The European Union's democratic agenda

This chapter asks whether and if so how the EU is able to export, promote or simply showcase its system of democratic governance to the rest of the world. It is organised around a twofold distinction between the EU's external influence applied to states or to relations between states - that is, to democracy within states or democracy between states. These dimensions are to be related to the three legal orders of a federation of states as identified by Immanuel Kant: (i) relations between citizens and state as established by ius civitatis, (ii) relations between states as governed by ius gentium, and (iii) relations between nationals and a foreign state as defined by ius cosmopoliticum. The first category has to do with political order within states, while the last two categories concern relations between states. We argue that while the same principles underlie the EU's internal and external action, much is lost in translation: the conditions that gave rise to the construction of an integrated Europe cannot generally be replicated elsewhere. But the intra-state vs inter-state distinction is crucial in this regard. While the agenda of 'democracy promotion' within other states (and the problems it encounters) is shared by many actors in the international system, the second agenda, that of democracy between polities (as states or as citizens) is more specific to the EU, at least to the extent that the EU alone can claim to provide a model for such an agenda. It is in this second dimension that the EU might have the most relevant lessons to offer - positive or negative - to the rest of the world.SCOPUS: ch.b