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.

Introduction

The planetary organic crisis that Ian Manners refers to in his intervention to the special issue on ‘Normative Power in the Planetary Organic Crisis’ is a holistic one; it involves, in Gill and Benatar’s (2020) words ‘interacting and deepening structural crises of economy/development, society, ecology, politics, culture and ethics – in ways that are unsustainable’ (p. 171). Since the first publication of normative power in 2002, such crises have intensified and diversified – as have the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) as well as, more generally, globally. As the world is not the same anymore as when the normative power approach (NPA) was first formulated, the explanatory value of such approach has changed, too. What has remained, though, is its claim to ‘empowering actions’ to ‘reshape conceptions of the normal for the planetary good’ (Manners, 2024: 2).

With this article, we seek to contribute to such endeavour. For doing so, we reflect on the NPA through our disciplinary background in human geography and, in particular, through the lens of critical theory of the first generation of the Frankfurt School (FS) around Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In doing so, we emphasise two aspects. First, we highlight the challenge for both the NPA and the FS to think through the simultaneity of their normative claims and their non-authoritarian orientation. The question of how to advance certain values in a non-authoritarian way remains unanswered. In the context of this article, our focus is on both the NPA’s and the FS’ claim to counter socioeconomic inequality and ethnonationalism. Second, we offer a careful consideration of the operations of EU normative power under contemporary forms of capitalism. For a better understanding of the global effects of EU (normative) power, we need to examine the ways in which its global role is co-constituted with ‘corporate power’ in the context of an expanding knowledge economy. The political-corporate liaison of such co-constitution is referred to by the FS with the term Führercliquen [command cliques] (Horkheimer, 1937).

Our key argument thereby is to illustrate how, despite the claim to function as an integrative force for the reduction of socioeconomic inequality – both within the EU and globally – the EU furthers uneven geographical development through its operations with the knowledge economy. The geographical expansion of this particular form of knowledge-intensive capitalism merits a careful rethinking of the different aspects of the ‘normative power’ that the EU embodies and advances. In this context, we also call for a critical engagement with the various forms of political-economic neoliberalisation and the associated ‘populist oligarchy’ (Manners, 2024: 17) from the perspective of the NPA – or the transformed types of command cliques that the FS pointed to almost a century ago (Horkheimer, 1937). It is thus pivotal to examine the ways in which territorial political actors, such as the EU further uneven geographical development both within and beyond its borders. For doing so, we make use of the intellectual stimulus of the FS’ first generation to shed light on the socially and spatially marginalising effects of certain forms of capitalism and its propositions on how to overcome those.

In what follows, we first discuss the geopolitics of the expanding global knowledge economy. We believe that such a call is of current interest not least given that, at the present conjuncture, neoliberalisation is fundamentally marked by the expansion of both financialisation and the knowledge economy. Such expansion, in particular to the ‘Global South’, ¹ is not only geographically uneven as a process but also ultimately enabled by territorial polities, such as the EU and the ‘colonial state’.

Second, we highlight how both the FS and the various geopolitical discourses of European integration, most notably the NPA, have always entailed fundamentally ‘applied’ claims in a sense that they try not only to provide explanatory analysis but also offer normative and prescriptive visions for socioeconomic progress.

Third, and given that the first generation of the FS was precisely focussing on the politics of economic forms and their implications, we discuss the NPA with some of the basic conceptual tools provided by the FS. We, thus, seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the geopolitical nature of the planetary organic crisis. In doing so, we focus on two aspects similarly identified by both the FS and the NPA for hindering socioeconomic progress: sociomaterial inequality and ethnonationalism.

Fourth, we contextualise two of the FS’ key terms, Entfremdung [alienation] and Mündigkeit [maturity ² ] against the background of the challenges outlined both by Manners (2024) in the context of the planetary organic crisis and our previous reading of the EU’s normative power as an expansive force of global capitalism.

Fifth, we join Nikita Dhawan (2017) in suggesting that both the FS and the NPA could benefit from a more thorough inclusion of a range of ‘critical theories’, such as postcolonial and feminist theory, in an effort that aims at de-imperialising ³ not only the EU as geopolitical actor but also the FS and normative power as geopolitical concepts.

The EU and the expanding knowledge economy: notes on the colonial geopolitics of contemporary capitalism

The notion of the organic crisis speaks directly to the ways in which different kinds of ‘worlds’ have emerged in the capitalist economy after the crisis of Atlantic Fordism in the 1980s. We argue that one of the key processes of the organic crisis of late capitalism pertains to the ways in which the so-called knowledge economy has expanded from its Silicon Valley heartlands and produced interconnected worlds across geographical contexts. The knowledge economy customarily refers to an economic formation whereby knowledge creation is an essential source of competitive advantage to many sectors of the economy, with a special emphasis on R&D (research and development), higher education and various knowledge-intensive industries ranging from the ICT (information and communications technology) to various cultural industries and the media (Peters, 2009). In our perspective, it is, however, more than that. The knowledge economy can also be considered as a politically productive force, mobilised by firms, governments and international organisations to legitimise certain actions and political agendas in a number of policy fields ranging from security to development.

