Focusing on Europe, this paper investigates diplomatic training as an uneven transnational field. The field is uneven not only along the predictable lines of big and small states but also along the lines of wealth and tradition that are customarily overlooked in diplomatic studies. The field is transnational in the sense that national, international, and supranational elements blend in daily practice to create qualitatively new forms of diplomatic knowledge production. It is transnational also because of the growing role of EU institutions in European diplomacy. The goal is to grasp the variegated capacities of Europe’s foreign services, including the European External Action Service, to generate high-quality diplomatic knowledge today. More broadly the goal is to improve our understanding of transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. Empirically, the paper draws from extensive web-based sources and nearly 100 qualitative one-to-one interviews with the professionals of diplomacy in Brussels and five national capitals. Conceptually and methodologically, my long-term study offers a relatively ‘peopled’ or quasi-ethnographic analysis of a transnational field (of diplomatic training) that has hitherto received little attention in any social science discipline. That close-up lens enables me to examine diplomatic training at a higher resolution than is usually done and to thereby illuminate patterns that remain obscure in traditional state-based accounts.
Keywords: Diplomacy, European External Action Service, diplomatic training, transnationalism
