Timing Practice: The Role of the Future in the Brexit Debate on European Defence

The conduct of international relations is intimately tied to the handling of time. Still, International Relations (IR) remains inattentive to how the everyday conduct of international politics is enabled and constrained by temporal elements, especially the role of the future. Introducing a novel approach binding the past, present and future together for the study social action and practice in IR, the article argues that the visions that practitioners have about the future in times of perceived change, is a useful analytical tool in trying to understand political practices. Illustrated by the debate over the future of European defence in relation to Brexit, the article develops the concept of doxic visions – situated representations of the future that guide practice. From such an approach, IR scholars can ask questions about how social agents rationalise premised on the ontologically indivisible relationship between the past and the future in the structuring of practice. This allows also for a more pragmatic relationship with the nexus between the tacit and the explicit elements of how social agents rationalise.