Moisio (2018) argues that the knowledge economy is closely connected to inter-state rivalries over territories of technology and global value chains. Cities, regions and states in the Global North, East and South compete for talent, tech investments and companies, and to market themselves as vibrant locations for activities of the knowledge economy. These spaces are integrated into this competition in different manners, not least given the highly uneven distribution and control of knowledge across geographical contexts. It has indeed become increasingly obvious that different cities, regions and even entire states, as well as different fractions of capital and segments of population, are integrated into the knowledge economy in a highly variegated manner. In other words, many countries are only thinly connected to the global networks within which significant amounts of economic value are being produced. However, they are very much connected to this economy as markets, as sources of raw materials, and as sites of negative environmental impact. One may indeed argue that the increasingly ‘global’ knowledge economy is marked by deeply colonial geopolitics (Moisio and Tarvainen, 2023). Colonial expansionism, in turn, is intimately tied to capital’s search for fresh resources (Moore, 2016; Wolfe, 2006) as well as markets. To open up space for an examination of the expansion of the knowledge economy, David Harvey’s (1985) original conceptualisation on the geopolitics of capitalism is a useful starting point. In his conceptual frame, geopolitics emanates from the spatial dynamism of the capitalist mode of production in general and from the associated circulation of capital in particular. The internal contradictions of capitalism prompt efforts to sustain accumulation and profit through geographical shifts. Capitalism is hence essentially a system characterised by both constant movement – relocating surpluses in the forms of exporting capital – and fixed and immobile spatial configurations and associated territorial forms of power (most notably, the state).

According to Harvey (1985), capitalism is addicted to geographical expansion as much as it is addicted to technological change. In short, the geographical expansion of capitalism is an important means to secure economic growth and accumulation. Capitalism could not survive without being geographically expansionary, and perpetually seeking out new ‘spatial fixes’ for its problems.

From the geopolitical perspective, the increasingly global knowledge economy is one of the contemporary versions of capitalism’s never-ending search for a spatial fix to its crisis tendencies. The geographical expansion is hence intimately about openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories, and about bringing new populations and spaces within the operations of such economy (Moisio, 2024).

Major innovations in communication technologies have been the necessary condition for global expansion of the knowledge economy. This has not only enabled accelerated movement of commodities, information and ideas over space, but also provided powerful ‘digital platforms’ through which profits can be generated in cities and beyond. Modes of geographical expansion in the context of the knowledge economy, however, vary regarding whether the search was for markets, fresh labour power, natural resources (raw materials) or opportunities to invest in new production facilities. These modes of geographical expansion are extremely important in a context when, in one particular territory, capital faces a crisis because it has reached its limits for growing and generating surplus, hence facing limits to profitable possibilities.

In case of a crisis of localised overaccumulation in a particular territory, the solution appears to be the export of capital and labour surpluses to new geographical contexts to start-up new production. In such a strategy, exporting capital from core to some other place in the world seeks to develop productive capacities in new contexts beyond the core, hence potentially creating new territorial rivals. In the context of the knowledge economy, however, while the ‘immaterial’ phases of innovation (such as design and development) have clustered in the Global North, the assembly lines, the call centres, and the raw material sites of the ‘digital economy’ have been largely located in the Global South.

If overaccumulation is mainly registered as a lack of effective demand for commodities, however, the opening up of new markets in new territories still appears the best strategy for expansion (Harvey, 1985). Importantly, the expansion of capitalism can, and often does, take an explicitly colonial direction. This means that the exporting of capital destroys and suppresses existing industries by replacing the local productive capacity with ‘new’ products. It also involves lending money (exporting capital) to places that are then supposed to invest that capital back to products being produced within the jurisdictions of the exporter. This results in integrating the importers of capital both economically and politically to the exporters of capital (as is the case with China in Africa). Recently, the expansion of the global knowledge economy has manifested itself in the attempts to build new infrastructures, such as 5G networks and related ‘digital infrastructures’ in the Global South, too. In our reading, these ‘digital infrastructures’ not only connect new geographical areas to the key political and corporate players of the knowledge economy but also unite the knowledge economy geopolitically as a ‘world’ that has the capacity to re-produce colonial control and related hierarchies (for a related discussion on the EU’s expansionist drive to the Southern Mediterranean, see Cebeci’s contribution in this issue).

Investing into human capital or innovation potential and generating activities that belong to the upper parts of the global value chains have remained rare compared to treating the Global South/East as new market areas (people with particular needs and desires as consumers), sites of manual labour or sources of raw materials needed for the operation of the global knowledge economy’s key technologies (Moisio and Tarvainen, 2023). This is the case even if we constantly witness the rise of development policies that use a technology-centred language as a rescue method for peripheries, hence circulating the imaginaries of ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ (including, e.g. artificial intelligence [AI], robotics, ‘intelligent healthcare’, 5G, drones, edge analytics) across territorial contexts. A more realistic picture of the nature of the contemporary geographical expansion of the knowledge economy is provided by Robert Wade (2019) who argues that the reliance of developing countries on imports of knowledge-intensive capital goods subject to intellectual property rights, holds them hostage by limiting the ability to copy.

