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AbstractThis article argues that the existing literature on EU foreign, security and defence strategy has paid insufficient attention to two basic prior questions: what is strategy? And what constitutes good strategy? Judged against a baseline definition of good strategy, the EU lacks an agreed assessment of its external environment, struggles to prioritize competing foreign policy objectives, avoids difficult foreign policy choices, and often lacks the ways and means necessary to achieve its goals, yet is reluctant to modify its objectives. These problems reflect the EU's character as a polity: differences amongst member states and the primarily intergovernmental nature of EU foreign, security and defence decision‐making fundamentally constrain the Union's ability to develop and implement external strategy. The EU is better understood as an astrategic actor: an actor without a strategy in the proper meaning of the word and one that will continue to find it difficult to develop such a strategy.

In this autoethnographic response to Brexit, the author tries to make sense of feelings of profound loss following the UK referendum decision to leave the European Union. In exploring questions of what it is that has been lost, who 'we' are, and how we might recover, she traces key strands in her family, cultural, and professional life that highlight both points of division and points of connection with others (and with those doing 'othering'), in our increasingly polarised and fragmented world. Stories she listened to in her professional capacity, told by politicians on the one hand and by those who had long felt excluded and 'left behind' on the other, take on a fresh significance in light of the decision to 'leave'. In these uncertain and insecure times, one thing seems sure: Progress lies in connecting to others, reaching out, crossing borders, holding hands, healing wounds, re-creating community.

How are time and materiality felt in periods of expectation, when change is awaited but never comes, at least not in the way anticipated? Disappointment may set in, but in the expanding European context in which I conducted research, something else occurs: sensory experiences of time and materiality intermingle and shape each other. These experiences of temporal-material relations, in a context of historical disorientation, are the basis of a new European temporality. My ethnographic research on waste management in Bulgaria, conducted between 2010 and 2013, with informal garbage collectors, city street sweepers, waste company officials, Sofia citizens, municipal representatives and ministry employees, provides the empirical foundation for this piece.