Returning Practice to the Linguistic

Turn: The Case of Diplomacy

Iver B. Neumann
The linguistic turn in the social sciences has been fruitful in directing
attention towards the preconditions for action, as well as those actions
understood as speech acts. However, to the extent that the linguistic turn
comprises only textual approaches, it brackets out the study of other kinds
of action, and so cannot account for social life understood as a whole. We
should return to seminal theorists such as Wittgenstein and Foucault, who
complemented a linguistic turn with a turn towards practices. Drawing
on the work of ethnographers such as Michel de Certeau and sociologists
such as Ann Swidler, in part one of this article I suggest that this may be
done by using a simple model of culture as a mutually conditioned play
between discourse and practices. In part two, I use this model to study
changing Norwegian diplomatic practices in the High North in the
aftermath of the Cold War. The claim is that capital-based diplomatic
practices are being complemented by emerging local practices which may
only be governed from the capital by indirect means. Diplomacy thus
changes from being a centralised to being a multibased practice.

For a generation now, the linguistic turn has invigorated social inquiry,
the discipline of International Relations (IR) included. Over the last fifteen
years in particular, a number of text-based approaches have emerged
with discourse analysis being perhaps the most dominant among them.
Like any balanced approach to social analysis, the linguistic turn, as well
as its sub-set discourse analysis, has had to own up to the challenge of
studying how humans make their own history, but not under conditions
they themselves have chosen. The seminal thinkers for discourse analysis,
Wittgenstein and Foucault, both went about this by focussing on language
in useon discursive practices. Their followers in IR, however, have not
always been as diligent in foregrounding the aspect of practice. In this
article, I contend that especially in IR we have to remind ourselves that
the linguistic turn and the turn to discourse analysis involved from the
beginning a turn to practices. For IR this means the linguistic turn is not
just a turn to narrative discourse and rhetoric, but to how politics is actually
effected. The analysis of discourse understood as the study of the
preconditions for social action must include the analysis of practice

Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2002. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 627-651

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understood as the study of social action itself.1 This turn to practice will
strike certain scholars as unnecessary. They may argue that, since the world
cannot be grasped outside of language, there is nothing outside of
discourse, and for this reason, the analysis of language is all that we need
in order to account for what is going on in the world. Such a response
would, however, miss the point, for what is at stake is not the question of
whether anything exists outside of language. Practices are discursive,
both in the sense that some practices involve speech acts (acts which in
themselves gesture outside of narrative), and in the sense that practice
cannot be thought outside of discourse. My concern here is a different
one, namely how best to analyse social life given that social life can only
play itself out in discourse. This concern stems from an impatience with
what could, perhaps unkindly, be called armchair analysis; by which I
mean text-based analyses of global politics that are not complemented
by different kinds of contextual data from the field, data that may
illuminate how foreign policy and global politics are experienced as lived
practices.
I begin by drawing on the work of ethnographers in order to construct
a model of social action in the articulation of narrative discourse and
discursive practices. The key function of this model is to demonstrate that
whereas practices tend to preserve the status quo of discourse, change is
always possible. In the second part of the article, true to the pledge of
studying politics close up, I give a reading of a field-based and interviewbased case study in the light of the proposed model. The point of the case
study is not only to validate the model, but to demonstrate how one specific
institutionnamely diplomacywas altered in at least one non-trivial
waynamely by a change in its set of actorsin one specific location
namely the High North in the 1990sby the actions of one specific actor
namely the state of Norway.
Cultures do not stand still for their portraits; both because they are
imbricated in one another, and because they change. One IR specialty has
been to investigate the institutions that have emerged to mediate such
changes, be they formal organisations such as the United Nations or wideranging institutions such as diplomacy. These institutions change too, and
these changes should be studied. Surely they may be studied in terms of
their narrative discourse. Such a way of studying them will, however, tend
to focus on the preconditions for action. The resulting studies may be very

1. The linguistic turn has often been characterised as a turn back to the sophists.
If one wants to dabble in such parallels, it is indeed noteworthy that sophists such
as Isocrates consistently stressed the importance of language as well as practices
as did the early pragmatists some 2,300 years later. See Isocrates, Helenes pris, in
Fire Taler, trans. Thure Hastrup (Kbenhavn: Museum Tusculanums, 1986), 65, l45.

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valuable indeed. We should, nonetheless, also push on to study social action
as such. This may be done by focussing on social practices.

Bringing Practice Back In

To the extent that the linguistic turn in the social sciences can be read as an
attempt to access the social by way of metaphors and narratives only, it
invites an elision of social practices. This overly sharp linguistic turn needs
correction by what Schatzki, Knorr Cetina and Savigny refer to as a practice
turn.2 To that end, they propose practice theory, by which they simply
mean general and abstract accounts of incorporated and material patterns
of action that are organised around the common implicit understandings
of the actors.3 Just like rules do not contain rules for their own application,
so practices do not contain rules for their use: it is always necessary to ask
what disposes people to enact the practices they do, how and when they
do; and their aims, their lived experience and their inherited knowledge
will surely figure amongst the factors of interest here.4 Practices are nested
phenomena.
Discourse analysts, who have arguably been the mainstay of the
linguistic turn in the social sciences, have consistently grappled with the
dilemma of how to reconcile meaning and materiality, discourse and
practice. 5 Michel Foucault, who saw practices as being part of discourse,
hence wrote about discursive practices, with discourse being the privileged
concept.6 The tendency to privilege discourse over practice has since been
2. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds., The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001).
3. Theodore R. Schatzki, Introduction: Practice Theory, in The Practice Turn, 3.
4. Barry Barnes, Practice as Collective Action, in The Practice Turn, 22.
5. I should not like this statement to be read as an exclusion of other extremely
valid attempts to grapple with related questions, for example those offered by the
German conceptual historians or by the Cambridge historians. I refer, for example,
to a discussion of the latter by Tully: Most practitioners of interpretative humanism
from Villa to Geertz are concerned with reconstructing or reproducing diverse
language games, traditions, paradigms or ideologies, showing ones way about
within them, mapping their transformations and, perhaps, going on to compare,
contrast and evaluate them in the light of our horizons. This has never been the
sole concern for Skinner because his further objective has always been to disclose
the relation or relations between political thought and political action. Wittgenstein
left us with a sublimely general description of this relation: a way of acting, a form
of life, lies at the bottom of a language-game. By this he meant that although
language-games lack rational foundations they do have practical foundations; they
are grounded by being woven into human activity and practices; see James Tully,
The Pen is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinners Analysis of Politics, in Meaning
and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1988), 22-23.
6. His principal biographer Eribon argues that Foucault, in works such as that
on Pierre Rivire, moves the entry point of analysis from the order of discourse to
social practices; Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Faber

