This book provides a practice-based analysis of European Union (EU) diplomacy and community-building.
Unlike studies focusing on how EU community-building proceeds centrally in Brussels, this book ...turns to EU diplomacy in its bordering state of Ukraine. At a time when the EU's internal cohesion is being put to the test, this book provides novel insights into how feelings of belonging are produced amongst its members in the absence of a homogenous 'we'. Transcending the traditional dichotomy between macro-structures and micro-processes of interaction, the book demonstrates that the EU's large-scale community depends for its existence on practical instantiations of community-building in distinct 'communities of practice'. Using the case of an EU diplomatic 'community of practice' in Kyiv, Ukraine takes these questions to the EU's margins, highlighting that the boundaries of community are key sites in which community materialises. The in-depth case study identifies diplomats' 'boundary work' as the constitutive rule that makes the local 'community of practice' cohere and create feelings of belonging to the large-scale polity of the EU.
This book will be of interest to researchers of European studies, as well as to those working on global cooperation and international relations more broadly.
In their ground-breaking philosophical investigation of the ‘practice turn’ Lechner and Frost prompt a standpoint debate in international relations theory, which touches upon the relationship between ...practice theory and its subject matter. Lechner and Frost decidedly opt for an internal standpoint, which promises to understand a social practice in terms of the meaning-in-use of its participants. This article argues that the internalist promise will ultimately remain unfulfilled, however, for the aim of collapsing the distinction between the ‘language of action’ and ‘language of observation’ is epistemologically impossible. Taking such an ‘internal’ perspective not only underestimates the problem of the double hermeneutic. It also disregards the gap between theory and practice. Any social enquiry that fails to acknowledge this gap inevitably becomes externalist, for it misses to reflect on its own normative presuppositions. The way ahead is to address this gap reflexively by way of a triple hermeneutics that is bolstered by abductive reasoning.
This article contributes to the communities of practice (CoP) literature by focusing on the neglected role of the boundary in constructing community. It takes issue with advocates of International ...Relations’ (IR) most recent ‘practice turn’ who have overrated inclusive practices of linking to the detriment of taking account of exclusive practices of demarcation. A conceptual turn to the boundary, understood as a ‘site of difference’, highlights how the two sets of practices operate simultaneously in creating shared senses of belonging to a community. The article empirically probes this turn to the boundary by studying how the postmodern community of the European Union (EU) is (re)constructed by EU diplomats in its neighbouring state Ukraine. As a borderland, it symbolises an interstitial zone of high connectivity where the EU’s otherwise latent order is unearthed. A reconstructive analysis of interviews with members of this ‘community of practice’ reveals that they function as ‘boundary workers’ who engage in both boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing practices on an everyday basis. Zooming in on the ‘boundary work’ by EU diplomats exposes the complex process of community-building and thereby helps grasp community as an emergent structure of possibilities whose meaning is contextually mediated by its members’ social experience of the boundary.
Abstract
Several new frameworks for the study of the differentiation of and relations between global orders have recently been introduced to International Relations. This article demonstrates how the ...communities of practice (COP) framework provides complementary as well as novel answers to processes of global ordering. COP theory has become a thriving research framework and has led to substantial innovative work on the internal logics of international institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and various professions, such as diplomats. Surprisingly, researchers have so far not appreciated the potential of the approach as a more general theory of global order. We argue that lifting this potential implies focusing on the interaction of and spaces between communities as well as going beyond the study of the internal logics of a discrete community. We propose a framework for the study of this interaction with a focus on its spatial and agential dimensions. We then show how this leads to an innovative research framework, drawing on an illustration from the case of global ocean governance.
Conclusion Hofius, Maren
European Union Communities of Practice,
2023
Book Chapter
In this chapter, I discuss my findings in light of the theoretical arguments and consolidate the work's major strengths as well as its overall contribution to the International Relation discipline. ...Following a self-reflexive review of the limitations of the book, I offer some proposals on how the argument could be evaluated and refined by further research.
