The Politics of the Immobility of Knowledge: Research and Education on Europe in Asia

Global knowledge production remains largely an ideal. In European Studies, the reality seems more local as the centres of research and education are by and large in the United States and Europe. Yet, across the globe, researchers are busy studying and teaching Europe. Whereas many European Studies institutions outside of Europe find their origin in some connection to the colonial heritage or the Cold War, more recently, the European Union has stepped in and has become the single most important agent at the global level, e.g. through the Jean Monnet programs, thereby effectively turning much of European Studies into EU Studies. In this paper, we focus on Asia. How is Europe studied today in Asia? What political and economic drivers can be identified? Notable exceptions aside (Holland et al. 2008), these new global realities have thus far been largely neglected in the scholarly community. This troubling immobility of knowledge is of scholarly and political concern: academically, it represents a lost opportunity in terms of missing out on existing knowledge; politically, it might be unwise for European policy-makers to ignore the knowledge base at the hands of their Asian negotiation partners. In this paper, we give an up-to-date state-of-the-art account on European Studies in Asia and present some fruitful research trajectories. These emerge not only if one treats the topic as an issue of higher education and as an Asian view on Europe, but also in terms of the politics that drive European studies and the EU's public diplomacy in Asia.