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Millennium
intensified by discourse analysts such as Laclau and Mouffe. Practice
theorists reverse this conceptual hierarchy by taking the understanding of
material practice as their point of departure.
A central challenge for social analysis, then, must be how to preserve
the insights that have been produced by this narrow linguistic turn while
also adding the insights promised by practice theory, to re-combine the
study of meaning with the study of practice. One way of doing this is to
place culture at the centre of the analysis and to conceptualise it as a
dynamic interplay between discourse and practice. In this way, IR may
follow the general turn of anthropology and sociology away from an
analysis based on beliefs, ideas, norms and so on, in favour of more concrete
analysis:
Practice theory moves the level of sociological attention down
from conscious ideas and values to the physical and the habitual.
But this move is complemented by a move up, from ideas located
in individual consciousness to the impersonal arena of discourse.
A focus on discourses, or on semiotic codes permits attention to
meaning without having to focus on whether particular actors
believe, think, or act on any specific ideas. Like language, discourse
is conceived to be the impersonal medium through which (with
which) thought occurs (Lvi-Strausss notion that animals are good
to think with). A focus on discourse then reintroduces the world
of language, symbols, and meanings without making them anyonein-particulars meanings. . . . The old terrain of ideas and actors
[is] thus split into two domains, that of practices and that of
discourses. 7
Discourse here may then be understood as a system for the formation of
statements.8 Practices are socially recognized forms of activity, done on
and Faber, 1992), 235. Note, for example, how, in one of his very last works, Foucault
still uses discourse as the master concept that encompasses, among other things,
practices. Sexuality understood as the history of a present experience has three
interrelated axes: (1) the formation of sciences (savoirs) that refer to it, (2) the systems
of power that regulate its practice, (3) the forms within which individuals are able,
are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects of this sexuality; Michel Foucault,
The Uses of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1985), 4-6. In terms of method, Foucault states that he used the study of discursive
practices for the first task, the study of strategic power relations for the second,
and a genealogical analysis of the practices by which individuals were led to focus
their attention on themselves for the third.
7. Ann Swidler, What Anchors Cultural Practices, in The Practice Turn, 75. For
previous advocacy of the need for such a move to be made in IR, see Mark Laffey
and Jutta Weldes Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of
International Relations, European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 2 (1998):
193-237.
8. Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).

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Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

the basis of what members learn from others, and capable of being done
well or badly, correctly or incorrectly.9 The latter aspect pinpoints that
practice is something more than habit. If discourse refers to preconditions
for action and practice to socialised patterns of action, then both should
add up to a concept of culture. As Theodore Schatzki puts it, discourse
is being, while practice is the becoming from which discourses
result and to which they eventually succumb. Conversely,
discourses are the precarious fixities that precipitate from human
practice and from which further practice arises. The latter
formulation is preferable . . . because practice has form (being)
only in so far as it issues from extant discourse.10
Note that such a re-conceptualisation is dynamic both in the sense that it
introduces an understanding of change rather than stasis as the normal
state of affairs as it focuses on empirical change, and that it places discourse
and practice in two different time tracks by letting them emerge in different
ways. Ann Swidler explains this in a way that should speak directly to
students of IR when she argues that practices remain stable not only
because habit engrains standard ways of doing things, but the need to
engage one another forces people to return to common structures. Indeed,
antagonistic interchanges may reproduce common structures more
precisely than friendly alliances do.11 What has been delineated so far

9. Barnes, Practice as Collective Action, 19. Other notable definitions are Anthony
Giddens conceptualisation of practice as rules and resources which play a key
role in what he calls structuration, whereby the structural properties of social
systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they discursively organize;
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 25. Bourdieu also stresses that practice is different
from theory inasmuch as the embodiers of practice cannot necessarily describe
what they are doing in language, which is to say practices typically appear separate
from language. For example Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 106. Bourdieus view, that practices
are unconscious, has been criticised by Brenda Farnell; see Brenda Farnell, Getting
Out of Habitus: An Alternative Model of Dynamically Embodied Social Action,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 6, no. 3 (2000): 408. To her, Bourdieus
distinction between conscious and unconscious rests on an unwarranted if classical
Christian dichotomy between body and soul. Farnell argues that even if actions
are not self-conscious, that does not necessarily make them un-conscious.
10. Theodore R. Schatzki, Practice Mind-ed Orders, in The Practice Turn, 44.
11. Swidler, What Anchors Cultural Practices, 85. This is a general formulation
of an insight which can be found in IR for example in the work of the Copenhagen
School: security complexes are held together not only by amity, but also by enmity.
See, for example, Barry Buzan, Ole Wver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New
Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

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may be summed up in a simple figure:
C

u ltu r e

is c o u r s e

P r a c tic e

Figure 1: Culture understood as a dynamic interplay between discourse and

practice

Bringing de Certeau into IR

It may be argued that Friedrich Kratochwil calls for a practice turn in IR
when he writes that
[i]nstead of making consistency and truth the paradigmatic cases
for deciding validity-claims, as logic and positivism demand, we
had better use the model of deciding such questions discursively as
our normal case. . . the issue of why and how certain opinions
(doxai) become authoritative has to be investigated. In particular,
one has to inquire into the ways in which traditions, historical
experiences, past cases, practices, ideologies, etc., provide support
for reasons that become socially dominant.12
When a new turn in knowledge production is heralded, it is always possible
to go back and find precursors. Excavating the work of pioneers for the
practice turn serves the function of giving it a history, and of reclaiming
insights which may save one from reinventing the wheel. Concerning the
practice turn overall, the work of the early pragmatists and of Wittgenstein
and Wittgensteinians stand out as particularly relevant. 13 As to the
particular question of how practice itself can be thought of as discursive, a
key pioneer was the social anthropologist Michel de Certeau. In his Arts
de faire published in 1974, de Certeau states the case for rethinking the
assumed hierarchical bifurcation between discourse and practice:
[i]t is a notable fact that from the eighteenth to the twentieth
centuries, ethnologists and historians consider . . . what these
techniques do. No need to interpret. It suffices to describe. In
contrast, these scholars consider the stories by means of which a
12. Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of
Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33.
13. As Collins writes, Wittgenstein is the philosopher to whom nearly all theorists
of practice defer; H. M. Collins, What is Tacit Knowledge?, in The Practice Turn,
107. For an early pragmatist statement, see Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings
of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1986 [1955]), 150.

632

Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

group situates or symbolizes its activities to be legends that mean
something other than what is said. There is a strange disparity
between the way of treating practices and that of treating
discourses. Whereas the first way records the truth about
operating, the second way decodes the lies of speech.14
De Certeau shares with Foucault the move away from structuralism as he
is not interested in analysing manifest structures in order to establish a
set of latent structures which undergird them. They are both poststructuralists in the sense that they see the hunt for latent structures as
ahistorical and asocial; social life is contingent, not anchored in something
outside itself. But contrary to Foucault, de Certeau aims at establishing a
theory of action. His basic unit of analysis is not the utterance, but the
action. In order to understand everyday practices de Certeau focuses on
the tacit knowledge that goes into performing them and perhaps altering
them, all the tricks and improvisations which come into play and which
are traditionally read out of social analyses.15
Such a programme immediately runs up against the problem of how
to establish the validity of its findings, of how to generalise. The social
analyst is, after all, not interested in one particular action as such, but in
what that particular action can tell us about something more far-reaching.
De Certeaus answer is to argue that
one must suppose that to these ways of operating correspond a
finite number of procedures (invention is not unlimited and, like
improvisations on the piano or on the guitar, it presupposes the
knowledge and application of codes), and that they imply a logic
of the operation of actions relative to types of situations. This logic,
which turns on circumstances, has as its precondition, contrary to
the procedures of Western science, the non-autonomy of its field
of action. 16
Given the existence of non-narrative discourse, and given that practices
are embedded in one another, it must be possible to establish what kind of
repertoire of actions exists for a particular type of subject in a particular
type of context. De Certeau also reintroduces an old Greek term, metis,
which refers to ways of comportment, ways of behaving in the world,
ways of acting and thinking where the point is to obtain the maximum
number of effects from the minimum force.17 Metis refers to the perfectly
timed, seemingly natural and seemingly effortless quality of a learned
action. Therefore it makes it possible to talk about the relative skill of
14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984 [1974]), 67, emphasis in original.
15. Ibid., 20.
16. Ibid., 21.
17. Ibid., 82.