This chapter discusses the theoretical arguments and consolidates the work's major strengths as well as its overall contribution to the International Relation discipline. The methodological implication of following ethnomethodology's claim that the constitution of order, and more broadly knowledge, is an observable phenomenon is that researchers become able to analyse its normative background by way of reconstructing it from practice. As European Union (EU) diplomacy implies simultaneously juggling intra-diplomacy and external diplomacy, EU diplomats are particularly skilled in spanning boundaries. Part of the reason the EU exists in its current form is that diplomats perpetuate its diverse socio-political, but also symbolic boundaries. A regime of mutual accountability hence principally builds upon the shared experience of accommodating diverging interpretations under the joint conduct of appropriating the EU's overall objectives in Ukraine. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
From Methodology to Method Hofius, Maren
European Union Communities of Practice,
2023, 2022
Book Chapter
In this chapter, I present a research strategy that provides concrete steps detailing how the background knowledge of boundary work can be reconstructed from practices. I will first discuss how ...reconstruction proceeds with a view to Karl Mannheim's 'documentary method of interpretation', which the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel revived for his own studies. Second, I shall introduce abduction as a specific logic of enquiry that encourages the researcher to engage in the discovery and construction of new concepts. In a third step, I advance a three-fold method of 'zooming in' on practices. To that end, I suggest focusing on (1) b/ordering sites, (2) the carriers of practices and (3) crisis moments. Finally, I provide insights into the methods used to generate and analyse my empirical data. I provide an overview of suitable interview questions for tapping background knowledge, delineate the method of interview sampling and finally introduce a text-hermeneutic technique of data analysis.
In this prelude to my conceptual framework, I engage in a review of prominent International Relations accounts of community in beyond-the-state contexts. Based on this review, I identify a central ...problématique underlying these accounts: either explicitly or implicitly, they presuppose a shared lifeworld or background from which community emerges as meaningful to its members. In the absence of a predefined background - be it formal institutions or a fixed set of norms and values - community is said to be non-existing. To counter what I call the 'community problem', I advocate a praxiological conception of community that accounts for the practices by which groups of individuals come to share a sense of belonging. Understood as a practical phenomenon, community does have a normative background. Yet, it is entirely practice-based and continually evolves as members engage in shared practices.
Introduction Hofius, Maren
European Union Communities of Practice,
2023
Book Chapter
The book opens with the global governance paradox as a vantage point to think about the role of 'communities of practice' for the constitution of order in the global realm. The global governance ...paradox reflects the move away from the Westphalian model of sovereign nation-states towards a thickening network of global, regional and transnational institutions that, however, lacks a normative grid that holds together the growing diversity of stakeholders in global governance. Absent a shared normative grid, International Relations and global governance scholars conclude that global governance is in disorder. To evidence how order develops in the face of cultural diversity, the book introduces readers to the benefit of zooming in on 'communities of practice'. 'Communities of practice' provide the social context within which a plurality of actors comes to create practice-based organising principles in the absence of a shared cultural background. These organising principles, in turn, constitute the normative background against which global governance institutions become meaningful to participating stakeholders. As a paradigmatic case of the global governance paradox on a regional scale, the book focuses on the European Union's (EU) efforts at creating a 'community without unity'. It demonstrates the value of treating it as a laboratory in which to reconstruct the normative grid that makes the EU hang together.
The global governance paradox reflects the move away from the Westphalian model of sovereign nation-states towards a thickening network of global, regional and transnational institutions that, lacks a normative grid that holds together the growing diversity of stakeholders in global governance. The international order lacks those socially recognised and culturally validated institutions that are capable of accommodating cultural difference in its various global governance frameworks. Like organising principles, constitutive rules move away from the quest for metaprinciples that are uprooted from the concrete contexts of people's engagement. For governance to work and be legitimate in the eyes of affected stakeholders in culturally heterogeneous contexts, the accommodation of cultural diversity in institutions is therefore key. The proposition to conceive of macro-structures as layered into multiple 'communities of practice' carries considerable weight because it holds out the prospect of identifying new practice-based organising principles for global governance. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
This chapter zooms in on the b/ordering site of Ukraine and provides detailed evidence for the empirical argument that EU field diplomats' boundary work forms a nexus of practices that composes the ...normative background of the EU community. Boundary work is therefore identified as the constitutive rule that orders the infinite ways of actualising the EU community in the local diplomatic 'community of practice' in Ukraine's capital Kyiv. By way of a fourfold distinction of boundary practices - internal boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing as well as external boundary-spanning and boundary-drawing - I present my findings as reconstructed from interviews conducted with EU diplomats in Kyiv in 2012 and 2014. The interviews reveal that boundary work is anything but a harmonious and coherent undertaking; in fact, it is a mélange of sometimes contradictory practices in which multiple layers of belonging are exposed. Boundary work is established as a constant play on boundaries in which the practices of linking and demarcation compensate one another, thus never losing the overall balance. Ultimately, it is not substantial agreement among the diplomatic 'community of practice' in Kyiv that creates senses of like-mindedness but the joint engagement in boundary work.
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