Europe’s future depends on perspective not policy

Understanding know-where

My first point is about multiplicity and ambiguity. Many people wish that the EU would develop a more unified policy line, especially in the big or strategic issues of geopolitics and external relations. Analysts try to distill or detect the one position—the one that finally seems to be emerging or ought to be emerging—that can tie together the different agendas into one broadly stable compromise. Multiplicity and messiness are cast as unfortunate roadblocks. Energies are directed to clearing things up into something more consistent.

This condemns the commentators to eternal disappointment. In the EU, every crack in a roadblock only ever opens onto another roadblock. The interminable grind of barely palatable compromises of which EU decisions are made is recognized in theory. It is usually recognized by those who practice the grind in Brussels. But I am puzzled by how many people in policy, popular and academic circles insist on hearing a neat line of what the EU is doing or ought to do. I am puzzled by how often EU experts, both officials and academics, apologize for EU-level processes being messy. They see complexity as a problem.

I regularly observe at various events on EU external action, that the so-called EU perspective, offered by a scholar or an EU diplomat, is a remarkably cautious, even timid, perspective. It is deeply deferential to whatever anyone cares to define as a national interest. If the exchange at such an event begins to resemble a debate, those who project the state-based perspective win. At some point, this deference to the nation state ceases to be level-headed and becomes unimaginative. It reproduces the idea that the EU is not and cannot be a powerful actor on the world stage.

This unease about complexity and ambiguity stems from a blind spot about the highly textured geographies of power and authority in Europe. The issue is not simply that the EU is complicated. The core issue is that the union is, to this day, Europe’s Unidentified Political Object (a phrase coined by Jacques Delors). We try to make sense of that object using our familiar language of the nation and the state as if we were discussing something vaguely state-like. This leads us to overlook the geographically rooted assumptions we bring into the discussion.

A European perspective always comes from somewhere more specific, both geographically and sociologically, than a national capital. That somewhere, the where of that historical metaphor or geographical analogy, matters. In the practice of EU decision-making, the where of the speaking mannerisms, the accents, the idioms that don’t quite work in English or French, matter. The clothing styles that betray the national capital where the clothes were purchased matter. The controversial and not infrequently flawed accounts of history matter, no matter how well we can document their flaws. Nobody in Europe is untainted by self-serving claims on what European culture is and where it is. In EU institutions, all jobs are geopolitical in that they are closely bound up with geographical imaginaries of where Europe and Europeanness are assumed to be and where the centres and margins of Europeanness are assumed to be. Dialogues about Europe often trade in parochialism dressed up as cosmopolitanism (Kuus, 2014).

The task is to examine not only what the practitioners of EU external action think about the union’s power but also what they think from: the usually unspoken geographical roots of their ideas and practices. We need to examine the know-where (Agnew, 2007) and not only the know-how of EU-level policy claims. Actual places, as experienced and imagined, anchor conceptions of what Europe is, how it works or how it ought to work. The task is not to create a smooth technocratic space in which that geography no longer matters. The task is to acknowledge and examine that geography.

The effort, in other words, should not be to reach for some lofty disembodied space of European cosmopolitanism. It should rather be to work with the actual geographical rootedness of perspective without either moulding it into a patchwork of states or scaling it up into Europe as a state-like structure. The choice is not between a national and a European perspective, as both of those two simplify the actual geographical texture of power.

That texture is detected in Brussels, but it cannot be neatly defined. In my interviews with diplomats, I observe that several interviewees, in different EU and national institutions, instinctively reach for tactile gestures to characterize the production of EU-level consensuses: gestures of feeling a fabric between their fingers to test its quality, feeling a handful of sand pass through their fingers or feeling the contours of something amorphous and hard to grasp. They use these gestures in part to indicate a certain difference between national and EU decision-making. As my work progressed, notes about such ‘cloth gestures’ increasingly appeared in my notes as I learned to notice the gestures. In a national capital, a national diplomat in Brussels explains, one learns the national line. ‘In Brussels, it is a bit more…’ – and he does the cloth gesture. ‘You cannot apply what you learned in your ministry’. ¹ The key point here is that EU decision-making is not seen as bigger or smaller, weightier or lighter, than the national kind. It is seen as different and more textured. The difference is felt but not clearly articulated. It remains undefined.

