A Poulantzasian Perspective On EU Foreign Policy

This chapter lays out a conceptual framework for analysing EU foreign policy (EUFP), which draws on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, who together with people such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Negri was a key contributor to efforts in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s to develop radical perspectives on power. Poulantzas sought to grasp how mobile and scattered relations of economic, political, and ideological power are condensed into ‘the national formulation of a coherent global project’. To answer this question, he focused on the state, for which he elaborated a concept which differs radically from those used in mainstream political science. Already in the 1970s, Poulantzas stressed the transversal nature of seemingly territorialised social power relations as he argued that they are embedded in the spatially ‘uneven development of the various national formations’. By performing its foreign policy in ethical terms, or in terms of ‘principled pragmatism’, the EU makes its internationalised state project do important ideological work.