Over the past years, the colonial expansionist nature of the knowledge economy has become increasingly salient. It has been closely associated with an occidental story of civilisation that Quijano (2007) describes as one about conquering territories and bodies. In fact, the Silicon Valley-based ‘innovation literature’ highlights the potential of ‘blank spaces’, typical in the settler-colonialist literature, that is, in turn, premised on the promise of expansion. Similarly, literature on ‘Western’ start-up entrepreneurs is premised on and recycles the colonial storylines on heroes who conquer ‘new worlds’ (Tarvainen, 2022). In the global knowledge economy, these new worlds can be used in different ways, ranging from their test-site role to the extraction of natural resources. Similarly, the contest over new geographical contexts involves efforts to appropriate minds and souls and to generate ‘ideal consumers’ for knowledge-intensive capitalism (a form of primitive accumulation). As such, the expansion of the knowledge economy produces social and geographical margins.

States and other territorial polities play a key role in its ongoing expansion, and the struggle over ‘territories of technology’ between the United States and China (through a handful of large ‘national’ corporations) has been a significant phenomenon in this context, too (Sellar et al., 2020). Arguably, the EU too has played a notable role in the production and generation of the knowledge economy as a set of interconnected worlds characterised by expansionary and colonial processes. The commitment of the EU to the expansion of the knowledge economy became increasingly evident in the Lisbon Strategy in 2000 and its many follow-up processes that sought to make the EU the strongest knowledge economy globally (Luukkonen and Moisio, 2016). Its commitments to develop the knowledge economy have been visible in the numerous technology-centred projects of the EU both within its territory and beyond. These projects include, for instance, furthering digitalisation both within the EU and in the Global South and bringing together the corporate power of large high technology firms and the power of the EU and its member states. As such, importantly, many of the advanced states and the EU have become part of the ‘command clique’ of an increasingly global economic form that originates in California.

It is in this context that the EU functions as a capitalist normative power in advancing and expanding the knowledge economy geographically, socially and ideationally (Weckroth and Moisio, 2020). This role in the expansion process ranges from putting forward processes of innovation and digitalisation as part of its development policies and related missions within and beyond the EU, to advancing a sort of Silicon Valley liberalism, which praises the expansion of civilisation across geographical contexts. This important role in the expansion of the knowledge economy is hence irrespective of the fact that the EU remains relatively weak in terms of developing the key technologies of the knowledge economy, a state of affairs, which has been critiqued by European corporate elites associated with high technology capital (e.g. CEO of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, 2019).

In the context of the knowledge economy, the EU’s normative power has not only been entangled with corporate power of big tech but also played a constitutive role of such power. As such, the EU has enabled the operations of a particular type of corporate power to function in the expansion of the knowledge economy not only within the EU but also in Africa and across many other geographical contexts. In our reading, the global knowledge economy is politically reproduced by states, polities, such as the EU, international institutions and the circuits of capital themselves, and firmly connected to what Agnew and Crobridge (1995) call transnational liberalism: the de-centring world characterised by networks of power, which is run by the ideology of the market and market expansionism.

‘Applied’ theories? Civilian power, normative power, FS

In this section, we briefly trace some of the origins of NPA in prior civilian power (CP) debates and lay out how both CP and NPA entail fundamentally applied claims, aiming to understand the nature of the integrating European polity as well as laying out future visions to pursue. We link this applied ambition of the conceptual apparatuses of CP and NPA with the claim of critical theory of the FS to socioeconomic transformation.

Civilian power and normative power as European geopolitical discourse

The formulation of the NPA in the 2000s was inspired by prior positionings of the EU (and its predecessor organisations) as a CP. The concept of CP emerged out of a series of debates in the late 1960s around the preparations for the accession of Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom to the, then, European Community in 1973 (Bachmann, 2013; Bachmann and Sidaway, 2009; Maull, 2013).

The names principally associated with the notion of CP are those of François Duchêne, for its first emergence in the 1970s, and Hanns Maull for its evolution into a theoretical concept. Since the late 1960s, Duchêne was pioneering an engagement with the geopolitical role and the future direction to take of an integrating Europe. Based on the experiences of two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, his writings also have to be seen in the context of a first ‘crisis’ of American hegemony in the early 1970s and the superpower rivalry during the Cold War. Central to Duchêne’s (1972, 1973b) notion was the idea of ‘domesticating’ relations between states, that is, international relations should be dealt with in structures and modes of domestic policy conduct. According to Duchêne, (Western) Europe should set an example for taming anarchy in the international system by establishing the international rule of law. It should also provide a ‘civilianized’ alternative to the first half of the twentieth century and the realist/militarist world order of the Cold War (Bachmann and Sidaway, 2009; Manners, 2010). Duchêne’s writings and the associated debates within which they were embedded (Kohnstamm and Hager, 1973; Mayne, 1972) were policy-oriented rather than analytical. As such, they were also highly integrative, characterised by frequent exchanges and flows of ideas and personnel between academia, politics, journalists and public debate.

Throughout the 1990s, CP was further developed into a theoretical concept by a team of political scientists around Hanns Maull, a former assistant to Duchêne (Kirste and Maull, 1996; Maull, 1990, 1992, 1993, 2005; see also Maull, 2013). Politically, CP prioritised multilateralism, supranational integration, institution-building, the rule of law and the restriction of the use of force in international politics. It was also strongly normative, focussing on human rights, democracy promotion, social and economic fairness, and so on.

