| Summary: | Where are the ‘spaces’ of Europe and European government? Who inhabits these spaces? What do they do? Building on scholarship which argues that political reality “requires physical props, individuals, actions, stationery, buildings and the like to really exist” (Kauppi 2010: 28), this Section proposes a focus on the ‘institutionalization of European spaces’ as a research design for capturing the politics of the European Union (EU). Starting from the premise shared by others (Favell, Guiraudon, Rumford) that the ‘spaces’ of European government are not solely ‘in Brussels’, nor only inhabited by EU organizations, we argue that Europe is constantly being made in particular places, through specific actor struggles, whose interconnections are often ill-defined. Moreover, the contingent nature of these interactions demands a systematic approach to demonstrate both ‘where’ and ‘how’ actors interpret, reference and articulate Europe and give it meaning.
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