Whose regional expertise? Political geographies of knowledge in the European Union

This article examines the production of geographical expertise inside the European Union (EU) bureaucracy in Brussels. My question is not what EU policy professionals know, but how they deploy specific knowledge claims as expertise. Drawing from 62 interviews with 42 policy professionals, mostly in Brussels, I focus empirically on one facet of one policy: the eastern direction of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the efforts of the ‘new’ or post-2004 member states to project regional expertise about the eastern neighbourhood within EU institutions.

In conceptual terms, I investigate the intellectual and social technologies by which expert authority is accomplished. The article illuminates the ways in which policy professionals script political space in terms of particular kinds of places to be dealt with by specific agents in specific kinds of ways. The interview material enables me to examine such processes of knowledge production in greater detail than is allowed by the conventional ‘big picture’ analyses of European integration.