Critical Social Theory Perspective: Embeddedness as Substance: The EU’s Socialized Approach to Democratization

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, governance has evolved into the 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 European Commission Communication on Governance and Development explains, ‘the concept has gained in importance’ (European Commission 2003a: 3). Consequently, the question of the substance of democracy and approaches to democratization and democracy promotion has found itself right at the centre of this ‘governance turn’. This governance turn — and the suspicion that ‘somehow’ it is affecting democracy and its promotion — has thus instigated this volume (see the introductory chapter). While the rise of governance in framing and addressing international problems (Dillon and Reid 2000, Duffield 2001, Larner and Walters 2004, Neumann and Sending 2010, Roberts 2010), generally, and regarding the EU specifically (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006, Youngs 2009, Chandler 2010, Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2011, Wetzel 2011) has gone far from unnoticed in academic discussions, this turn to governance, in fact, begs us to pause for a moment. It is, at this point, worth looking at the broader epistemological shifts that have occurred and ask how EU discourses on democratization have come to operate within them.