Eastern Partnership: bringing “the political” back in

Abstract

This article rethinks the Eastern Partnership agenda using Edkins’ framework of “the political”. Part of the problem, it argues, is the EU’s failure to imagine a new social order, which would give a relational value to the Other, and not by way of disciplining it to the EU standards, but rather, by way of aligning differences to a shared “normal”. The article problematises power relations as a process of “othering” in order to re-conceptualise them via key notions of differentiation, and normalisation. It argues for bringing “the political” back in, for debating and legitimising contesting social orders.