In many ways, the publication of the NPA in 2002, absorbed further debates on CP and quickly came to be the dominant geopolitical discourse for the EU. While NPA does not require further explication here, it is important to note that for both the civilian and the normative power discourses, both composites of the terms are important. The integrating Europe is positioned as civilian/normative and as a power. The former provides a qualitative positioning and describes policy orientations around the aspects listed above, while the latter refers to the willingness and the ability to promote such a civilian/normative order wider in the international system (Kirste and Maull, 1996). ‘Normative’ is thereby understood in the dual sense of a normative orientation as well as the ability to set international standards, ‘to define what passes for “normal” in world politics’ (Manners, 2002: 253). Such ability, to Manners (2002), is ‘ultimately, the greatest power [in international politics] of all’.

The ambition to change, towards creating a ‘better’ world has, thus, been a fundamental component of both civilian and normative power debates since the beginning. The vehicle and empirical proof that such a ‘better’ world is possible has been the integrating and evolving European polity – positioned generally as a ‘better’ counternarrative to various geopolitical others. Those others varied over time: starting from its own ‘chronopolitical opponent’ (war, butchery, ethnic cleansing and so on) (Rogers, 2009: 842) – that is the Europe of the first half of the twentieth century – to the superpower rivalry of the 1970s (for Duchêne), the end of the Cold War in the 1990s (for Maull) and the neo-conservative re-orientation of US foreign policy under George W Bush in the 2000s (for Manners) (for an overview, see Bachmann and Sidaway, 2009). The applied claim of CP and NPA can thus be traced back to the ambition to create a better, more just, ‘civilian’, more ‘normative’ world – using the EU’s (market) power for doing so.

This missionary ambition is particularly evident in the title of the German translation of Duchêne’s 1973 piece. While the English title, The European Community and the Uncertainties of Interdependence (Duchêne, 1973b), remains largely neutral and descriptive, the German title, Die Rolle Europas im Weltsystem: Von der regionalen zur planetarischen Interdependenz [Europe’s role in the world system: from regional to planetary interdependence] (Duchêne, 1973a), carries a decisively more prescriptive tone, suggesting the projection of Europe’s regional system of CP to a planetary scale.

The ‘applied’ claim of the FS’ first generation

The concepts of the CP and NPA echo an applied claim to theory that has been central to the writers of the first generation of the FS. Prior to the holocaust, their objective was no less than complete transformation of socioeconomic organisation by overcoming capitalism. After World War II, it became the fight against fascism under the lead premise of avoiding a repetition of Auschwitz. Nevertheless, in particular in Anglophone debates, the reception of the work of Theodor W Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other proponents of the FS’ first generation is often limited to their theoretical impact. Unlike the works of the second generation around Jürgen Habermas, the first generation’s more ‘applied’ thoughts have received remarkably little attention, despite critical theory’s key ambition of ‘lend[ing] a voice to suffering’ (Adorno, 1990 (1966) 17).

For the founders of the FS, the link between social science and societal crisis has always been immediate; the failure of the Weimar Republic was not least also a failure of social sciences. At the time, social science did not operate on a meta-level; it was exclusively problem-solving ‘normal science’ without attention to the underlying constellations of the economic, social and political order as a whole. However, as natural science too, social science functions as a productive power of society and can be used (or misappropriated) for maintaining the dominant power structures. However, it can also be used for liberation from those.

In the sense of critical theory, social scientific theory has always been constitutive of social and economic orders ⁴ and, thus, has to be normative and value-based – in contrast to traditional theory. In his landmark piece on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer (1937) unmistakenly lays out the social responsibility of critical theory. Traditional theory, he argues, is

working with conditional propositions as applied to a given situation. If circumstances a, b, c, and d are given, then event q must be expected; if d is lacking, event r; if g is added, event s, and so on. This kind of calculation is a logical tool of history as it is of science (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968b]: 194).

Traditional theory is thus elaborated in the same way for social sciences and natural sciences and can be verified or falsified through empirical testing. Critical theory, on the other hand, is radically different. It seeks to create a ‘rationally ⁵ organized future society’ (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968b]: 233) under the overall ‘concern for the abolition of social injustice’ (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968b]: 242). Its value is thus assessed not in terms of empirical verification but in terms of its ethical standpoints and social impact (Bachmann and Moisio, 2020, 2022). Critical theory, ‘having the happiness of all individuals as its goal’, Horkheimer (2002 [1968a]: 248) continues, ‘does not compromise with continued misery, as do the scientific servants of authoritarian States’. In this sense, the value of theories has to be assessed and comprehended from the perspective of their practical implication in developing ‘capacities that are at the heart of political agency and citizenship’ (Bohman, 2002: 503).

In our geopolitical approach, we take this decidedly applied ambition of both the FS and the NPA as an entry point, not for comparison, but as an exploration to look at the latter through the lens of the former. We are particularly interested in the question of how both approaches identify the production of sociomaterial and spatial inequality and the rise of ethnonationalism as key threats to societal advancement. What is more, we highlight the ambiguity of the EU’s claims towards ‘solidarity’ and its central role as one of the expansive geopolitical powers of capitalist knowledge economisation.

