Eastern Partnership: bringing “the political” back in

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.