Bureaucracy and place: expertise in the European Quarter

Bureaucratic structures and procedures are an integral part of the production of political space today. Analyses of geopolitical practices must therefore unpack the bureaucratic context in which these practices unfold on a daily basis. This is particularly important if we wish to understand transnational processes that operate at scales and in contexts other than the familiar contours of the nation‐state. In this article, I focus on one bureaucratic centre of geopolitics – the European Quarter in Brussels, Belgium, the institutional centre of the European Union. Drawing from scholarship on geopolitics and policy‐making, as well as primary interview material from field research in Brussels, I make two related points – (1) that we need detailed close‐up studies of the bureaucratic settings of contemporary geopolitics, and (2) that we must carefully situate such settings in their place‐specific contexts to reveal dynamics that remain unnoticed from afar. Empirically, the article contributes to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the EU as a transnational power centre of global importance. Theoretically, it seeks to improve our understanding of geopolitics as a bureaucratic and material practice.