Systems of exclusion and factors of the planetary organic crisis: sociomaterial inequality and ethnonationalism

Uneven geographical development and the reproduction of socioeconomic inequality

Those processes of how capitalism generates uneven geographical development are widely documented (Harvey, 1985, 1996; Smith, 1984). And indeed also key terms of critical theory, such as Entfremdung [alienation], Ausgrenzung [exclusion] or Verdinglichung [reification], are testimony to a long intellectual engagement with the processes of socioeconomic and spatial marginalisation of large parts of the populace through capitalist production, most recently in form of an ever-expanding knowledge economy (see above and Bachmann and Moisio, 2022; Moisio, 2018; Moisio and Rossi, 2020).

Such marginalisation relates to at least two aspects that merit more careful consideration in the context of reading the NPA and Manners’ intervention in this special issue through the lens of the FS: neoliberal inequality and ethno-nationalist irresilience. In a related call for a more engaged and constructive basis for the school of thought of critical geopolitics, we argue elsewhere how the FS provides a thorough theoretical grounding (see the applied claim to critical theory above) not only for identifying but also for overcoming systems of exclusion (Bachmann and Moisio, 2020). As part of this claim, we lay out how inequality and nationalism function as powerful systems of exclusion and how both have been dealt with (or not) in critical geopolitical scholarship of the EU. Both have also long been of central concern to the FS.

Manners (2024), too, identifies neoliberal inequality and ethnonationalism as two of five ‘symbiotic dimensions’ through which NPA can be of use for addressing the planetary organic crisis and the EU’s role in it (p. 3). While the FS’ first generation predates the term ‘neoliberal’, their criticism of rationally organised capitalism as the dominant system of economic organisation reveals much insight to more contemporary critiques of neoliberalism. FS critical theory aims at wider social transformation, however, in light of its Marxist intellectual origins and its interests in the social effects of production, it is inevitable economic. For Horkheimer (2002 [1968a]: 249), the ‘economy is the first cause of wretchedness [and] critique, theoretical and practical, must address itself primarily to it’. With its ‘concern for the abolition of social injustice’ (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968a]: 242), critical theory must be ‘a critique of the economy’ (p. 246).

Also in Manners’ lead intervention, economic inequality is identified as a key problem aggravating the planetary organic crisis. His take on the necessity of the EU’s fight against neoliberal inequality derives from taking seriously the respective passages laid out in the Treaty of the European Union (TEU). Referring to the TEU’s principle of ‘solidarity’ (in article 3), Manners invokes the NPAs ambition to ‘reshape conceptions of normal for the planetary good’, understood as ‘the advocacy of homeostasis (maintaining stable ecological conditions) and the advocacy of human equality within and between societies’ (Manners, 2024: 5–6).

Similarly, to the FS, inequality advances to more comprehensive forms of socioeconomic exclusion and, finally, results in the alienation [Entfremdung] of those that, due to their function in the capitalist system of production, are progressively excluded. In the case of post-Brexit Britain, Manners (2018) speaks of ‘neoliberal alienation’ and highlights the ‘disastrous socioeconomic consequences’ of ‘neoliberal severity’, including ‘adult and child food insecurity, poverty, and mortality’ (p. 1226). And such sentiments of alienation are a key driver for ethnonationalism (Adorno, 2019 [1967]).

Ethnonationalism through alienation

Drawing on the work of Vachudova (2019), Manners lays out how ethnonationalism is advanced by ‘rent seeking elites who use populist, ethnic, and nationalist appeals to legitimise their concentration of power’. A limited number of powerful individuals in charge of political and economic decision making thereby govern the state in form of an ‘neoliberal oligarchy’ or ‘populist oligarchy’ (Manners, 2024: 16–17). The writers of the early FS have similarly identified how ‘the circle of really powerful men grows narrower [leading to] a society dominated no longer by independent owners but by cliques of industrial and political leaders’. As a result, societal development is

determined much less by average men who compete with each other in improving the material apparatus of production and its products, than by conflicting national and international cliques of leaders at the various levels of command in the economy and the State (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968a]: 236).

Writing in 1937, the original German publication uses the term Führercliquen (Horkheimer, 1937) – an unlikely coincidence underlining the authoritarian and absolutist character of such corporate-political power (pp. 260, 286).

Socially, and by extensions politically, to Adorno (2019 [1967]: 9–10), the ‘concentration of capital’ goes along with the ‘permanent outclassing’ of groups that try to preserve their social status. Increasing material inequality within societies and the decoupling of such Führercliquen from the broader population maintain and extend processes of alienation (Entfremdung) from the political system and are, thus, detrimental to the democratic functioning of the state (see also Bachmann, 2020; Karolewski, 2017).

Accordingly, the concentration of capital and power – a process, which is at the core of the global expansion of knowledge economy and in the operations of ‘Big Tech’ – is a key reason for the perpetuation of ‘societal conditions of fascism’ (Adorno, 2019 (1967) 10; see also Adorno, 2019 [1959)): the alienated social groups are an easy target for exploitation by populist or fascist demagogues. This entails the ironic constellation of how those susceptible towards such demagogues often enough support such policies that have detrimental effects for themselves (Adorno, 2019 [1967): 28). Manners speaks in this context, referring to the work Timothy Snyder (2018: 272–275), of ‘sadopopulism’: the practice of ethno-nationalist political leaders, such as Putin, Trump (or Boris Johnson as Campbell, 2021 observes), of ‘making electoral promises they have no intention of delivering, instead their lack of policies make the suffering of their popular constituency even worse’ (Manners, 2024: 16).

