From transformation to reality: the role of local context in EU democracy promotion
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Jessica Schmidt |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117813489655d |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Forum: democracy and world order |
246 International Relations 27(2)
Geography, 22(7), 2003, pp. 741–63 and Graham Harrison, The World Bank and Africa: The
Construction of Governance States (London: Routledge, 2004).
From transformation to reality: the role of local context
in EU democracy promotion
Jessica Schmidt
University of Westminster
This brief intervention seeks to offer a critical narrative that goes beyond more estab-
lished critiques of EU democracy promotion as either polluted with ‘non-normative’
interests or deficient in its implementation. The concern here is that these critiques not
only essentialize the EU’s identity as having the potential for being a ‘force for good’
but also brush over the shifting understanding and role of democracy, as a foreign
policy goal – and possibly beyond.
Over the past 20 years, governance has evolved as a main trope in international relations,
the question of ‘world order’ and the problem of how to capture state–society relations.
‘While there is no internationally agreed definition of governance’, the 2003 Commission
Communication on ‘Governance and Development’ explains, ‘the concept has gained in
importance’.1 Consequently, the question of the substance of democracy and approaches to
democratization and democracy promotion has found itself right at the centre of this ‘gov-
ernance turn’. While the rise of governance in framing and addressing international prob-
lems,2 generally, and regarding the EU, specifically,3 has far from gone unnoticed in
academic discussions, this, in fact, begs us to pause for a moment. It is, at this point, worth-
while to look at the broader epistemic shifts that have occurred with the ‘governance turn’
and ask how EU discourses on democratization have come to operate within them.4
Governance here is addressed as a context-specific mode of managing social dynamics, in
distinction to a principle, function or location of decision-making.
With the governance turn, a crucial reversal affecting the conception of democracy as
well as the modality and rationality of its promotion has occurred. At the centre of this
reversal sits a change in the perception of target countries. From approaching local con-
texts in terms of what is absent, missing or lacking, there has been a significant tendency
towards framing local contexts in terms of what is present, of given and contingent local
dynamics.
Democracy as approached by the EU no longer seeks to address the question of how
authority is exercised and who is in power, but rather is concerned with optimizing local
life through participatory practices. It is less political institutions that are sought to be
democratized rather than the coping and management capacities of individuals, commu-
nities and societies. The crucial question for EU approaches, thus, has somewhat moved
away from whether democracy is better fostered via ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ measures.
Instead, both society and the state are increasingly understood in terms of their mutual
embeddedness, comprising complex social relations. And it is these relationships that
need to be managed and optimized by members of any given society themselves. In the
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