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performers of practices as well as of the quality of the performance itself.
The anthropologist James C. Scott, who has taken de Certeaus project
further, defines metis as a wide array of practical skills and acquired
intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human
environment.18
War, diplomacy and politics more generally are metis-laden skills.
The successful practitioner, in each case, tries to shape the behavior
of partners and opponents to his own ends. Unlike the sailor, who
can adjust to the wind and the waves but not influence them
directly, the general and the politician are in constant interaction
with their counterparts, each of whom is trying to outfox the other.
Adapting quickly and well to unpredictable eventsboth natural
events, such as the weather, and human events, such as the enemys
moveand making the best out of limited resources are the kinds
of skills that are hard to teach as cut-and-dried disciplines. 19
De Certeau forged his concept of metis as a resource with which to critique
his by now more famous contemporaries Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.
Foucault, de Certeau argues, is first and foremost interested in the effects
of practices rather than practices themselves.20 De Certeaus concept of
metis was meant to rectify this omission by providing a focus on action
itself. De Certeaus critique of Bourdieus field studies of practical sense in
France and North Africa is more wide-ranging and potentially more
damaging than his criticism of Foucault. Bourdieu focuses on how practices
emerge. He starts with postulating a structure, which yields a habitus (an
incorporated mode of being in the world), which yields a set of strategies.
When these strategies are employed, they meet a set of conjunctures, and
the result of this meeting is a set of renewed structures. In a way which
foreshadows what has by now become a standard post-structural critique
of much earlier social science, De Certeau highlights two related problems
in the basic set-up of Bourdieus analyses, both of which lead to reification.
First, Bourdieu presupposes that practices are unequivocally bound in
space, that geography and administrative practices go hand in hand. This
is a presupposition which de Certeau finds unwarranted in an age of what
18. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 313.
19. Ibid., 315.
20. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 45-49. Formulated in 1974, and thus
waged at the early Foucault, it must be acknowledged that this critique hit its
mark. Foucaults work in the remaining decade focussed on subjectivation, as if in
answer to this kind of criticism. See Arpd Szakolczai, Max Weber and Michel
Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (London: Routledge, 1998). Still, as noted above, both
the early and the late Foucault privileged discourse rather than practices, which is
probably why Foucault is very illuminating indeed on subjectivation, but has little
to say on actual subjects.

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we now call globalisation.21 Geography may still be important, but if so,
then it is important in different ways than those given by Bourdieu.
Secondly, in an even more far-reaching criticism, de Certeau explicitly
charges Bourdieu with reifying practices. At the time, Bourdieu still worked
in the spirit of the nation-state and held culture to be a unitary
phenomenon, considering a population and its territory as a seamless thing.
In contrast, to de Certeau culture is highly specific, so the practices which
are part of it cannot be incorporated in each subject in the same way.22 If,
instead of looking for the conditions of practices in a geographically bound
unified culture, as Bourdieu does, we look at the interplay of discourse
and practices as suggested above, then that should go some way towards
easing the problem of reification highlighted by de Certeau. Instead of
reifications, we must understand the general articulation of the specific,
singular, in discourse.
De Certeau himself does not, however, refer to the concept of
discourse, but moving in this direction he gives a prominent role to what
he calls stories: stories that go in a procession ahead of social practices
in order to open a field for them.23 He uses as an example the Roman
ritual specialists known as fetiales. The fetiales had a particular function as
ceremonial story-tellers when the Roman empire was about to take action
towards another political unit, be that by going to war, by suggesting an
alliance or the like. By physically moving from the inside of the empire,
21. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 55-56.
22. Post-structural IR critiques of realism have made the same point with respect
to the practice of statesmen: given that the setting for the actions of the head of a
Greek polis, an Italian city-state and a European nation-state are widely different,
it simply does not make sense to say that their actions are similar enough to be
chained together in a series and used as a foundation for a realist tradition. For a
pioneering statement of this point, see Richard Ashley, Political Realism and
Human Interests, International Studies Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1981): 204-36. Thus, for
example, the practice of the early days of the European states system that was
often referred to as raison dtat or prudence has an historically contingent existence.
It existed as specific social phenomena not only because it had a specific set of
qualities, but also because they played themselves out in relation to a specific
discourse. Gordon explains how [a] contemporary synonym of raison dtat
(condemned by a Pope as the devils reason) was civil prudence: part of its
genealogy has been seen to lie in the transformation of the Christian doctrine of
prudence, considered as the virtue displayed by a ruler capable of just action in
circumstances which are singular and specific: the governor as helmsmananother
of Platos metaphorspreserving ship and passengers from the hazards of reef
and storm. The meaning of prudence evolves from a context where it can be
identified with a knowledge of apt precedence (the singular is never the wholly
unprecedented) to a context, as in Machiavellian Italy, where the uncertain and
the unexpected come to be perceived as the norm of Fortunes empire; see Colin
Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, in The Foucault Effect: Studies
in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 9.
23. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 125.

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then to its frontier and then inside the other political unit, and by telling
stories in each succeeding locus, the fetiales narrated a social field inside
which acts of war, alliance and the like could then take place:
The ritual was a procession with three centrifugal stages, the first
within Roman territory but near the frontier, the second on the
frontier, the third in foreign territory. The ritual action was carried
out before every civil or military action because it is designed to
create the field necessary for political or military activities. . . . As
a general repetition before the actual representation, the rite, a
narration in acts, precedes the historical realization. The tour or
procession of the fetiales opens a space and provides a foundation
for the operations of the military men, diplomats, or merchants
who dare to cross the frontier.24
In the light of the model presented in figure 1 above, one may rephrase
this example by saying that the story-telling and physical movement of
the fetiales authorise an unprecedented practice. Order is constituted,
subject positions created and these and other phenomena named so that a
new practice may take shape in a relevant context. This practice is nested
in other practices, both in the sense that it emanates from a set of similar
practices existing elsewhere (in Rome, in this case), and in the sense that it
has to fit in with other practices that already play themselves out in the
new field into which it is being inserted (in this case, for example, the
others way of thinking about treaties). The new practice thus reconfigures
the field in which Roman discourse is relevant, and so alters the relationship
between the Romans and the other. When the relationship between two
agencies is being reconfigured, power is at work. Let us call the kind of
power that determines its field of discourse by establishing new practices
or maintaining already established ones conceptual power. It is this
conceptual power that allows for the extension of authority.
As the new practice is being adopted, two things happen. First, this
new practice is made to fit in with other already established practices
through omissions, additions and creations. These alterations are large
enough to allow for the insertion of the new practice into the new domain,
but not so large that they rupture the social tie to the authorising domain
and effectively disable the new practices service as conduit. Secondly, as
the new practice is institutionalised in the sense of becoming a regular
aspect of the social, it is also naturalised. As a naturalised social force, it
24. Ibid., 124. In an IR context, Doty recently argued in the same vein that [a]
radical understanding of practice suggests that the possibility of agency results
from a complex weaving together of the subject-positions and meanings that are
available within multiple and overlapping discourses; see Roxanne Lynn Doty,
Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent-Structure Problematique in
International Relations Theory, European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3
(1997): 385.

