Normative power Europe? The EU Projection of Normative Power Outside and Inside the UN

Normative Power Europe? The EU Projection of

Normative Power Outside and Inside the UN

Sarah Al Rubey S1643703 Leiden University Supervisor: Dr. Cusumano 21 March 2017

Contents

Chapter 2. Theory and Method --- 6

Theory--- 6

Method--- 9

Chapter 3. Literature Review --- 10

Chapter 4. Norm Propagation within the European Union --- 23

Chapter 5. Human Rights --- 27

Conclusion --- 33

1. Introduction

It has become all too common these days to follow a certain pattern in academic discourse concerning the European Union, particularly with respect to its external policy. That pattern is a rather repetitive one, and it goes like so: to create an eye-catching title for an

academic work, select an adjective more or less at random, and append to it “Power Europe.” We have therefore been treated to “ethical power Europe,” “communicative power Europe,”

“neo-liberal power Europe,” and even (tongue-in-cheek) “patchwork power Europe.” This has the potential to be somewhat irritating, but it also is quite an interesting phenomenon, and it is one that highlights a problem that will be a central one in this thesis: the idea of a “normative power Europe” is one with a great deal of intuitive appeal, and it is an idea that scholars

desperately want to adopt or at least adapt, but it is a slippery idea. Nobody is entirely sure what it means, or what characteristics Europe would have to possess in order to be a “normative power.” The originator of the term at times appears to be using it in a sense at odds with how everyone else appears to be using it; there is an idealistic camp that thinks of “normative power Europe” as representing the proposition that Europe is a “force for good,” a post-structuralist camp that asserts that “normative power Europe” is simply a vehicle for a new brand of

wrongheaded to talk of a “normative power,” as Europe is simply in a transition stage on the way to either collapse or the creation of a unified military power.

There is also a great deal of literature these days that examines the behavior of the

European Union at the United Nations. The majority of this concerns itself with the nature of the EU’s influence at the UN, over both the General Assembly and specific agencies and organs of the body as a whole. This body of literature is concerned with political power — with the

cohesion of EU member states at the UN, with the relationship between the agendas advanced by the EU at the UN and the adoption of those agendas by non-EU actors, and so on. This literature is primarily confined, in other words, to exploring the dynamic between the internal tensions of the EU and its effectiveness in promoting its political ends with respect to external actors.

What there is not, however, is a great deal of literature that examines the potential relationship between Normative Power Europe and the United Nations. Inquiries that have had the potential to touch on this relationship by viewing the EU at the UN through the lens of Normative Power Europe have shied away from this perspective, either because they view the critical ontology of Normative Power Europe as being unhelpful or because they believe the actual ontology of Normative Power Europe to be false. This gap in the literature is astonishing and should be filled: as we shall argue below, there are good reasons to think that the EU at least approximates the idea of a normative power, meaning that a realist ontology of Normative Power Europe is a viable one; moreover, the examples given in the literature review and in the

discussion of cases will demonstrate the utility of the Normative Power framework for assessing the actions of the EU at the UN.

The goal of this inquiry is not necessarily to prove or disprove the realist ontology of Normative Power Europe. As we shall discuss below, the realist ontology, insofar as it can be

proven or disproven, is misguided; we strongly prefer a “critical ontology” that primarily focuses on evaluating EU behavior through the analytic lens of Normative Power Europe and treats the actual accuracy or lack thereof of the Normative Power Europe theory as a subsidiary concern.

We will begin with a review of the literature intended to clarify the concept of Normative Power Europe, why we believe that the concept is useful, and why we believe it survives the most forceful objections raised against it. We will then move on to theory and method, discussing in more detail the “ideal type” conception of normative power and setting forth the implications that the ideal type conception has for our investigation. We will also discuss the case study methodology adopted here and defend the selection of very broad cases for examination. Finally, we will move on to the cases themselves, examining the case of EU advocacy for a human rights agenda both within and without the United Nations.

