European Quarter neither teaches nor explicitly demands but which constitute important assets in it. The argument is about resources like connections, reputation, poise, charm, and presence – in short, the incalculable feel for the game that distinguishes a well-informed and relaxed insider from an ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsider. The workings of the European Quarter as a field of power are closely tied to the translation and negotiation of nationally based status symbols in Brussels. The process is both social and geographical as it involves conceptions about the centres and margins of European diplomatic culture. The pursuit of symbolic capital in Brussels can therefore illuminate broader struggles over what a new European diplomatic culture would, could, or should be, and who can best represent or embody Europe externally.
The final substantive chapter turns once again to the use of geographical knowledge in the making of the neighbourhood policy. It examines the negotiation of expert claims about the union’s eastern neighbourhood: the ways in which political arguments about ENP bring in geographical claims about Europe and eastern Europe and the manner in which the member states compete for legitimacy in Brussels. I detail the presence of historical and cultural claims inside technical ones and I highlight the empirical significance of this for the neighbourhood policy and EU external relations more broadly.
The Conclusion returns to the deeper questions about knowledge and power in transnational regulatory institutions. At a time when many accounts bemoan the slow and convoluted character of EU policy-making, my conclusion is more hopeful. EU decision-making is certainly untidy. This is so in part because it represents pragmatic compromise-based politics: a process of working across competing and sometimes antagonistic positions (Agnew 2011, 468). If measured by a pre-determined outcome, such as reaching specific policy goals in a given time, the process is necessarily inadequate. If viewed as an open-ended process that should not be measured by today’s short-term yardsticks, it can teach us something about the complexity and creativity of transnational decision-making. “There are no clean solutions in the EU,” a senior diplomat remarks. “Every solution is a half-solution, every decision is a compromise.” Wishing for complete solutions short-changes the complexity and the gains involved in democratic politics.
At one level, then, by offering a high-resolution analysis of EU policy-making and by foregrounding the social and political ambiguities of that process, the book illuminates the workings of the European Union as a geopolitical subject. At another level, the effort here is not so much to answer questions as to raise them. The dynamics I highlight do not lend themselves to clear recommendations of what should or ought to happen. The objects of analysis are not problems that can be solved but dilemmas that must be continuously investigated, thought about, and reflected upon. It is such thought, as an intellectual and imaginative exercise, that I seek to provoke and cultivate.
1 Norwegian Nobel Committee 2012; Van Rompuy and Barroso 2012.
2 Visconti 2004 [1963]. The film is based on Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel (2007 [1958]) of the same title. The translation into English differs between the film and the book: in the latter, the remark appears as “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (p. 28). I use the film version, which conveys the political point better, as does the film as a whole (Wood 2004). Both translations, among several others, circulate widely.
When investigating the use of geographical and geopolitical claims in the European Quarter, I often hear that such claims do not matter. For many of my interviewees – multilingual cosmopolitan foreign affairs professionals – ‘geography’ connotes the given, the immutable, and the limiting. Geography associates vaguely with things like regional planning – useful but unexciting – and geopolitics alludes to some of the more troubled facets of Europe’s history. Some of my interlocutors appear intrigued by the concept of geopolitics, but others find it distasteful although they are too polite to say so. Even asking questions about a geographical concept, Europe in this case, is deemed an odd activity: out-of-date and slightly suspicious, like enquiring about a dead relative who passed away in unclear circumstances.
The narrative that pervades the European Quarter suggests that European integration is an anti-geopolitical project. Integration has enabled Europe’s nation-states to mend their historical antagonisms and overcome the violence inherent in territorial power politics. As an idea and a political project, Europe transcends rigid borders internally and externally. Internally, inter-state tensions have been transferred from the realm of high politics into administration as the member states have pooled their sovereignty in one regulatory space in many spheres of societal life. Externally, the union is a new kind of global power that influences world affairs through norms and standards rather than zero-sum territorial politics. Integration is never one-way or complete, but it nonetheless gradually smoothes Europe’s internal divisions and creates a harmonized space on a continental scale. The nation-state is not undone but national interests and knowledge claims are integrated into European networks and partnerships. As a political subject, Europe has prevailed over geopolitical power games among states and their alliances.
