Explaining the European Union's foreign policy

The basic premise of this ambitious book is that we know little of why the EU acts the way it does internationally, and current theoretical debates do little to help. To remedy this, Magnus Ekengren proposes ‘a practice theory of translocal action’ as the way forward. Practice theory, originating in sociology, and especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu, he argues, can help us overcome the ‘superficial representations of interests and norms’ which form the spine of the two main contending theoretical approaches to explaining EU foreign policy. Ekengren contends that there is a growing divide between ‘the empirical reality of EU foreign policy’ and the dominant theoretical approaches of realism and constructivism. Ekengren argues that interest- or value-driven explanations of EU foreign policy are merely rhetorical and do not account for the foreign policy practices which emerge ‘from foreign policy action repeated over time and recognized as competent performance by a transnational community of practice’ (p. 4). The key to understanding this approach, as I see it, rests on the assumption that existing theoretical explanations of EU foreign policy pay scant attention to communities of practitioners whose repeated actions and decisions form the substance of EU foreign policy. Their practices are not motivated by vague, abstract notions of national interest or normative aspirations. In essence, this community of practice, which is transgovernmental—cutting across traditional understandings of a state-based, territorially defined ‘international’—brings together global and local practice, creating the ‘translocal’ in the title of the book. Of greatest importance in this relationship is the experience of ‘localized practice’, that is the foreign policy actions of the EU's representatives/actors in local environments which, when aggregated, can begin to explain the nature of EU foreign policy

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