We can thus observe how the two aspects of (neoliberal) inequality and ethnonationalism go hand in hand as threats to democratic state structures and a normative orientation of the state, or rather, the European polity. While we have selectively outlined briefly how both the FS and the NPA identify this threat, we continue in the next sections with selected approaches suggested by the FS on how to counteract such development as well as the dilemmas this raises.

The FS’ promotion of Mündigkeit as a means against alienation

In the logic of the FS, the systems of exclusion described above pose severe challenges both on the individual level of those being excluded and on a societal level as a whole. The aligned processes of alienation have to be understood both in economic and in political terms. The former describes a systemic problem of the capitalist production process, related to reification [Verdinglichung] of the labourer as a mere (technical) component subordinated to profit maximisation. The latter is both systemic and personal. Political alienation is systemic in the sense of individuals’ embeddedness in the respectively dominant sociopolitical system and their aligned exposure to particular influences, information and (personal) contacts. And it is personal as it also depends on each individual’s choices, roles and positions in their immediate social environment as well as in society as a whole.

An essential component, to Adorno, for countering alienation, both economic and political, is the notion of Mündigkeit – and the process of educating citizens towards Mündigkeit. The terms ‘educating’ and ‘Mündigkeit’ merit some explanation here. While both terms trace through much of Adorno’s (2019 [1969]) work, they are specifically elaborated on in the text Erziehung zur Mündigkeit – published in English under the title Education towards maturity and responsibility (Adorno and Becker, 1999 [1969)). Both terms occupy a broader meaning in German than their direct English translation. Erziehung, to Adorno, refers to both national education systems and private processes of raising children and a more comprehensive forming of human beings into their roles of a state’s citizens. The original meaning of Mündigkeit might best be captured by a triple description of its adjective, mündig, as ‘mature/responsible/informed’. Its etymology is based on the word Mund (mouth) and, thus, involves the ability of an adult to speak for her/himself with an own opinion – as opposed to the etymology of the word ‘infant’ as infans (referring to the inability to speak in Latin). ⁶ More specifically, Adorno approaches Mündigkeit through a reference to Kant’s piece ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment’ (Kant, 2004 [1784]). His understanding of Mündigkeit derives from Kant’s famous opening lines:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity [Unmündigkeit]. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! (Kant, 2009 [1784])

Taken from Kant’s definition of ‘immaturity’, or rather ‘tutelage’ [Unmündigkeit], the essence of Adorno’s understanding of Mündigkeit is the ‘capacity and courage of each individual to make full use of his [sic] reasoning power’ (Adorno and Becker, 1999 [1969]: 21). Such Mündigkeit is the prerequisite for democracy, and enlightenment is the path to it (Roth, 2012: 2). Reasoning power is crucial here in the context of what Horkheimer and Adorno (2006 [1969]) famously laid out elsewhere as the famous ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. The perfectly administered world of Nazi Germany, enlightened and rational, turned out not to be the opposite of fascism, but its peak. Through its instrumentalised rationality, it almost eliminated the type of humane rationality that strives for realisation of the free individual. Its conformity is borne out of rationality and enlightenment, yet in the end, it suppresses those that it seeks to liberate: the individual. Education towards Mündigkeit, thus, ought to work against such conformity and critically prepare individuals for democracy (Roth, 2012: 12). For doing so, the stimulation of each individuals’ ‘reasoning power’ through (public and private) education [Erziehung] is necessary to prepare citizens for their role as genuine electorate in a truly democratic state.

This is a malleable process and, as such, inevitably open to be influenced, for instance, through national education systems. Here too, Adorno remains with Kant. Kant perceives of enlightenment as process, responding to the question if ‘we live in an enlightened age’ with ‘no, but we do live in an age of enlightenment’ (Kant, 2009 [1784)). Respectively Adorno (2019 [1969): 144) emphasises how Mündigkeit is not to be seen as a static, but as a dynamic category – ‘as in a state of becoming not being’. And this malleability of how individuals position themselves in society and how a state governs its education system, opens the door for both abuse and also for education to Mündigkeit.

To avoid abuse, education ought to be ‘education for protest and for resistance’ (Adorno and Becker, 1999 [1969]: 31) and work towards Mündigkeit. Here again the applied, societally constitutive role of theory comes at play. It is a key task for social scientific theory to expose citizens ‘false consciousness’, that is their imagination of supposed freedom in the economic production process (Horkheimer, 2002 [1968b]: 197). The abovementioned take on ‘the labourer’ as a reified economic object can be transferred to the citizen’s role in the state. Both economic (i.e. capitalist production) and political (certain policies, e.g. austerity) orders, are presented as the only possibility at hand. Framed in such TINA (there is no alternative) logics through what Marcuse (2007 [1964]: 104) refers to as ‘closed language’ that lets ‘no time and no space for a discussion which would project disruptive alternatives’, such dominant orders pretend implicit legitimacy (Karolewski, 2017).

