EU Foreign Policy Ideas as International Relations of Domination: A Neo-Gramscian Perspective

This chapter employs a neo-Gramscian International Relations (IR) perspective to explore how the foreign policy ideas congealed in EU grand strategy intra-act with political-economic class struggle, political consciousness, and the international relations of imperialism to affect EU capitalist worldmaking. The chapter begins by discussing the existential and epistemological assumptions and the methodology of neo-Gramscian IR, before developing three arguments about the macro- and micro-political work of EU foreign policy ideas. In doing so, it integrates postcolonial and cultural sociological insights into this neo-Gramscian analysis. The first argument is that EU grand strategy produces a deceptive hybrid of knowledge and ignorance, which camouflages the EU’s historical and contemporary performances of imperialist domination. The second argument is that EU grand strategy is made by intra-capitalist political-economic class struggles within the EU. The third argument is that EU grand strategy makes the hegemony of neoliberal economic order politics endure within the EU by offering normative affordances to the ethical self-making practices of key fractions of the elites governing the EU. The concepts that drive this analysis are hegemony, ideology, common sense, and control. The conclusion draws on Gramsci’s arguments about political consciousness to discuss the importance of everyday epistemic agency for disrupting hegemony.