ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter summarizes the research and provides an overview of the democratic identity and the ensuing approaches to democracy assistance of both actors. We conclude that while the US approach to democracy assistance, reflected in the design of practices and institutions serving this end, is geared toward politically and economically empowering the target population, the EU rather aims to embed the target citizens into a socio-economic system and political structures that provide a theoretical balance between governance and well-being that in turn leads to social stability. We thereby label the EU’s “top-down–developmental–substantive” approach to democracy assistance as the embedding approach and the US’s “bottom-up–political–procedural” approach as the empowering approach. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the implications of the divergent approaches and examines the potential for mutual compatibility.
