Geopolitics and Expertise Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy

Geopolitics and Expertise is an in-depth exploration of how expert knowledge is created and exercised in the external relations machinery of the European Union.

• Provides a rare, full-length work on transnational diplomatic practice
• Based on a rigorous and empirical study, involving over 100 interviews with policy professionals over seven years
• Focuses on the qualitative and contextual, rather than the quantitative and uniform
• Moves beyond traditional political science to blend human geography, international relations, anthropology, and sociology

Merje Kuus is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research focuses on political geography and transnational policy processes. She is the author of Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement (2007) and co-editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics (2013). She has also written on security narratives, intellectuals of statecraft, the idea of Europe, and transnational diplomatic practice.

Series Editors’ Preface vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: The Crown Jewel 1

1 The Dead Relative: Bounding Europe in Europe 12
Geopolitics by Nobody; Carving Places out of Space; Embodied Europes

2 Knowledge and Policy in Transnational Fields 32
Placing Diplomatic Knowledge; Policy Fields; “The work of reciprocal elucidation”

3 Brussels and Theatre: Bureaucracy and Place 61
Planet Brussels; Those Who Hold the Pen: EU Professionals; The Political and the Technical – and the Social

4 Transnational Diplomats: Representing Europe in EU 27 86
European External Action Service; Curved Mirrors: Negotiating the National; The Group for Which There
is no Term: The New Member States

5 Powers of Conceptualization and Contextualization 112
A New Object of Knowledge; Fields of Expertise in the European Quarter; “Most people just want to
do what they are told”

6 Feel for the Game: Symbolic Capital in the European Quarter 133
Symbolic Capital; “We are dealing with elites”; “In the third degree of depth”; “An urbane, subtle approach”; Shifts and Spirals

7 Political Geographies of Expertise 171
Knowledge From and On the East; Finding a Market; “Things are evolving”; Managing Difference

Conclusion: Circles of Knowledge 195

References 209

Index 225

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