Situating identities: Enacting and studying Europe at a Russian elite university

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 3-25

  Müller, Martin ^a  

^a GOETHE UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

Author keywords

Discourse; Ethnography; Europe; Identity; Poststructuralism; Russia

Indexed keywords

EID: 50849097101     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093728     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. For example David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992);
2. Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. For example Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006);
4. Janice Bially Mattern, Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force (New York: Routledge, 2005).
5. For example Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
6. For example Ulrike H. Meinhof, ed., Living (with) Border: Identity Discourses on East-West Borders in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
7. Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
8. There are a sizeable number of articles and several monographs on this topic, e.g. James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004);
9. Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);
10. Mikhail A. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian-Ukrainian Relations (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002);
11. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1996);
12. Rolf Peter, Russland im neuen Europa: Nationale Identität und außenpolitische Präferenzen (1992-2004) [Russia in the New Europe: National Identity and Foreign Policy Preferences (1992-2004)] (Hamburg: LIT-Verlag, 2006);
13. Andrei P. Tsygankov, Pathways after Empire: National Identity and Foreign Economic Policy in the Post-Soviet World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001);
14. Russia's Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
15. Graham Smith, The Post-Soviet States: Mapping the Politics of Transition (London: Arnold, 1999), 47-50;
16. Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe, and Zžižek (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 152.
17. Similar cases are made in Nick Megoran, 'For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-imagining Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures', Political Geography 25 (2006): 622-40;
18. Iver B. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2002): 627-51.
19. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 'Nation, State and Identity at International Borders', in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-30, 4.
20. Neil Renwick, 'Re-reading Europe's Identities', in Identities in International Relations, eds Jill Krause and Neil Renwick (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 154-71, 155
21. quoting Sharon Macdonald, 'Identity Complexes in Western Europe: Social Anthropological Perspectives', in Inside European Identities, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 1-26, 6.
22. Ibid., 155.
23. Chantal Mouffe, 'Citizenship and Identity', October 61, Summer (1992): 28-32.
24. Jennifer Milliken, 'The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods', European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 2 (1999): 225-54.
25. See the seminal book by James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989),
26. and in the Russian context, e.g. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe; Sergei Prozorov, Understanding Conflict between Russia and the EU: The Limits of Integration (London: Palgrave, 2006);
27. and Tsygankov, Russia's Foreign Policy.
28. On this see the argument in Martin Müller, 'Reconsidering the Concept of Discourse in the Field of Critical Geopolitics: Towards Discourse as Language and Practice', Political Geography 27, no. 3 (2008): 322-38
29. and David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 24ff., who draws on the work of Judith Butler.
30. For example Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn', although I do not agree with his way of opposing the two concepts of discourse and practice, and meaning and materiality.
31. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
32. For more detail see Müller, 'Reconsidering the Concept of Discourse'.
33. For example in Nick Megoran, 'The Critical Geopolitics of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley Boundary Dispute, 1999-2000', Political Geography 23, no. 6 (2004): 731-64.
34. Johannes Angermüller, 'Diskursanalyse: Strömungen, Tendenzen, Perspektiven. Eine Einführung [Discourse Analysis: Strands, Tendencies, Perspectives. An Introduction]', in Diskursanalyse: Theorien, Methoden, Anwendungen, eds, Johannes Angermüller, Katharina Bunzmann and Martin Nonhoff (Hamburg: Argument, 2001), 7-22;
35. Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994);
36. Stefan Titscher, Michael Meyer, Ruth Wodak and Eva Vetter, Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis: In Search of Meaning (London: Sage, 2000), 27-8.
37. Teun A. van Dijk, "The Study of Discourse', in Discourse as Structure and Process, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (London: Sage, 1997), 1-34, 29.
38. Ted Hopf, 'The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory', International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171-200, 182.
39. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
40. Mouffe, 'Citizenship and Identity', 28.
41. Didier Bigo and R. B. J. Walker, 'International, Political, Sociology', International Political Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 1-5, 5.
42. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn', 628.
43. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, 2.
44. Vladimir Baranovsky, 'Russia: A Part of Europe or Apart from Europe?', International Affairs 76, no. 3 (2000): 443-58, 445.
45. See also Roy Allison, Margot Light and Stephen White, Putin's Russia and the Enlarged Europe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2006).
46. Nikolas K. Gvosdev, 'Russia: European but Not Western?', Orbis 51, no. 1 (2007): 129-40;
47. Vyacheslav Morozov, 'Auf der Suche nach Europa: Der politische Diskurs in Russland [In Search of Europe: Political Discourse in Russia]', Osteuropa 53, no. 9-10 (2003): 1501-14.
48. Flemming Splidsboel-Hansen, 'Russia's Relations with the European Union: A Constructivist Cut', International Politics 39 (2002) : 399-421.
49. Sergei Prozorov, 'The Narratives of Exclusion and Self-exclusion in the Russian Conflict Discourse on EU-Russian Relations', Political Geography 26, no. 3 (2007): 309-29, 323ff.
50. For example Robert Kagan, 'New Europe, Old Russia', The Washington Post, 6 February 2008, A19;