The true sovereign is thus not the populace. Subordinated to the real power of political-economic Führercliquen (see above), the populace is politically reified to merely play ‘the role of the People [in] theatrical fiction’ (Eco, 1995: 15). It has no real power but is reduced to accepting predefined TINA policies in a democracy that is more theatre than real’ (Bachmann and Moisio, 2022). Such political alienation, Karolewski (2017) observes, fundamentally augments citizens’ susceptibility ‘to the populism of ‘alternative facts’’ (p. 66).

For Adorno, enlightenment and Mündigkeit always have a systemic component because the dominant socioeconomic system alienates individuals and is constitutive of a false consciousness. As such, it is imperative to publicly advance Mündigkeit. For Kant, it is a personal question. The lack of Mündigkeit is due to individuals’ ignorance or lack of interest:

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men ⁷ [. . .] gladly remain immature for life [and why] it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature [unmündig]! (Kant, 2009 [1784]).

The convenience of immaturity, laziness and of following an idol or leader, that Kant observes here for the late eighteenth century, can also be found in the rationally enlightened modern society of Nazi Germany. Likewise, it can also be traced in the conversations between Adorno and the pedagogue Hellmut Becker in the 1960s West Germany. Adorno and Becker lament a lack of interest in developing a critical consciousness: ‘the youth does not want a critical consciousness. The youths wants idols’ (Adorno, 2019 [1968]: 108). Also at the present conjuncture, those observations, made for the late eighteenth century, for Nazi Germany, as well as for the 1960s, are remarkably pertinent against the background of populist and fascist movements across the EU and beyond.

For Adorno, having lived through the holocaust, this convenience of laziness is not acceptable. The empiricism of critical theory, Baum (2017) reminds us, is the ‘experience of suffering’ (p. 48). And while the FS always carried the ambition of societal transformation, the experience of the holocaust made critical theoretical intervention towards avoiding a repetition of Auschwitz all the more imperative – and Mündigkeit a decisive tool of prevention against demagogy and fascism.

The dilemma of non-authoritarian and non-imperial normativity

While the advancement of Mündigkeit is central to the FS, the question of how to advance Mündigkeit and certain desirable norms and values in a non-authoritarian and non-imperial way remains a key dilemma for both the FS and the NPA. For the FS, the engagement with both Mündigkeit and authoritarianism is central (Adorno et al., 1950; Horkheimer, 1973). The relation between authority and autonomy (Adorno, 2019 [1969)) is thereby crucial. It is important to differentiate between Adorno’s call for liberating educational stimulation and what Marcuse (2007 [1964): 44) refers to as ‘educational dictatorship’. Education, to Adorno, is ‘not the shaping of human beings [Menschenformung], as no one has the right to shape another human being’. It is also not a ‘mere transfer of knowledge’. Education is much rather the ‘production of a right consciousness’ (Adorno, 2019 [1968]: 107) to enable human beings for making use of their reasoning power and taking liberated, mündige decisions.

Nevertheless, the writers of the FS’ first generation remain vague on the challenge of the non-authoritarian yet supportive ‘production of a right consciousness’ towards Mündigkeit. This challenge of non-authoritarian advancement of normativity presents itself of course also to the NPA and the EU’s role in the world, in particular in the context of the EU as a driver for expanding the capitalist knowledge economy. However, also beyond the knowledge economy, Diez (2021) observes how the ‘Eurocentrism and Othering’ that earlier versions of NPA entailed, ‘in effect undermined its own ethics’ (p. 3). As a consequence, he suggests a new approach to NPA that ‘is based much more on dialogue and mutual recognition [. . .] while still emphasising a particular normative standpoint’. This is in line with Manners and Whitman’s (2016: 3) call for a ‘polyphonic engagement with dissident voices and differing disciplinary approaches’ to the study of Europe to make ‘another Europe, and another theory’ possible and ‘indeed probable’ (see also Manners, 2007).

More generally, the de-centring of Europe has always been a challenge for the FS – as has been, relatedly, its relations with postcolonial thought. In his pivotal Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1993) wrote ‘Frankfurt School critical theory, despite its seminal insights into the relationship between domination, modern society, and the opportunities for redemption through art as critical, is stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire’ (p. 278). This is not least due to critical theory being ‘from its beginnings a European or Euro-American enterprise’ (Ingram, 2019: 501). While its writers have long

sought to critically diagnose modernity as a global condition, they seldom if ever questioned the idea, inherited from the philosophical tradition out of and against which they wrote, that they could do so from modernity’s homeland and most advanced point, the West (Ingram, 2019).

Nikita Dhawan (2017) thereby observes how ‘in its narrow usage, [Critical Theory] remains deeply provincial because it stages a regional European perspective as a global one’ (p. 54). And while most of the postcolonial critique on the FS is directed at its second generation, the lack of interest in colonialism more generally certainly also applies to its first generation (see also Kerner, 2019).

The provinciality of a ‘regional European perspective’ that Dhawan laments for critical theory – including the claim to universality – equally traces through the geopolitical discourses and positionings of the EU as a ‘better’, civilian or normative, geopolitical model (see also Diez, 2021). We recall here Duchêne’s missionary ambition to transfer the ‘new’ European interdependence of the 1970s from the ‘regional to the planetary’ scale (see above and Duchêne, 1973a, 1973b), the early normative power’s claim ‘to define what passes for ‘normal’ in world politics’, as well as various other calls on the EU to operate as a ‘better’ alternative, a role model, in world politics (see, e.g. Bretherton and Vogler, 2006; for a critical review, see Bachmann and Sidaway, 2009). And in particular, we recall here the (neoimperial) expansion of the knowledge economy and a related selective version of Silicon Valley libertarianism through the (normative) power of the EU and its member states into the Global South/East.

