Seminar State Democracy and Governance

Western liberal democracy, historically based on a special relation between state and society has become a model for the rest of the world, and its main facets are universally promoted under the label ‘good governance’. But what are the essentials of this model and why has Europe succeeded in establishing it as a standard to the rest of the world? The evolution and the transformation of European modern statehood will be the starting point of the course. We will thus start with state theory, both from a Western and non-Western perspective. We will then deepen our understanding of the specific dimensions of the European state (nation-state, accountability, democracy, equality and citizenship, rule of law, secularism) and work to understand what of this model can be exported to different non-Western contexts. The class will both study historical circumstances which generated the development of the rule of law, democracy and secular government, and (selected) contemporary challenges to the efforts of emulating these models across the world. Among these more general challenges features the strong social and ethnic heterogeneity of societies outside OECD, but also more stable patterns of ‘governance without a state’, i.e. situations with a lack of monopoly of state violence. We will finally discuss to what extent we see the emergence of ‘counter-hegemonic’ models of state, regime and governance (i.e. Beijing model). A detailed reading list will be distributed in the first session Sozialwissenschaften Universität Duisburg-Essen WiSe 2015/16 Development a. Governance, Prof. Dr. Hartmann Christof