Geopolitics and Expertise

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 viiiIntroduction: The Crown Jewel 11 The Dead Relative: Bounding Europe in Europe 12Geopolitics by Nobody; Carving Places out of Space; Embodied Europes2 Knowledge and Policy in Transnational Fields 32Placing Diplomatic Knowledge; Policy Fields; "The work of reciprocal elucidation"3 Brussels and Theatre: Bureaucracy and Place 61Planet Brussels; Those Who Hold the Pen: EU Professionals; The Political and the Technical – and the Social4 Transnational Diplomats: Representing Europe in EU 27 86European External Action Service; Curved Mirrors: Negotiating the National; The Group for Which There is no Term: The New Member States5 Powers of Conceptualization and Contextualization 112A 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 133Symbolic Capital; "We are dealing with elites"; "In the third degree of depth"; "An urbane, subtle approach"; Shifts and Spirals7 Political Geographies of Expertise 171Knowledge From and On the East; Finding a Market; "Things are evolving"; Managing DifferenceConclusion: Circles of Knowledge 195References 209Index 225