Before we can fruitfully discuss what Europe ought to do about its various policy dilemmas, we need to re-examine the lens through which we view these dilemmas. I will highlight two problems with the ...habitual lens on Europe’s future: firstly, it’s unrealistic emphasis on clarity and coherence and, secondly, its state-centrism and state-envy. I explore the ways in which we can reverse the lens to examine familiar problems from unfamiliar angles.
Transnational bureaucracies Kuus, Merje
Progress in human geography,
08/2015, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper assesses geographic and especially political geographic work on transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. The term 'transnational' signals policy processes that blend national and ...extranational dynamics in institutional settings that transcend the governmental structures of states. The focus is on the international arena rather than national policy-making. The paper foregrounds the growing attention to bureaucratic processes in geography and highlights some productive arguments about spatiality and practice in that work. I stress the need for closer interdisciplinary engagements and I point to the insights that we would gain from the work of Pierre Bourdieu in that effort.
Political economies of transnational fields: harmonization and differentiation in European diplomacy. Territory, Politics, Governance. Focusing on Europe, this paper analyses diplomacy as an uneven ...transnational field. The field is uneven not only along the predictable lines of big and small states, but also along the lines of wealth and tradition that are customarily overlooked in diplomatic studies. The political economy of European diplomacy cannot be read off the map of states without considering cross-national patterns of economic and symbolic capital. The field is transnational in the sense that national, international and supranational elements blend in daily practice to create qualitatively new forms of diplomatic knowledge production. By analysing such uneven transnationalism, the paper brings greater empirical and conceptual specificity to our understanding of bureaucratic knowledge production. The empirical material focuses on diplomatic training. It is drawn from web-based sources and over 100 interviews with the professionals of diplomacy in Brussels and five national capitals. This ‘peopled’ lens enables a high-resolution analysis of diplomatic practice and thereby illuminates socio-spatial patterns that remain invisible in traditional state-based accounts. By unpacking in concrete terms what the oft-used phrase ‘beyond the state’ means in diplomatic training, the paper advances the study of bureaucratic knowledge production in geography and cognate fields.
Bureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which ...these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucratic centre of geopolitics – the European Quarter in Brussels, Belgium, the institutional centre of the European Union. Drawing from scholarship on geopolitics and policy‐making, as well as primary interview material from field research in Brussels, I make two related points – (1) that we need detailed close‐up studies of the bureaucratic settings of contemporary geopolitics, and (2) that we must carefully situate such settings in their place‐specific contexts to reveal dynamics that remain unnoticed from afar. Empirically, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the EU as a transnational power centre of global importance. Theoretically, it seeks to improve our understanding of geopolitics as a bureaucratic and material practice.
This article examines the production of geographical expertise inside the European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels. My question is not what EU policy professionals know, but how they deploy ...specific knowledge claims as expertise. Drawing from 62 interviews with 42 policy professionals, mostly in Brussels, I focus empirically on one facet of one policy: the eastern direction of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the efforts of the ‘new’ or post-2004 member states to project regional expertise about the eastern neighbourhood within EU institutions. In conceptual terms, I investigate the intellectual and social technologies by which expert authority is accomplished. The article illuminates the ways in which policy professionals script political space in terms of particular kinds of places to be dealt with by specific agents in specific kinds of ways. The interview material enables me to examine such processes of knowledge production in greater detail than is allowed by the conventional ‘big picture’ analyses of European integration.
This article uses the character of Josef Švejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating ...humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding Švejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses.