51. Jeffrey Mankoff, 'Russia and the West: Taking the Longer View', Washington Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2007): 125-35;
52. Boris Mezhuev, 'Modern Russia and Postmodern Europe', Russia in Global Affairs 6, no. 1 (2008).
53. This aspect is studied by political geographers in the field of critical geopolitics, see, for example, the instructive overview by Simon Dalby, 'Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference and Dissent', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9 (1991): 261-83.
54. For this function of 'Europe' in everyday life see, for example, Jennifer Patico, 'Consuming the West but Becoming Third World: Food Imports and the Experience of Russianness', The Anthropology of East Europe Review 21, no. 1 (2003) http://condor.depaul.edu/%7Errotenbe/aeer/V2inl/Patico.pdf, 10 July 2008.
55. See Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, or Ernesto Laclau, 'Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?', in Emancipation(s), ed. Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 1996), 36-46, for a good summary of the operation of empty signifiers.
56. Interview with Professor Igor' Rozhkov, available on faces.mgimo.ru.
57. MGIMO is the common acronym under which this university figures in Russia.
58. All data as of 2006.
59. The ethical implications of my research are addressed in greater detail in my doctoral thesis.
60. The methodology of political ethnography, situated at the intersection of the disciplines of political science, anthropology, sociology and geography, has gained some popularity lately. This is attested by a number of recently published and forthcoming edited volumes: Lauren Joseph, Matthew Mahler and Javier Auyero, eds, New Perspectives in Political Ethnography (New York: Springer, 2007);
61. Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 forthcoming);
62. and the review articles Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Brian T. Connor, 'The Ethnos in the Polis: Political Ethnography as a Mode of Inquiry', Sociology Compass 2, no. 1 (2008): 139-55;
63. and Lorraine Bayard de Volo and Edward Schatz, 'From the Inside out: Ethnographic Methods in Political Research', PS: Political Science and Politics 37, no. 2 (2004): 267-71.
64. In International Relations, ethnography is still a very marginal methodology, but see Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn'; Vincent Pouliot, '"Subjectivism": Toward a Constructivist Methodology', International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2007): 350-84;
65. and the discussion forum contributions in International Political Sociology 2, no. 1 (2008): 89-93.
66. Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics, 28.
67. Nigel Thrift, 'It's the Little Things', in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, eds, Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 380-7.
68. Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles and Practices (New York: Routledge, 1995), 174-232;
69. Stefan Titscher, Michael Meyer, Ruth Wodak and Eva Vetter, Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis: In Search of Meaning (London: Sage, 2000), 90-103.
70. Herbert Blumer, 'What Is Wrong with Social Theory?', American Sociological Review 19, no. 1 (1954): 3-10, 7.
71. All names changed.
72. All material has been translated from the Russian by the author.
73. D. Bartlett, 'In Russia, at Last and Forever: The First Seven Years of Russian Vogue', Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 10, nos 1-2 (2006): 175-203;
74. Elena Karpova, Nancy Nelson-Hodges and William. Tullar, 'Making Sense of the Market: An Exploration of Apparel Consumption Practices of the Russian Consumer', Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 11, no. 1 (2007): 106-21, also report that the origin of clothing tends to be more important than the label.
75. For similar observations see Hilary A. Pilkington, 'Looking West? Cultural Globalisation and Russian Youth Cultures', Europxa 6, nos 1/2 (2001): 83-98.
76. Numbers are used as tags to assign interview extracts to interviews.
77. Collective Security Treaty Organization, the CIS equivalent to NATO in which Russia plays a leading role.
78. Mouffe, 'Citizenship and Identity'.
79. These overlapping identities have also been briefly addressed in focus group research on the views and perception of Europe by ordinary Russians in Stephen White, Ian McAllister and Margot Light, 'Enlargement and the New Out-siders', JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 1 (2002): 135-53, 146-7. Results indicate ambiguous identities and a considerable breadth of meaning attached to the idea of 'Europeanness'. While many respondents felt attracted to European civilization and culture, they were considerably less vociferous advocates of political integration with Europe. A majority considered Russia a unique country in geopolitical terms, for which it was not desirable to strive for the status of a European state.
80. On this see also Prozorov, Understanding Conflict between Russia and the EU, 183-4.
81. Gvosdev, 'Russia: European but not Western'; Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics, 174ff.
82. Neumann, 'Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn', 636-7. Sedimented discourses have also been called 'institutionalised performativity'; for more detail see Kate Nash, 'Thinking Political Sociology: Beyond the Limits of Post-Marxism', History of the Human Sciences 15, no. 4 (2002): 97-114.
83. As observed in Ted Hopf, 'Identity, Legitimacy, and the Use of Military Force: Russia's Great Power Identities and Military Intervention in Abkhazia', Review of International Studies 31 (2005): 225-43.
84. As observed in Mankoff, 'Russia and the West', and in Dmitriy Trenin, 'Russia Redefines Itself and Its Relations with the West', Washington Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2007): 95-105.
85. On the basis of the data provided by the New Russia Barometer, a regular survey of the Russian population, this hypothesis is suggested for the popular geopolitical orientation in Russia in Richard Rose and Neil Munro, 'Do Russians See Their Future in Europe or the CIS?', Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 1 (2008): 49-66, 63.
86. For example in Rose and Munro, 'Do Russians See Their Future in Europe or the CIS?'; Andrei P. Tsygankov, 'Mastering Space in Eurasia: Russia's Geopolitical Thinking after the Soviet Break-up', Communist and PostCommunist Studies 36 (2003): 101-27;
87. William Zimmerman, 'Slavophiles and Westernizers Redux: Contemporary Russian Elite Perspectives', Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 3 (2005): 183-209.
88. Mouffe, 'Citizenship and Identity', 28.