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authorises its own stories of what things should be like, thereby entrenching
its authority. The practice speaks: this is how we have always done things
around here. Margaret Somers hints at this when she writes that people
are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the
projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiple but
ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural
narrativesunderstanding repertoire here as roughly analogous to the
understanding of discourse developed above. 25 The social fact that actions
are ordered in a particular way and not another may be conceptualised as
a story that instructs specific people in specific contexts. A phenomenon
that makes people do what they would not otherwise have done is a
phenomenon of power. In this case, it is a power that makes it possible to
govern people indirectly and from afar, by impinging on their schemes of
action by instituting a new practice. Let us follow the late Foucault and
call this form of power governmentality. 26 As long as people act in
accordance with established practices, they confirm a given discourse
as seen from the governors point of view, they are well governed. Another
perspective allows us to see the precarious nature of these self-authorising
practices. The possibility exists that people will not act in accordance with
a given practice, in which case established discourse will come under strain.
We are now in a position to modify the model given in figure 1 as follows:
C u lt u r e

g o v ern m

e n ta lity

s to r ie s

D is c o u r s e

P r a c t ic e

s to r ie s

c o n c e p tu a l p o w e r

Figure 2: Culture understood as a circuit of practice, discourse and stories, charged

with power
To sum up the argument so far, practices are integrative, inasmuch as they
nudge human beings into relationships, be they of amity or enmity. We
should remember that practices are improvisational, inasmuch as they
play themselves out in particular situations for which humans may only
be partially prepared. They are reflective, inasmuch as they have to relate
to the actions of other actors (to what extent they are conscious is, however,
25. Margaret R. Somers, The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational
and Network Approach, Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 614.
26. Michel Foucault, Governmentality, in Power, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Michel
Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2000), 20122.

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a contested matter). They are quotidian, in the sense that they play
themselves out every day, often in seemingly trivial ways, and are part of
everybodys lives. They are performativethey are (also) their useand
they are stylised (and so de Certeaus choice of a ritual as example is apt in
more senses than one).

Changing Diplomatic Practice as an Example

The traditional point of departure for IR as a discipline is the European
states system. Whereas structural-functionalism was discarded in a number
of other social disciplines already from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, in IR
the systemic point of departure has remained. To take a central recent
example, Alexander Wendts book Social Theory of International Relations,
which sets out to bring IR theory closer to social theory overall and succeeds
in doing so in a number of ways, programmatically fails to challenge the
idea that IR theory is about the system of states.27 Wendts theory helps us
to discuss how that system functions and how non-state actors are involved
in its functioning, but given the systemic point of departure, we have no
way of discussing empirically to what extent the system of states in fact
remains central to global politics. The system appears as ontic, as an
exogenised given of the analysis.
I should like to highlight two problems with this way of thinking
about global politics. First, as argued more than ten years ago by R.B.J.
Walker, a systemic perspective of this kind offers no room for thinking
about how our own analyses of international relations may preserve a
certain state of affairs.28 To Walker, the discipline of IR is more interesting
for its contribution to preserving a certain pattern of international relations
than for the analytical insights that it produces. By treating the system of
states as a given, IR theorists bracket out other possible ways of framing
global politics, and so effectively hamper other ways from emerging more
clearly. Since its point of departure is not a systemic one, practice theory
offers a way of analysing global politics empirically. In the light of figure
1, Walkers claim may be rephrased as follows: one of the practices that
upholds the existing discourse on global politics is the positivist practice
of analysing international relations. The repertoire of actions that exists for
the IR scholar may be conceptualised as the application of theories to a
certain range of questions. To the extent that the range of theories is
determined by a systemic theory, where the centrality of the system of
states is guaranteed by being exogenised from empirical investigation, IR
as a practice has no invariance-breaking potential. Since Walker, a number
of scholars informed by the linguistic turn have repeated his claim, and
27. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
28. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

yet another repetition would be hardly ground-breaking. What is needed,
I would argue, are empirical studies that specify exactly how IR practices
contribute, or do not contribute, to the status quo. Walker s incisive
employment of the linguistic turn to reflect on the place of our discipline
in the larger scheme of things should be followed up by equally incisive
reflexive applications of the practice turn.
A second problem with treating the system of states as a given follows
from and is in one sense a generalisation of the first. If the key drama of
present-day global politics should happen to be to what extent state actors
increasingly have to grapple with other actors in or even outside the system
of states, and to what extent this change affects global politics overall,
then the traditional framing of the analysis limits our empiric al
investigation of this drama. Maintaining the system of states as an analytic
given does not only read out the possible importance of our own practices,
but all kinds of other and arguably more interesting practices as well. I
turn now to the examination of a critical case, namely the case of
diplomacy. My example is a critical case in the sense that it concerns a
practice that has traditionally been seen as a mainstay of the states system,
and so this should be a case where potentially systems-transforming
innovation should be less expected.
All editions of Satows Guide to Diplomatic Practice, the work which
has been the ubiquitous standard reference work for diplomats since the
appearance of its second edition in 1919, begin with the same definition:
[d]iplomacy is the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of
official relations between the governments of independent states, extending
sometimes also to their relations with vassal states.29 I take as a warrant
that this volumes working understanding of practice is broadly similar to
the understanding advanced here the description given of how subsequent
editions have been edited: some passages have had to be rewritten, others
have become archaic rather than historically useful and have had to be
omitted, while several new chapters have had to be added.30 The key word
here is usefula diplomatic discourse exists, and the knowledge available
as Satow is part of that discourse. Satow is intended to be and is broadly
used as a guide to practicethat is, when a protocol department in a foreign
ministry, the diplomat-lawyer drafting a demarche or the host at a diplomatic
dinner feels a need for guidance before taking action, he or she will likely
turn to Satow. Satow is then an attempt at what I referred to in my discussion
of de Certeau as establishing a repertoire of actions that exists for a particular
type of subject in a particular type of context, with the type of subject

29. Ernest M. Satow, Satows Guide to Diplomatic Practice, ed. Lord Gore-Booth,
5th ed. (London: Longman, 1979 [1917]), 3.
30. Ibid., ix.