Unveiling regulatory power

My second, related, point is about nation-envy or the geographical bounding of power and influence. Much of what is said about politics and identity in today’s Europe is tells a familiar story of national competition and national identity. It channels our thinking into a territorial, state-like frame of power. It frames the nation state and the EU as distinct. It downplays questions about the actual know-where, the geography, of the EU’s regulatory power.

Europe’s power is obscure in part because our analytical tools make it such. The problem is not that the EU has not yet acquired sufficient amounts of what might be called ‘real’ power. The problem is rather that our conceptions of power are ill-suited for capturing transnational regulatory power (Kuus, 2017, 2020). For example, much has been said about identity and migration – of passports – in the discussions of Brexit. Little has been said, outside specialized media, of passporting rights, the capacity of companies to operate across the single market.

A passport is a tangible artefact of the interstate system. Passporting is an intangible capacity of a transnational regulatory space. In a similar vein, much has been said about the power of the American tech giants in our world. Little has been said about the role of the GDPR – the General Data Protection Regulation, a directive of the European Commission – in regulating the online life of people in places like Canada or the United States. From the labelling of Australian wine to the privacy protections offered by American technology companies, daily life around the world is shaped by the regulatory know-how of the EU.

That know-how is operationalized through the union’s diplomatic expertise. In the words of an EU diplomat: ‘An ambassador promotes trade; an EU ambassador creates the conditions in which trade can flourish’. We tend to not see such activity as an exercise of power, but this has more to do with our own blind spots about regulatory power than it has with the EU’s de facto influence around the world. In the words of Gideon Rachman (2019) of The Financial Times, ‘Big power struggles are played out through other means – such as the current trade war. And here, the EU – with its huge internal market and a unified trade and competition policy – is well equipped to slug it out with China and the US’.

When people say that the EU is not a strong power or it is becoming a stronger one, or that is finally growing up, they tacitly frame power in territorial and state-based terms. The assumption holds in Brussels as well as national capitals. EU decision-making not so much supersedes as overflows or messes up the nationally based lenses on power and influence. There is indeed no Europe without nation states. There are also no successful nation states in Europe without the EU today. Effective state power requires the EU and this is why states invest in the union. The more effective the state, the more systematically is invests in the union – and Germany is a prime example of this kind of foresight.

The problem is that our analyses of power are still laden with state-envy. Our stories of identity and influence tell us what power is and where it is in terms of a specifically territorial and state-like story of politics and belonging. This systematically downplays transnational regulatory power. Without an explicit effort to be more precise about the where of regulatory power, the binary of Europe and the nation continues to limit our understandings of political space.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the nation state or a national perspective. The simplification that I am trying to highlight is the idea that EU and nation state are distinct and there is a certain balance of power between them. That simplification contains our thought and imagination about where power is, can be or ought to be.

Seeing new patterns

I have identified two analytical habits that generate some closed thought patterns about Europe’s probable or possible futures. How would a more open-ended thinking look like, one might ask? I suggest we shift the lens first. The work towards that open-ended thinking does not begin with devising a new policy. It begins with shifting our perspective away from these familiar patterns. In the habitual lens, we locate power in terms of territorial blocks, as if power was a tile game of building territory. This leads us to see territorial and state-like geography of power first and to imagine the future in terms of that geography first. To imagine the future differently – to begin from a different place – we need to locate power differently.

I end with a point from a diplomat in Brussels. He speaks of his profession – diplomacy – and what makes a good diplomat. Whatever else a diplomat might do, he observes, that person ‘must be open, to see new patterns’. This call for an open mind, and the discomfort and dislocation that come with it, is good advice to those interested in imagining different futures in Europe and for Europe.