Hegemony and Discourse Theory: Democracy as Empty Signifier in International Relations

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - General and Theories of International Politics, grade: 20/20, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, language: English, abstract: The objective of this research paper was to apply Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's discursive theory of hegemony to the study of IR. I first compared Alexander Wendt's Constructivism with Althusser theory of ideology and claimed that what Wendt calls "collective meaning" does not evolve process-like, but is the result of a hegemonic struggle. In avoidance of an autonomous and self-transparent notion of the state in IR, I claimed that a state is an overdetermined instance; i.e. a hub of different overlapping discourses which is thought of as a person in order to facilitate an understanding of it. A discursive hegemony goes beyond Neo-Gramscianism by giving a new model of cultural articulation and by rejecting essentialist concepts of actors (as state as such or global class), in order to provide a discursive understanding of world politics. I c concretize my analyses at times with references to democracy, which, as it was shown, functions as empty signifier within a global hegemonic formation.