Exploring the Multilateral Hub: Brussels as the EU's Hidden Centre

Abstract

Global politics is happening to a large extent in multilateral hubs or "political global cities" such as Geneva, New York, or Brussels. This paper theorizes about the hub as a political centre by putting it in a historical sociological perspective. I am mapping the dynastic court and the national capital as ideal typical centres and contrasting them with the multilateral hub as a real type. I am arguing that the court and the capital used to be conspicuous centres where the political authority of kings and governments became manifest, staged and symbolically affirmed. The modern multilateral hub, in contrast, can be understood as a hidden centre in which the political authority of professionals has moved to the background world of policy-making out of the public gaze and devoid of symbolic representations. The paper illustrates the professionalised politics of the multilateral hub with a case study on Brussels as the centre of the EU.