Culture has increasingly become mainstreamed in the EU's international cooperation agendas related to socio-economic development and external relations. This manifested in a new narrative of cultural diplomacy under the label of International Cultural Relations (ICR) that provided a seemingly depoliticised framework for culture in the EU’s wider foreign strategy as well as an opportunity to introduce new (cultural) intermediaries to translate the strategy’s visions into action. This paper examines the role of international cultural organisations (intermediaries) in foreign policy and neighbourhood policy in the Eastern Partnership initiative of the European Union. From a critical-interpretive perspective, it explores how communities of practices (CoPs) are orchestrated through and for the introduction and management of the European Union’s foreign policy aims, and how cultural intermediaries negotiate and enact the various interests between the EU’s normative and strategic aims and civil society interests in the framework of the Eastern Partnership Initiative. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork based on semi-structured interviews, observation and discourse analysis, it analyses the situated and relational practices emerging in the various communities of practices. Building on methodological triangulation between practice theory, policy translation and organisational ethnography, the research aims to offer theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of relational exchanges in the policy field between the various policy actors, and it aims to offer insights into how Russia’s war against Ukraine and the current geopolitical changes polarised and instrumentalised the role of culture.

Symbolic classifications that delineate the boundaries of contemporary national “imagined communities” are always defined relationally. When drawing such boundaries, political representatives often try to relate themselves to or distance themselves from other political communities that have historically represented their significant Others. In the context of Central Europe, the bulk of such boundary work takes place among the neighboring countries, who have represented each other’s significant Other throughout modern history. In this contribution, we explore the dynamics of such boundary work and its implications for present-day nationalism and political legitimacy. We situate our study in Czechia, a country whose national identity has been significantly shaped by its relationship to Germany and whose political positioning continues to be informed by images of its neighbor even today. We combine critical discourse analysis of public statements of country’s leading political representatives with cultural sociological theories of symbolic boundaries and boundary work. Focusing on the moment of “crisis” that followed the Russian invasion to Ukraine in 2022, we explore how they maintain, solidify, or shift the boundaries in relation to Germany when they try to claim legitimacy for their own reactions to this event. We find that the boundary work of Czech political representatives underwent three significant stages, characterized by the initial maintenance of Germany’s superior position informed by its economic and political power, gradual boundary shifting informed by claims of Czechia’s moral superiority, and finally projections of new balance in relationship of the two political communities enhanced by the Russian invasion.

Available studies seeking to understand past European defence industrial cooperation and integration overwhelmingly focus on new European initiatives, Western European collaborative projects, or the impact of external threats. While not lauding major breakthroughs, the studies generally note progress and improvement, as well as opportunity. We challenge this perception in a time series cluster analysis of mutual intra-EU arms trade in singling out the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The findings indicate a region far less integrated with the rest of Europe and within itself, than any other region in Europe – yet one with a growing defence industry. Based on detailed analysis of trade in specific military categories, we offer several relevant explanations for the identified trends and project them upon the ongoing CEE reactions to the Ukraine war. The findings have highly significant repercussions for the setup and operation of new European initiatives as well as for the future de-fragmentation of EDTIB.