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Millennium
being the diplomat and the type of context being the diplomats working
life.
When, at the end of the 1980s, it appeared that a systems-transforming
process was under way in the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended, one
discourse immediately affected was diplomacy. All recognised actors took
stock of the situation, new aspiring actors emerged, new relations had to
be forged. The possibility of creating new practices opened up. In the case
of one traditional actor, Norway, the key attempt at establishing a new
practice concerned its relationship with the Soviet Union, and came to
focus on the 137 kilometre long border in the High North and the possibility
of building some kind of regional structure for cooperation around it. John
Kvistad sums up the preliminary proceedings as follows:
The new opening for untraditional foreign policy after the fall of
the Berlin Wall had consequences also in the Norwegian foreign
ministry. This was particularly apparent in the Department of
Policy Planning and Research, which is supposed to be the source
of undogmatic initiatives. After Assistant Director general Sverre
Jervell (of the Department of Policy Planning and Research)
returned to the ministry after a year of research mostly on a project
about the Baltic Sea Cooperation at the Norwegian Institute of
[International] Affairs, the idea of a Barents Region was brought
to the ministry itself. . . . After having the idea presented to him . .
. Foreign Minister Stoltenberg became very enthusiastic. Aiming
at defining the future playing rules in the High North while
Moscow was talkative and positive, a small group of senior
ministerial officials met at the Holmenkollen Park Hotel to discuss
the political concept of the region. Evidently, the Barents project
was conducted and promoted on a relatively independent basis in
the early stages, detached from the ordinary hierarchical line of
administration in the ministry.31
This is the story of how, within the repertoire of practices available, and in
the margins of the established institutionsfirst and foremost the
Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)a small group took action
to improvise the building of a new region. There is a nice fit with De
Certeaus insight into how stories go in a procession ahead of practices,
how social fields where practices may play themselves out may be narrated
into existence. In this case, the MFA commissioned several studies about
the area in question and ordered two reports on how relations between
31. John Mikal Kvistad, The Barents Spirit: A Bridge-Building Project in the
Wake of the Cold War, Forsvarsstudie, no. 2 (1995): 11. My material for analysing
this case draws on Kvistads conclusions from his interviews with most of the
Norwegian politicians and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials involved not long
after the Barents Euro-Arctic region was set up, on a number of other extant
studies, and on a dozen follow-up interviews with key Norwegian personnel
that I have recently conducted myself.

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Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

Norway and Russia had always been friendly at the grassroots level
except for the last 70 years of communism.32 The lesson to be produced
was that, with communism gone, building a region would not be a new
undertaking at all, but a question of re-establishing what was historically
natural. With this story in place, new practices could be initiated.
The action taken in order to improvise a new region also included a
new idea, namely that the institutional structure of the Barents region
should have two tiers: one council for foreign ministers of a traditional
type, and one regional council, headed by elected local representatives. If
we compare this move to Satows definition of diplomacy as being about
the conduct of official relations between the governments, the incremental
character of this innovation becomes clear. Government need not
necessarily mean central government, but also local government.
However, this shift to local government is an innovation nonetheless, as it
breaks with previous practice. If adopted, this idea could in turn change
diplomatic discourse by institutionalising a role for (certain) locally elected
officials where no such role had before existed.
Practices answer to a regularity and inertia which serves to maintain
power relations. This means that actions to innovate will be met with
counter-actions to resist change and hold intact the existing set of
preconditions for practice. In this sense, the MFA bureaucracy is positioned
to act as the discourse police. A focus on practice, therefore, invites the
prediction that an initiative of this kind will be resisted. Since the idea of
fostering new practices by giving regional politicians a diplomatic function
was the one piece of the initiative that stood out as truly innovative,
bureaucratic resistance could be expected to focus on this idea in particular.
And indeed, that is was what happened. Inside the MFA, senior bureaucrats
advocated a more cautious attitude towards Russia in general. Specifically,
however, some of these more cautious diplomats wanted the states
representatives in each county (fylkesmannen) to play the leading part in
the Regional Council instead of elected local representatives, in order to
maintain and protect the centres control of foreign policy.33
Two particular resisting actions stand out.34 First, the MFAs senior
servant, the permanent undersecretary, took the unusual step of forwarding
a memo to the Foreign Minister, signed by himself and a number of
directors general, warning him against the plan. This action was a show of
force. Secondly, the same bureaucrats used their control over the annual
32. For afterthoughts, see Jens Petter Nielsen, Russian-Norwegian Relations in
Arctic Europe: The History of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (paper presented
at a think-tank seminar on The Future of the Barents Euro-Artic Cooperation and the
Northern Dimension of Europe, Bjrkliden, Lapland, Sweden, 14-17 June 2001), 10113.
33. Kvistad, The Barents Spirit, 11-12.
34. This paragraph draws on Kre Hauge, The Barents Region: History
Resurrected in Post-Soviet Europe, unpublished manuscript.

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Millennium
budget process and attempted to block extra funding for the Department
of Policy Planning and Research. Without this extra funding, the
Department would be unable to finance the work that needed to be done
in order to get the initiative going, and so it would effectively be killed.
With the planners and the chain of command at loggerheads, it was up to
the political leadership to restore consensus.
Diplomatic discourse empowers the foreign minister in a different
way, however, giving him the key role in internal decision making and in
political consensus building. Without the foreign ministers endorsement
and support, existing practices will tend to flatten out any innovation. Of
course, a key practice for the politician is mediation between his or her
constituency and the outside world. But the politician also performs
another key practice that follows a different temponamely the practice
of the statesman. This practice centres on gauging the scope for taking
actions which initiate changes that may forestall problems and create new
interfaces, so that future system maintenance may run more smoothly.
Faced with a new idea, a foreign minister must then choose when to follow
bureaucratic practice and summarily rule it out, and when to follow the
practice of the statesman and, perhaps, back it. In this case, the Minister
went for the latter alternative. In his words,
[w]hen I came back as Foreign Minister in November 1990, one of
the first questions I raised was how we could take advantage of
the end of the Cold War. The natural place to look was where there
had been tensions, namely in the North. The planning staff
responded, Sverre Jervell was a key person, and it was his idea to
involve the counties and the local politicians, at least he was the
one to suggest it to me. This turned out to be the beginning of a
trend where counties and regions work with one another across
borders throughout Europe. I had already talked with Kozyrev,
he was so keen he even decided to run for his Duma seat in
Murmansk, I also spoke to [Finnish Foreign Minister (FM)]
Vyrynen, [Swedish FM] Margareta af Ugglas, and to [Danish FM]
Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, and we all met in Kirkenes on 13 January
1993. . . . The regional council grew out of two factors. First, it was
the very idea that the motor of the cooperation should be tended
to by the people in the North themselves, for the people in the
North themselves. We thought of it as a 21st century version of the
Plan for Northern Norway [the plan to rebuild Northern Norway in
the wake of Nazi scorched earth tactics after the Second World
War, a social democratic showcase of regional development], only
this time it would be for the entire region. Secondly, a general move
towards involving regional politicians in transborder activities was
afoot, around the Baltic Sea, Skagerrak, around the North Sea and
so on. Whatever we say officially, the reality is that our relationship