At the same time, Europe as an idea, an identity, and a set of values is invoked frequently as a fundamental principle of EU policy-making. The union’s civil servants identify strongly with ‘the European process’ and ‘Europe’ in contrast to a various ‘others’ ‘outside’ of Europe (Wodak 2009, 58). For many of them, the idea of Europe is central to their careers and their personal histories, and they see their work partly in terms of advancing a distinctly European societal model. A commission official explains: “We are defending a cultural model, neither the Japanese model nor the American model, but the social market economy, the Rhine model. And that idea is shared from the south of Spain to the north of Sweden” (quoted in Hooghe 2001, 81). When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, Herman Van Rompuy explicitly refers to the idea of Europe as a guiding principle of EU actions: European integration, he says, is propelled not only by the sheer necessity of cooperation but also by “a sense of togetherness, and in a way speaking to us from the centuries, the idea of Europa itself” (Van Rompuy and Barroso 2012). Timothy Garton Ash (1999, 316), a prominent historian, captures the elusive presence of Europe in European political life when he remarks:
There is Europe and there is ‘Europe’. There is the place, the continent, the political and economic reality, and there is Europe as an idea and an ideal, as a dream, a project, process, progress towards some visionary goal. No other continent is so obsessed with its own meaning and direction. These idealistic and teleological visions of Europe at once inform and legitimate, and are themselves informed and legitimated by, the political development of something now called the European Union. The very name ‘European Union’ is itself a product of this approach. For a union is what it’s meant to be, not what it is.
For my interviewees, Europe works in such an absent-yet-present form. It is a category of everyday speech and practice but not a category of analysis. They use the concept of Europe, but they are sceptical of my effort to take the category apart to see how it is put together. Many EU professionals view the union as a sui generis object: a one of a kind geopolitical entity inexplicable by existing terminology (Shore 2006). The idea of Europe is central to this mystique. An official of the European Commission explains: “That’s how you can get everybody in favour of Europe and disagreeing at the same time, because each individual is in favour of his preferred version of Europe” (quoted in Benson-Rea and Shore 2012, 12).
The political ambiguity of the European Union relies in part on the geographical ambiguity of Europe. It is based on the bundling up of seemingly clear-cut geographical claims with aspirations and visions about politics and culture. Garton Ash (2001) pinpointed this over a decade ago:
‘Will Europe never be Europe because it is becoming Europe?’ To most speakers of the English language, the sentence must look like nonsense. But in Brussels, the capital of Europe and the inner temple of the European debate, it is perfectly comprehensible and indeed vitally important. One just needs to insert the different meanings of the word ‘Europe’. The sentence then reads: ‘Will the current European Union of fifteen states – that is, Europe in sense 1 – never attain the long dreamed-of political unity – that is Europe in sense 2 – because it is now committed to including most other states on the geographical continent of Europe – that is, Europe in sense 3?’
Much has changed since 2001, but that amorphous bundling up of political ideas and geographical definition still underpins European politics. There is still a kind of banal mysticism to the concept Europe: it is simultaneously in constant view and indescribable, concretely territorial and abstractly philosophical. Evoking Europe has political effects but appears to be an apolitical exercise. Like Michael Billig’s (1995) banal nationalism, Europe and geography function as ideological habits that enable to get things done while remaining analytically invisible. And just as national sentiments are maintained by being flagged daily, so is Europe maintained by being flagged in EU policy-making. We need to understand how this happens. We must consider geographical knowledge – that dead relative in the title of the chapter – to elucidate the geopolitical undercurrents inside seemingly a-geographical claims.
A central problem with the commonsense narrative of Europe is that it seems to have no agents: its bounding appears to happen on its own, mostly in national power centres, without the active participation of the professionals who work in its name. Europe as a geographical concept seems to lack agents and happen in no place in particular. Roland Barthes’ (1980, 151) point about political myths captures the dynamics well. Like a myth, the geographical concept of Europe is:
a kind of ideal servant: it prepares all things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from. … Nothing is produced, nothing is chosen: all one has to do is to possess these new objects from which all soiling trace of origin or choice has been removed.
The meanings of Europe have been debated since the inception of the idea in the 18th century.1 Most writings focus empirically on the statements of Europe’s political and intellectual elites. When it comes to Brussels, the best we have are general statements by high-level commission officials (Hooghe 2001; Ross 2011). Such accounts are helpful but too general for a detailed understanding of EU policy processes. A closer account requires that we analyze the evocations of Europe in more specific terms to tease out where these evocations come from, for what audiences they are tailored, how they demarcate Europe, and how they are combined and sometimes welded together in Brussels. The question is about the ways in which geographical arguments are continuously made and re-made by political agents in specific social contexts. With respect to Europe, the question is not where Europe’s borders are or should be, or where commission officials think these borders ought to be, but how EU officials use the concept of Europe in their daily work. The answer to this open-ended question can illuminate the intellectual frames of EU policy-making. The point is not that we must consider geographical categories alongside political and technical claims, but that political and technical claims rely on unspoken geographical assumptions.
Europe is a political metaphor across Europe and a specific local idiom in the European Quarter in Brussels (Shore 2000,