The Embodiment of Hegemony: Diplomatic Practices in the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we explain Ecuador's foreign policy shift away from the counter-hegemonic project of the Pink Tide and toward the US-led international order. Current scholarship assumes that small states pursue moral recognition from great powers by reproducing the normative principles of the hegemonic order. However, the dynamics of small-state status seeking remain underexplored. How does domestic elite competition, including their preferred strategic narratives and histories of elite socialization, shape policymakers’ preferences for status within alternative international orders? Bourdieu's practice theory enables us to demonstrate how senior Ecuadorian diplomats embody the principles of the US-led hegemonic order. By analyzing documents, speeches, and the results of semistructured interviews, we show how diplomats’ tacit background knowledge led them to reject former president Rafael Correa's initiatives and replace them with a “professional” diplomacy and “pragmatic” foreign policy. Diplomats pursue moral authority not only for its own sake but also as a means of alleviating stigmas associated with Ecuador's intense subordination. In this way, diplomats legitimated the restoration of the pre-Correa liberal state. Their experience of hysteresis, or a mismatch between their habitus and field position, drove them to assert their taken-for-granted truths as a new orthodoxy once Correa departed.