642

Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

to borders has changed rather dramatically. As seen by the civil
servants, it was an unusual thing that the counties were involved.35
Unusual, how the foreign minister broke with bureaucratic practice in
this case. One also notes how meeting practices between opposite numbers
are activated in order to push the initiative through, and how stories about
the initiative that should make it look more familiar by linking it to already
known stories (about social democratic reinvigorations of Northern
Norway) go in a procession towards the broad public before the practice
is introduced. What the former Foreign Minister did not note in the
interview was that in order to save the innovation and at the same time
maintain consensus within the MFA, he had to compromise. With the
advantage of hindsight, the head of the Department for Planning has
published the following version of events:
Because Stoltenberg was also a former diplomat, he knew that there
is a limit to how strong internal opposition even a foreign minister
can overrun if you want the bureaucratic machine to work
smoothly. At the same time his political (and humane!) instincts
told him that this approach to post-Communist Russia deserved
to be tested. He found a compromise solution: take out those
elements that created the most concern in the establishment, the
continental shelf and fisheries, and go for the rest.36
The innovative practice of the statesman was weighed against
bureaucratic practice, and a via media was struck. With stories in place and
the political decision made, it was time for changing working practices
inside the MFA in order to make the initiative part of Norwegian diplomatic
discourse. This involved a certain amount of improvisation. Not least in
order to insulate the initiative from extinction by already established
practices, most of the early work was carried out at the political level,
flanked by the Department of Policy Planning and Research, the work of
which had been partially detached from the standard chain of command.
In this way, the initiative could be normalised as part of the ministrys
work before it was actually slotted into ministry working practices. Once
work was going according to schedule, a working-group consisting of
twelve to fifteen people from different relevant offices and departments
was established, and met on a weekly basis. This loose grouping was then
turned into a Barents secretariat, consisting of two employees, that took
care of the daily work. Only when the Barents region had been formally
35. Thorvald Stoltenberg, interview by author, Oslo, 29 February 2000; for more
details, see Ola Tunander, Inventing the Barents Region: Overcoming the EastWest Divide, in The Barents Region: Cooperation in Arctic Europe, eds. Olav Schram
Stokke and Ola Tunander (London: Sage, 1994), 31-45.
36. Hauge, The Barents Region.

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Millennium
established was this project fully integrated into the normal bureaucratic
procedures of the MFA.37 The incremental character of the actions taken
by politicians vis--vis the bureaucracy may be taken as evidence of how
strong those politicians held the power of running practices inside the
ministry to be. Innovation had to come from the very top, and its
normalisation as part of a changed practice had to be overseen every step
of the way. In this case, the chain of sustained actions resulted in the
innovation being accepted. The new practices were eventually accepted,
and diplomacy changed accordingly. When I arrived in the Ministry years
later to work in the very same Department of Policy Planning and Research
that had been responsible for hatching and implementing the innovation,
however, colleagues from other Departments would still occasionally
complain about how my Department had breached the chain of command
in order to get the innovation through.38 With reference to figure 2, we
have here an illustration of how discourses are layered. In terms of the
innovation in practice, by 2000 the internal changes in the MFA were long
since normalised. I am going to argue below that there had also been a
change in diplomatic discourse, in that the empowerment of sub-state
actors made for preconditions expanding the range of possible actions.
What had not changed, however, was the more deeply embedded
precondition for action that the bureaucratic line of command should be
adhered to. The abolishment of the Department of Planning may be read
as the eradicating revenge of the chain of command against a staff element
that had ruptured practice. As seen from the chain of command, that
elements success was actually the best argument in favour of extinguishing
it.
As seen from the ministry, and in the light of diplomatic discourse,
the innovation was to bring in locally elected politicians. Seen from the
other end of the relationship, the discourse on local politics in Northern
Norway (as well as in the other states involved) was changed by a new
relationship to diplomacy and the foreign ministry. Judging by my material,
local administrators and politicians seem to be thriving on their new foreign
policy role. The key desk officer in the County of Finnmark reported that
he was in contact with the Ministry for the Municipality and the Regions
perhaps three times a month, mostly about economic matters, and with
the MFA perhaps once a month. In addition to this, there are running
contacts with the MFA. Twice a week or so he is on the phone with
Murmansk and Archangel, and three times a month or so he is in contact
with the Russian consulate general in Kirkenes. He is also in contact with
Rovaniemi about the EUs programme for social and economic integration
(INTERREG) three or four times a week, mostly by e-mail.39 Considering
37. Kvistad, The Barents Spirit, 13.
38. One of them was Kre Hauge, the Head of that Department at the time of the
Barents initiative, interview by author, Oslo, 19 August 2001.
39. Jan Martin Solstad, interview by author, Alta, 23 October 2000.

644

Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

that he is also flanked by other regional bureaucrats who have similar if
less intense transnational contacts, all this adds up to an important change
in working practices at the County level. Furthermore, the Chair of
Nordland County Cabinet and head of the Barents Council of the Regions
reported that
[o]ur experiences from the Barents region proves that the two-pillar
system of cross-border cooperation is successful. It is my most
exciting political experience so far. The division of labour is that
we look after the people-to-people contacts, while the Foreign
Ministry handles foreign policy overall. They are not able to handle
the hands-on culture and business contacts. . . . Each year the two
county mayors and I have a meeting with the Foreign Minister, to
discuss the division of labour, financing of projects and so on.
Before meetings in the Regional Council, we often initiate informal
contact. Before the last meeting, I had a conversation with [Foreign
Minister] Jagland. We do not feel instructed, but rather that we
work our way through an agenda. They are present, but we do not
feel them breathing down our necks. It is a functioning two-pillar
system.40
This goes to show that not only regional bureaucrats, but also regional
politicians have become heavily involved in practices of a diplomatic kind.
As seen from the MFA, this is a question of co-opting local politicians,
of organising a kind of political setting where they can take the lead in
weaving the local world as seamlessly as possible into the world of
diplomacy. They succeed in this to the extent that local politicians re-present
foreign policy and diplomatic practices isomorphically, by playing out the
exchange of notes with Russian opposite numbers, by having the leading
local politician go before his local assembly and inform them about his
foreign policy activities, etc.41 Where diplomatic practice is concerned, then,
in addition to changing the internal practices of the MFA, there was a
need to establish new ones for cooperating with these sub-state actors. In
terms of the model presented above, we may think of this as how
diplomatic discourse evolves stories of new practices. These stories describe
how local politicians and bureaucrats may, always in a qualified fashion,
40. Geir Knutson, interview by author, Oslo, 15 December 2000.
41. The diplomatic exposure even seems to spawn new practices in local politics.
At the end of the 1990s the expanded role of local politicians in foreign policy led
the heads of the counties to deliver line speeches to their county assemblies, on the
model of the annual line speech delivered by the Foreign Minister to Parliament at
the national level. The newness of this practice is evident, for example, from such
details that the first of these speeches by the head of Troms county was delivered
in the course of the year that it purportedly summed up, and that the published
variant does not contain the name of the speaker; Troms fylkeskommune,
Fylkesordfrerens tale for 1998, fylkestingets samling oktober 1998 (Troms: Troms
County Administration, 1998).

