ABSTRACT
The book opens with the global governance paradox as a vantage point to think about the role of ‘communities of practice’ for the constitution of order in the global realm. The global governance paradox reflects the move away from the Westphalian model of sovereign nation-states towards a thickening network of global, regional and transnational institutions that, however, lacks a normative grid that holds together the growing diversity of stakeholders in global governance. Absent a shared normative grid, International Relations and global governance scholars conclude that global governance is in disorder. To evidence how order develops in the face of cultural diversity, the book introduces readers to the benefit of zooming in on ‘communities of practice’. ‘Communities of practice’ provide the social context within which a plurality of actors comes to create practice-based organising principles in the absence of a shared cultural background. These organising principles, in turn, constitute the normative background against which global governance institutions become meaningful to participating stakeholders. As a paradigmatic case of the global governance paradox on a regional scale, the book focuses on the European Union’s (EU) efforts at creating a ‘community without unity’. It demonstrates the value of treating it as a laboratory in which to reconstruct the normative grid that makes the EU hang together.
