An inquiry into the EU’s role in global domination: Thinking normative power through the Frankfurt School

Abstract

The European Union (EU) functions as a productive power in the process of expanding the global knowledge economy. As such, it contributes to the planetary organic crisis – as opposed to its claim of countering it. In making this argument, we focus on two of the five dimensions identified by Manners as constitutive of the planetary organic crisis: sociomaterial inequality and ethnonationalism. Both dimensions are of fundamental concern to the normative power approach (NPA) and the Frankfurt School (FS) critical theory. We critically scrutinise how knowledge-based economisation, as the latest phase of capitalist expansion, hierarchises different spaces within and between states. Such sociospatial hierarchisations are often accompanied by alienation processes and are, thus, detrimental for the functioning of the democratic state. While both NPA and the FS share the ambition to work against such hierarchisation, they also share the dilemma of how to advance normative values in a non-authoritarian, non-imperial way. We thus suggest for both the FS and the NPA, and for the EU as geopolitical actor, to draw inspiration from a broader understanding of ‘critical theories’, including postcolonial, feminist or critical race theories as a necessary step to de-imperialise both our theoretical understanding and the EU’s global role.