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conduct diplomacy. The stories construct a new subject position for use
locallythat of the almost-diplomat flanking the diplomatand offer
scripts for how to act in relation to Russian colleagues, under the
supervision of the fully-fledged diplomat. In the early years, a regional
politician was made a political advisor to the Foreign Minister in order to
serve as a conduit for running business. These contacts were complemented
by informal telephone calls taken by a diplomat based in the Department
of Planning on behalf of the Foreign Minister, to the regional politicians. 42
Once the new practices had been institutionalised, the need for this kind
of ad hoc intervention diminished. As reported by one key diplomat,
From the very first, that relationship worked both ways, and it
grew very close very quickly. Then we set up the Barents secretariat,
which we had intended as an international secretariat, but it did
not work out that way. Rather, it is now a company owned by the
counties [i.e., the three Norwegian counties that are involved]. They
receive a lump sum from us, and we work well together. Just the
other month we went to Brussels for a multilateral meetingthe
head of the county, [the head of the Barents Secretariat] and us
[the MFA]; after a fashion, that is foreign policy fair enough.43
One notes the diffidence: what the counties are doing is foreign policy
after a fashion. One also notes, however, that it was the Norwegian
counties, and not the MFA, which took over the running of the Barents
secretariat when the MFA did not succeed in striking a deal with the other
MFAs involved for making it an international onebut they do it on the
MFAs penny. The secretariat was established in October 1993, for a trial
period of four years, and with the idea that it would becom e an
international secretariat. After four years, however, it was made into a
common company owned by the three Norwegian counties involved. Still,
the Russian MFA has had a serving junior diplomat liaised to the secretariat
from 1997 onwards (although there was a hiatus from April 1997 to June
1998 due to a lack of funds on the Russian side). Thus, in addition to the
Norwegian diplomatic presence of a consulate general on the Russian side
of the border and in addition to the Russian consulate in the city of Troms
to the south, there is a certain Russian presence not far away from the
border as well.44 In terms of practice this is significant, inasmuch as it is
42. Sverre Jervell, interview by author, Oslo, 11 November 2002.
43. Kre Hauge, interview by author, Oslo, 15 August 2000.
44. Establishing the Norwegian consulate in Murmansk also involved a lot of
improvisation: When this started ten years ago, we hardly knew what was on the
other side of the border. The lack of information was simply baffling. First contact
was taken by private business, particularly Barents Company, who did all kinds of
trade. They had offices, and we were able to squeeze in a company. That was what
saved us. Then we simply walked around and introduced ourselves. We came
there and were an unknown entity, really. Their own networks were in shambles

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Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

highly unusual that diplomats are being accredited to a station that is
neither a consulate, nor an embassy, nor a delegation (to a large
multinational organisation like, for example, the OECD). The relationship
between the MFA and the local politicians is presented by a former consul
general as an amicable one:
Of course, if we look at what is actually formalised as Barents
cooperation, that is not all that much. . . . It provides an arena. The
focal point is the county administration of Finnmark in Vads. The
MFA is lacing the whole thing with money. We have excellent
relations with the county administration in Finnmark, which is
the focal point of it all. . . . The subregional cooperation is formalised
in the Regional Committee and in the bilateral meetings between
the head of Finnmark County Evy-Ann Midthun and the governor
of Murmansk himself. And then you have all the ad hoc meetings,
delegations and projects. . . . The head of Finmark county
[fylkesordfreren, the ranking elected politician] is the one who is
taking charge, but she is seeking out our advice. In the final
analysis, we are the one who manage the financial flows, but we
have never had to play that card.45
To this former Norwegian consulate general, the upshot of it all is first
and foremost that overall relations with the Russian state improved as a
direct result of the local interaction in the north: Barents gives us a unique
take on Russia. The regional everyday aspect deepens our understanding,
and strengthens the relationship. When Kosovo happened, [the Murmansk
Vice Governor] sought out [the Norwegian consul general] and said that
he saw no reason why one should let these problems interfere with the
good rapport they had been able to establish locally.46 In line with this,
pressure from regional politicians and regional bureaucrats to play a role
in what is considered MFA work, like the drafting of communiqus from
meetings by Foreign Ministers, has been resolutely rebuffed. The key locus
of this kind of decision making remains the meetings by representatives
from the Foreign Ministries in the Barents Committee of Senior Officials
and they were on the look-out. It was chaotic, but everything was possible. To
them, having diplomats around was something mysterious. They asked what
diplomacy was, and we gave them the Vienna Convention and some treaties to
look at. In the autumn of 1993 MID [the Russian MFA] opened an office up there,
headed by Nazim Babashov. Now it is [the Murmansk governor] Evdokimov who
runs it, you know they extend visas and dabble in other kinds of biznes. It took two
years to get a building; Knut Hauge, interview by author, Oslo, 24 February 2000.
There is, however, nothing particularly new about this practice; see James Der
Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987) and Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge,
1992).
45. Kre Hauge, interview by author, Oslo, 24 February 2000.
46. Ibid.

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every other month or so. In this forum, when the representative from the
regional council is present at all, he is not a key presence.
If we look at the matter as being one of relational practice, however,
the existence of the Barents region has empowered regional politicians in
the national arena to an extent that it may be hard for the MFA to cross
them out of diplomatic practices again, if it should so desire. In ongoing
discussions on whether the counties have been so stripped of tasks that
they should be scrapped, the three Northern counties have had some
success with offering the international work they have performed over
the last ten years as proof that the cou nty should remain as an
administrative unit. Furthermore, representatives of other counties point
to the example of the Barents region when they themselves try to receive
the backing of the MFA for their own international contacts (with Western
counties targeting sub-state cooperation with counties around the North
Sea, Southern counties with counties around the Skagerrak). Regional
diplomacy is also becoming more visible in events hosted by the MFA
itself. For example, as part of preparations for a visit by a foreign head of
state it is customary for the MFA to host a seminar on topics related to that
country. I have recently attended such seminars on Italy and Hungary
and on both occasions, the programme consisted of general lectures and
roundtables by Oslo-based politicians and academics on national culture
and national politics. A similar seminar on Russia held in the autumn of
2002, however, centred not on national Russian politics, but on the Barents
region. One of the speakers was the Head of Finnmark county, who used
this platform as an opportunity to justify her actions in upgrading the
local infrastructure, to voice her preference for a Europe of the regions,
and to demand more money for her activities.
To sum up thus far, changes in global political discourse in which
diplomatic discourse is nested opened up the possibility for initiating new
practices. Key personnel at the Norwegian MFA responded by improvising
a new practice. Stories of historical friendship between Russians and
Norwegians that had been cut short by the Soviet power were ordered
and paid for by the Norwegian MFA, creating a social field inside which
the new practice could emerge. 47 By producing and fielding new
knowledge, the MFA wielded conceptual power that made possible the
establishment of a new practice. This new practice was then established in
the face of notable opposition from the discourse police inside the
Norwegian MFA. As a result, Norwegian diplomatic discourse changed
and local political discourse in Northern Norway changed as well. Drawing
47. It could become the area of decentration; it is here that Big Stories of Russia
and Europe could be in a way desacralized in the course of practical cooperation;
Sergei Medvedev, The Blank Space: Glenn Gould, Russia, Finland, and the North
(paper presented to the annual meeting of the International Studies Asociation,
Los Angeles, 14-18 March 2000).

