Knowledge and Authority in European Institutions, or: How Do Diplomats Know What They Know

Lecture

Drawing on her recent book, Merje Kuus starts to unpack the production of expert authority in Brussels. Relying empirically on over one hundred interviews with 73 foreign affairs professionals, she disentangles some of the rules for the production of rules in Brussels.

Beyond Europe, the analysis clarifies the workings of knowledge and power in transnational regulatory institutions. 

Expertise is the crown jewel of policy-making institutions, such as the European Union’s civil service in Brussels. Complex transnational decision-making requires sophisticated technical expertise on how social relations work or ought to work.

To comprehend European Union (EU) policy-making, we must grasp what counts as expertise in Brussels: whose expertise, from where, succeeds, and whose fails, and why and how this is so. We must understand how EU policy professionals know what they know, how they know that it is them who know, and how others know that this is so.

These questions are particularly fascinating when pondered in the context of diplomatic institutions, such as the EU’s new diplomatic corps. This is so in part because diplomatic practice relies on subtle social conventions that are not written down in training manuals. Close attention to EU diplomatic affairs can therefore illuminate the role of unspoken social conventions in the production of expert authority.

About Merje Kuus

Between 2-18 June 2014 Merje Kuus (Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) will be ACCESS EUROPE Visiting Professor for the theme 'Europe and the World'. 

She is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is a political geographer whose work concentrates on geopolitics and policy processes in transnational institutions.