Conference Program

The modern state system originated in the structural deterioration and dysfunctionality of the medieval world in Europe (a development often traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) and the trend toward European imperial expansion. Statism became the general rule in the 19th and 20th centuries with the consolidation of nation-states in Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America and the establishment of post-colonial states in Africa and elsewhere. The structural core of the nation-state system has involved centralised public bureaucratic hierarchies, clearly demarcated and controlled external borders, economic modernisation (both capitalist and socialist, shaped in particular by the Second Industrial Revolution), and nationalist ideologies across the left-right spectrum.

Today the dialectic of globalisation and fragmentation increasingly leading to a multi-level, multi-nodal, complex and uneven restructuration process. Bureaucracies are being decentralised and quasi-privatised, leading to private interest regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage and the predominance of profitability over the public interest, both domestically and transnationally. Borders are becoming more and more fragile as local as transnational processes cut across them. Economic change, from financialisation to the Third and/or Fourth Industrial Revoltion(s) and technological change, is increasingly multi-level, above, below and cutting across states. And ideological shifts, from neoliberalism and libertarianism on the one hand to the new quasi-dictatorial populism on the other are challenging the “public interest” state and traditional liberal democracy. What Rosenau called “Turbulence” and postmodernism constitute the new way of the world .

International theory has sought to interpret the renewed centrality of geopolitical competition in contemporary affairs. Often, it has taken what a retrofuturistic stance, meaning that it describes said competition as a return to the original Cold War in terms of its structural logic, while allowing for a limited impact of technological and other developments as ephemeral factors. Here, I argue that the retrofuturistic interpretation of great power competition ignores a fundamentally altered social structure of today’s contest. Whereas the original Cold War took place between essentially autarkic bloc-states that were isolated from each other as societies, today’s great powers represent political centers of power within a highly interdependent economic and social system. Within this globalized social structure, great powers do not function according to the horizontal logic of conflict between functionally identical “like units” of the original Cold War, as they were theorized by structural realism. Rather, we are now looking at an at least partially vertical division of labor between competing units in global value chains of capitalist production, resulting in a heterarchical social structure. This heterarchy, however, cannot be accounted for within traditional anthropomorphic morphologies of the international, derived from classical humanist understandings of agency and structure. It might more adequately be conceived as similar to the aesthetic of J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise, in which different hostile groups inhabit a vertically integrated order within a common technological infrastructure. A posthumanist understanding of social order may thus be necessary to theorize the logic of the new cold war.

The Council of the European Union gathers representatives of the EU member states, who meet and negotiate in many different bodies at several levels, from junior diplomats to ministers. Formally, the Council looks like a typical space for inter-state bargaining: the states are sending their representatives to hierarchically layered bodies, these representatives receive and fulfil instructions, and subsequently report to their superiors. This view is challenged, however, by the practices and norms, prevalent in EU decision-making and institutions, which question both the anarchical logic of the state system and the hierarchical order in the domestic realm.

In this paper, I focus on the way member state officials understand representation. Rather that defining the concept of representation “from above”, I want to approach it “from below” and ground it in the experience and understandings of national officials who work in the Council’s preparatory bodies. This type of interpretive approach to concepts is called “elucidation” (cf. Schaffer 2015). Empirically, the paper is based on in-depth interviews conducted during my ongoing field research in Brussels.

In order to find out what meanings the officials associate with representation, I ask how they perceive their role as representatives, who they think they represent, and if there are any tensions between their representative duties and consensus-seeking. In this last aspect, I use practice-oriented framework, looking at both consensus-seeking and representation as social practices, or socially recognisable, patterned, meaningful action which can be performed at varying degrees of competence.

When we look at continuity and change in current international relations, we are limited by the frames of two dominant theories: realism sees national interests and hard/soft power; whereas idealism envisions international institutions and normative constructions. However, there is a possibility to see the world from a relational lens. The specific relationships between interactional actors might enable us to better make sense of the followings: irrationality besides rational foreign policies; "emotional truth" working alongside with cognitive truth; war as a result of relational "push and pull" instead of as a continuation of rational politics; the possibility of interdependent governance across national politics; and the impact of the connective power. We might conclude that international relations should be about "relations," which shape the perception of national interests, pave the path of the construction of national power, and enable the working of international institutions, as well as affect domestic politics. This paper attempts to explore this relational aspect of international relations and therefore reveal another dynamic of the continuity and change of the world.