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Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn

on figure 2 above, the change in Norwegian diplomacy may be modelled
as follows:
N

o rw

e g ia n

ip lo m

a tic C u ltu r e

lo c a ls a r e d ip lo m

a ts

s to r y

is c o u r s e

t2 : D

ip lo m

acy

u ltib a s e d
P r a c tic e

is c o u r s e

t1 : D

ip lo m

a cy

c e n tr a lly

b a se d

s to r y

lo c a l in te r a c tio n

th e h is to r ic a l n o r m

Figure 3: Change in Norwegian diplomatic culture in the 1990s

A last question would be to what extent this analysis is generalisable. How
wide-ranging are the impact of the changes in Norwegian diplomatic
culture evidenced here on diplomatic discourse overall, and to what extent
is the process modelled here paralleled by other similar processes? It is
not hard to find sceptics. In their highly readable book on diplomacy,
Langhorne and Hamilton write about the explosion in what they refer to
as subnational or non-central governmental activity, noting that [a]s with
so much else in diplomacy little of this is truly new.48 I have two objections
to this assertion. First, if a marginal practice becomes more frequent, then
that may change the discourse as such. Secondly, in reviewing the evidence,
Langhorne and Hamilton only touch on exchanges of town mayors,
regional trade chambers abroad and suchlike, that is, activities in which
the practices of the different layers may come into conflict and be in need
of delimitation, but which are nonetheless separable and, not least,
functionally specific. I hope to have demonstrated that the role of the
Barents Council in Russian-Norwegian relations goes far beyond that,
being multi-functional and what we may call multi-perspectival. As seen
from Oslo, it is a key point that the delineation between the different layers
of the state may not be easily distinguished.
Furthermore, sceptics have argued that [t]he Barents Region is a
typical state-led project although there is also a council for the local districts
in the sense that the initiative for the Barents region cooperation is a
counter-strategy of the nation-state against the rising civil society.49 There
is, however, a tension between these two utterances, for if these changes
48. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorn, The Practice of Diplomacy (London:
Routledge, 1995), 242.
49. Jyrki Kknen, [The] North Calotte as a Political Actor , in Dreaming of the
Barents Region: Interpreting Cooperation in the Euro-Arctic Rim, TAPRI Research Report
no. 73, ed. Jyrki Kknen (Tampere: Tampere Peace Research Institute, 1994), 72,
75.

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are read as a particular response to a new situation, then they are hardly
typical. Indeed, in attempting to account for the Barents region, this sceptic
himself points to possible overall changes in diplomatic discourse when
he argues that behind the active Norwegian interest for regional
cooperation in Northern Europe there was a fear of being left outside the
existing structures for international cooperation after the Cold War. In order
to avoid peripheralisation today, the actors are forced to cooperate actively
and to take initiatives.50 But if this is correct, then the Norwegian innovative
practice accounted for above may be read as one in a cluster of potentially
transforming changes in European diplomatic discourse overall.
Developments in the Barents region may be indicative of a larger
movement.
One way to demonstrate this is to consider the Barents region
initiative in the context of EU regional policy. The INTERREG programme
was launched in 1991, and from 1996 onwards, there has been an
INTERREG IIA BARENTS with a secretariat in Rovaniemi, Finland, EU.
As the three participating Norwegian counties present the case in a
brochure pitched towards the business community, [t]he goal is to build
the Barents region as a strong, active and known area of co-operation in
Europe of the regions. This also seems to be the self-understanding of
key personnel involved: We have good contacts with the county
administration, and sometimes we even help them. We follow the EUs
INTE RREG programme, we are part of a European pattern. The
INTERREG programme is county governed, and there is an overlap in
work. When they lack money, they have sometimes approached us with
projects, and we have said yes to perhaps three or four a year.51
There also exist parallels between the diplomatic practices in evidence
in the Barents region and those in another circumpolar organisation,
namely the Arctic Council.52 Finally, parallels may be drawn between the
disaggregation of agency downwards from the MFA to sub-state actors
that has been discussed here, to the aggregation upwards to supranational
50. Ibid., 76.
51. Oddrun Pettersen, head of the Barents Secretariat, interview by author,
Kirkenes, 25 October 2000.
52. The Arctic Council was created as a response to Gorbachevs Murmansk
speech and instigated by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who, during
his November 1989 visit to Russia saw the opportunity to (re-) launch the Canadian
idea of an Arctic council as a way to formalise northern cooperation. Moreover, in
its further efforts to canvas support for the council, Canada sought the support of
the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, support landed in May 1992. There are parallels
to be drawn to the Norwegian states eagerness to tie in the Saami with the Barents
project. However, the Canada DFAIT went one further by choosing as the newlycreated Circumpolar Ambassador post a former head of the Conference, Mary
Simon. See Douglas North, The Northern Dimension of North American Foreign
Policy: Tension Between Canadian and American Visions (paper presented to the
annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Los Angeles, 14-19 March
2000).

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structures such as the EU, and sideways to what has often been regarded
in IR as non-state actors, but which with closer scrutiny turn out to be
rather quasi-state actors such as oil companies or humanitarian
organisations. 53

Conclusion
In our context, the key point is not the substantial one that diplomacy may
be changing as a result of a disaggregation in state practices, but the
methodological one that this question of changing practices may be
empirically studied in terms of an analysis of the interplay between
discourse and practices. The re-framing of the study of diplomacy and
other aspects of discursive mediationsocial and politicalthat has taken
place in the wake of the linguistic turn in social inquiry may be followed
up by a practice turn, in which empirical work will take centre place.
Diplomacys institutions are changing. To the social analyst, the linguistic
turns focus on the importance of new metaphors and narratives should
beg the question of which metaphors and narratives will make a difference,
of how this may or may not happen, and with what effects. The hatching
of new discourses may be preconditions for new actions, and those new
actions may, if they take on enough regularity to count as practice-creating,
actually add up to change. The social and political analyst who wants to
investigate this must and should choose other points of departure and
include other kinds of material than the study of texts. It is time to
complement all the good work already done in the wake of the linguistic
turn in IR by bringing practices back in.

Iver B. Neumann is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of

International Affairs

53. For an analysis of the latter problematique, see Iver B. Neumann, Harnessing
Social Power: Norwegian State Diplomacy and the Land Mines Issue, in Enhancing
Global Governance: Towards a New Diplomacy, eds. Andrew Cooper, John English,
and Ramesh Thakur (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2002), 106-32.

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