Against the ‘narrow usage’ of critical theory, including the Eurocentrism and provinciality that come with it, Dhawan suggests an enrichment of critical theory through various approaches that might not stand in the direct tradition of FS critical theory, but that are ‘subsumed under the more general usage “critical theories”’. Such approaches, ‘including, feminist theory, postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory’, to Dhawan (2017),

forsake claims of universality and are cognizant of their historical, social, cultural, economic and geographical situatedness. Ironically, Critical Theory is remarkably uncritical about colonialism and its consequences. Its unequivocal commitment to normative foundationalism obscures the violent legacies of European colonialism and the ambivalence of Enlightenment ideals. In acknowledging that differences in experiences, perspectives and location make a difference, postcolonial-queer-feminism outlines how critical normative principles are formulated and operationalized in the non-European world. Thus, ‘critical theories’ make an important contribution in decolonizing and dehegemonizing Eurocentric and Androcentric critical tradition (p. 55).

Clearly, a cross-reading of postcolonial and critical theory, for instance, as regards the controversial ambiguities of enlightenment and its violent projections (Horkheimer and Adorno (2006 [1969]; Spivak, 2012), would merit much deeper analysis but is beyond the scope of our intervention here (see also Kerner, 2019). Instead, we suggest that the inclusion of the type of ‘critical theories’ as mentioned by Dhawan above, offers a promising avenue for thinking through the dilemma of both the FS and a planetary take on normative power on how to advance basic values and norms in a non-authoritarian, non-essentialising and non-imperial way.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that the EU functions as a key productive power in the process of expanding the knowledge economy, a peculiar discursive and material capitalist formation that originates in Silicon Valley. The uneven geographical development inherent to this latest phase of global capitalist expansion sorts and hierarchises different spaces and segments of population both within states and globally. While a comprehensive categorisation is difficult to maintain ultimately, we can roughly observe growing inequalities in form of further marginalisation of rural in comparison to urban areas as well as of, often already marginalised, places in the ‘Global South’ vis-à-vis core places in the ‘Global North’ where the most lucrative parts of global value chains tend to locate. As such, we conceptualise the knowledge economy as a set of different and integrated worlds that together form a particular geopolitical hierarchy.

We have further scrutinised these processes of uneven geographical development against the background of the applied claim of both the FS and the NPA. The FS emerged out of a turn from traditional to critical theory. Instead of the traditional theoretical validation through empirical testing or strictly ‘scientific methods’ of verification or falsification, critical theory is fundamentally predicated upon norms and values for socioeconomic progress. As such, it entails an applied, prescriptive component in the sense of a normative geopolitical vision for a ‘better world’.

This applied claim is shared by the NPA. Focussing on two of the key challenges of the planetary organic crisis that Manners (2024) laid out in the lead intervention to this special issue, sociomaterial inequality and ethnonationalism, we illustrate how the FS offers analytical value and depth for a more thorough understanding of the geopolitical nature of the planetary crisis. In particular, we highlight how the FS’ notion of Entfremdung [alienation] has long identified socioeconomic marginalisation as detrimental for the functioning of the democratic state. Our argument is thereby that the uneven geographical development produced by the expansion of the knowledge economy is responsible precisely for such marginalisation and, by extension, sociospatial exclusion. As a countermeasure, the FS suggests to advance citizens’ Mündigkeit as a means to reduce susceptibility to both economic and political alienation and, therefore, to counter marginalisation and ethnonationalism.

In light of the FS’ explicit anti-authoritarianism, however, it faces the dilemma of how to advance such Mündigkeit in a non-authoritarian, non-essentialising, non-imperial way. This dilemma is shared by the NPA in the sense of its fundamental question of how ‘empowering actions’ for reshaping ‘conceptions of the normal for the planetary good’ (Manners, 2024) could look like in light of past and present forms of European imperialism (p. 2). We suggest for both the FS and the NPA, and for the EU as a geopolitical actor, to draw inspiration from ‘dissident voices’ (Manners and Whitman, 2016) and a broader understanding of ‘critical theories’, including postcolonial, feminist or critical race theories (see Dhawan, 2017). We regard such a de-imperialisation as pivotal for the further ethical legitimation and application of the NPA as well as the EU’s global role. Our reading of the geopolitics of capitalism and the FS’ attention to alienation processes highlights the detrimental effects of socioeconomic inequality produced by the expansion of the capitalist knowledge economy. The EU is not an innocent actor in this process – nor is NPA as the EU’s lead geopolitical narrative. Through its (normative) power, the EU is one of the productive forces for such capitalist expansion and, hence, the marginalisation of certain places and spaces. In our view, it is therefore imperative to examine the ‘nature’ of the EU’s normative power and the ways in which this geopolitical power operates in contemporary practices of domination. More specifically, we call for more critical research on the structures and processes of how the EU contributes to the planetary organic crisis – as opposed to its claim of countering it.