Doing Ethnography in EU Brussels: A Key to Understand the EU-Europe?

Since it’s very beginning, the EU civil service established itself as an entity comprising of people particularly well educated and prepared to “build Europe” on a basis of rationality and merit. Research shows also that EU civil servants perceive themselves as particularly tolerant and capable of handling the national sensitivities on a daily basis exceptionally well. I argue however that ethnographic approach and “deep hanging out” (Clifford 2010) with bureaucrats in Brussels reveal stereotypes and essentialisations of national cultures. These markings often run along the lines of “modernity” that implies also “Europeaness” of national performances and representations and construct hierarchies within the EU apparatus. Such dynamics however reveal deeply embedded power relations in everyday life that brings into light a colonial heritage of “Europe” in EU-Brussels. Doing ethnography in post enlargement Brussels shows how “rationality” and a promise of inclusion and modernity stipulates productions of divisions that have further consequences on the self-understanding of “Europeanness” and European project itself and on the production of the not fitting, non-rational and not modern “Other” in today’s EU Europe.