How interdisciplinary is European Studies? In this chapter, we assess the state of interdisciplinarity in European Studies through a comprehensive empirical examination of the scope, content, type, and success of research articles published within the field. Our mixed-methods approach incorporates both quantitative analyses of large datasets and qualitative assessments of a substantive body of research output. We start by surveying the abstracts of papers published in European Studies journals for self-proclaimed interdisciplinarity. Overall, we find only just over 1% of research to be interdisciplinary by self-proclamation. Yet, we also note an encouraging increase over time. We then examine the extent and success of interdisciplinary collaborations by analysing citation counts of articles published between 2016 and 2020 in two notable European Studies journals. We find that over 9% of articles are the result of collaborations across disciplinary boundaries. We also conceptualise different types of interdisciplinarity and study their empirical prevalence and implementation. A more detailed look reveals that interdisciplinarity may be more widespread than authors proclaim themselves, amounting to 16% of examined articles. Not only do European Studies scholars collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, but in single-authored work we also discover many examples of different types of interdisciplinarity. Encouragingly, we find no evidence that this interdisciplinary work receives fewer citations than scholarship confined to disciplinary boundaries. Building on this, we offer some tools and best-practice examples of how to bring interdisciplinarity into one’s scholarship.
How does legal talk matter and how it is used in diplomatic practice? International law's inherent openness to interpretation is an opportunity for states to shape it to their advantage through argumentation, a well-studied type of legal rhetoric. In this article, I investigate another avenue: legal openness can also be used in a way that actively maintains and reproduces it through ambiguous discourse, in a way that is consequential for the emergence (or lack thereof) of international norms and for the quality of relations between states. This article puts scholarship on international law in conversation with practice theory and diplomatic theory by arguing that international legal practice, including legal talk, depends on the logic of practicality of those who practice it. The article develops a theoretical framework of discursive uses of international law and employs it to the study of engagement of progressive states on the issues of abortion and same-sex partnerships in Poland. I conclude that diplomats construct ambiguity about their countries' positions on how human rights square with the principle of non-interference. Consequently, international law is found as a discursive resource not only for argumentation in the interest of statecraft but also for maintenance of ambiguity in the interest of co-existence. Interestingly, these findings from a bilateral site stand in contrast with argumentative legal practice used in multilateral fora.
How do states negotiate meaning? Building on the empirical case of the contestation of the term ‘gender equality’ in the Council of the European Union, I show that the scholarship has so far lacked precise tools for analysing negotiation over meaning. This gap is surprising given how ubiquitous and politically consequential are negotiations over definitions in the European Union and other international loci. Because of assumed contradiction between constructivism and bargaining in the EU literature, bargaining over language has not received enough scholarly attention. In this article, I propose an analytical framework for studying intentional meaning-making through negotiations and I introduce concepts of language-solving and language-bargaining. I show how the meaning ascribed to the term ‘gender equality’ in the EU is a result of language-bargaining between nationally-located understandings represented by EU member states. The negotiations led first to the open meaning of the term between 1990s and 2010s and then, following ‘gender crisis’, an explicit agreement by member states to attribute diverging meanings to the term ‘gender equality’ since 2021. The analysis shows the importance of partial separation of national processes of meaning-making for international negotiations.
To what extent is diplomacy a depolarizing tool of international society? This article proposes a novel theoretical and empirical focus on depolarization in international politics of gender and sexuality. It operationalizes the concepts of polarization and depolarization and integrates them with Self/Other theory in international relations. It puts forward an argument that the logic of diplomacy is, although not unequivocally, compatible with the logic of depolarization. The claim and the application of the framework are illustrated with a case study of gender equality and LGBT+ rights diplomacies in Poland. Based on the empirical findings, the article contends that diplomacy is primarily a practice of depolarization.
According to recent scholarship, populist governments engage in “unpolitics,” a repudiation of politics as the process of resolving conflict, including on the level of the EU. We propose that the conditions provided by the Council preparatory bodies, namely constructive negotiation culture, focus on technical details and containment of a negotiation outside of mediatised venues, might hamper the emergence of unpolitics. We test this argument by tracing the process of the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence, concluded in June 2023. This case study serves as a hard case for our theory because gender equality as a policy area is susceptible to tactics of unpolitics and right-wing populists have employed populist critique of the Istanbul Convention in their domestic contexts. Having analysed multiple data sources, including interviews with negotiators in the Council of the EU, official EU documents, and media coverage, we find little evidence of unpolitics in the case of the Council’s negotiation of the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention. We suggest that decision-making venues such as Council preparatory bodies can mitigate phenomena associated with populism, such as the use of unpolitics tactics in EU decision-making.