Conclusion

This book sought to gain insight into how EU practitioners consider the policy for which they have direct responsibility. By first summarising its findings, I reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of this study and studying EU practitioners in general. I examined data drawn from research interviews with EU practitioners who work on EU foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Following a poststructuralist theoretical and methodology position within the practice turn, and having an open research question, allowed me to focus on the data and the topics that EU practitioners raised. I analysed these interactions through the application of DPM. DPM enabled me to draw attention to the discursive patterns that practitioners employ when they discuss EU foreign policy in the eastern neighbourhood, what they accomplish with them, how they manage their personal accountability or agency through them, and what implications these formulations have for the practitioners’ practices. This led to a focus on the ways that practitioners manage identity, normative, moral, and collective interest concerns. These four concepts are crucial for IR theory, and also for understanding EU foreign policy. Although each concept was addressed in a separate chapter, I demonstrated points of interdependency throughout the analysis. Their parallel existence is key for this study and for poststructuralist practice theory. It builds on previous constructive works that linked identity and interests, but expanded it to normative and even moral concerns faced by practitioners when developing a specific foreign policy. Drawing this inference was only possible owing to the openness and refusal to take anything for granted advocated by poststructuralists; thus, the focus lies on the topics made relevant by practitioners, and how their accounts build up specific constructions of our world, rather testing for specific categories or for the truth value of their account....