International Relations and Jean Monnet Seminars 2009-2010

Xavier Guillaume-23rd of November 2009

Room: CAS 133

Time:16:45

Travelogues of difference: IR Theory and Travel Literature

Critical constructivists have largely contributed to draw attention to the key role of identity formation in our understanding of the international, most notably by concentrating on the links between identity and alterity. Yet, they have concentrated on a specific mechanism, othering, equating it, often implicitly, as the main sociological process by which a collective self-understanding/representation is actually forming, performing, and transforming itself vis-a-vis alterity. In this contribution, I argue that there exists a modernist bend in this conception due to an overreliance on a specific European/modern travel literature as a point of departure.  In order to contrast this modernist twist, I provide a form of critical intellectual history of this reading and then offer an alternative reading inspired by a pre-modern source, Heredotus.  By their ability to decentre our modern and European gaze, the Histories can help us to think beyond categories of othering and inversion at the heart of the critical constructivist reading of identity/alterity nexus.

Pertti Joenniemi -16th of November 2009

Room: CAS 133

Time: 16:45

Re-negotiating Europe's Identity: 

The European Neighbourhood Policy as a Form of Othering                                   


The contribution probes changes in the essence of the European Union through the lens of neighbourhood. It rests on the claim that the advent of the concept of 'neighbour' in the context of the Union's new policy of neighbourhood (ENP) testifies to an altered EU-identity. It argues that an approaching of the concept as foundational rather than seeing it merely as something functional and instrumental reveals crucial changes not just in the EU's vicinity but first and foremost in the EU itself.