2. Theory and Method Theory

We now turn to the theoretical concerns underpinning this investigation. Because the core of this thesis is investigating the extent to which the EU exhibits the characteristics of a

normative power, and it is our intent that this research be useful for academics adopting a number of different perspectives on the nature of normative power, we have adopted the

conception of normative power advanced by Forsberg: the “ideal type” conception of normative power in which there is no truth value to the Normative Power Europe hypothesis, only a spectrum of adherence along which every international power falls. The question for

investigation, then, is along the elements of Normative Power that we investigate, what is the degree of adherence between the behavior of the EU and the predictions of the Normative Power ideal type?

Normative Power as Ideal Type Having a normative identity.

Forsberg suggests that an ideal normative power has a “normative identity,” meaning that it sees itself strictly in normative terms (Forsberg, 2011). By this we mean only that the

component (which is a low bar). As we shall discuss in chapter 4, we think there is more to it than that. For our purposes, therefore, the ideal normative power not only sees itself as acting in normative terms but actually has a coherent normative identity; that is, it conceives its normative actions as being directed towards a coherent set of norms. On this conception, the EU is an ideal normative power only if there is a single coherent normative vision that the EU uses to frame its narrative; the EU coheres to this element of the ideal type less well if, for instance, there are numerous competing normative identities operating within the EU.

Having normative interests.

Forsberg’s second characteristic of a normative power is that the normative power has “normative interests”: interests that “refer to wider milieu goals instead of more selfish

possession goals” (Forsberg, 2011). We find that this is an acceptable definition for our purposes, although again with the caveat that coherence in these normative interests is more ideal than incoherence. The EU perfectly coheres to this aspect of the ideal type insofar as it has a single set of normative goals that all of its members wish to advance; it coheres imperfectly with this aspect if it has normative goals that are important to it and dominant but these goals are

contested; it coheres not at all to this aspect if it does not have normative goals but rather sees its normative actions as being important to advancing its own possessory interests.

Behaving according to norms.

An actor’s behavior is norm-governed where it behaves according to international norms for behavior, or at least where it behaves according to the norms it promulgates (Forsberg, 2011; Gulmez & Gulmez, 2013). We can conceive of this aspect of the ideal type as having two components in a multi-polar polity, both of which should ideally be satisfied: an internal component and an external one. The internal component concerns the relations between the

advances; the external component concerns the relations between the EU and other powers, and the degree to which those relations are consistent with the norms that the EU promulgates.

Using normative means of power.

The ideal normative power also uses purely normative means of power (Forsberg, 2011). These include persuasion and cognitive standard-setting. Again by way of example, the EU would adhere ideally to this aspect of the ideal type if it used only normative means of power, at least with respect to achieving its normative ends; it would adhere not at all if it did not use any normative means of power (e.g. if all of its normative disputes were resolved by the expedient of invading the offending state).

Achieving normative ends.

The ideal normative power does not merely set out to achieve normative ends, it actually does achieve them (Forsberg, 2011). This, of course, is the summation of the “Power”

component of “normative power” — it would be improper to describe the EU as a “normative power” if it were entirely ineffectual in achieving its goals. However, this aspect of the ideal type is one that is difficult to evaluate, because the degree of success that an entity meets with in trying to accomplish its normative goals is heavily dependent upon the degree of emphasis that it gives to those goals and to using normative means; for instance, a hypothetical military imperial power might meet with incredible success imposing its normative ends through military means, and an EU analogue might meet with comparatively less success using persuasion, but it seems incorrect to say therefore that the Empire is more of a “normative power” than the EU. It seems, therefore, that we must restrict our analysis of this point to a comparison of the success that entities meet with in satisfying moral goals using commensurable means.

Method

The case study selected for investigation in this thesis is simply “the European Union’s efforts to advance a human rights agenda in the United Nations.” This may at first glance appear to be rather broad; however, that is not so. It is broader than the investigation of any one case of human rights violations or responses to those violations; however, drawing conclusions about the consistency of EU behaviors with respect to human rights would require the examination of so many cases that treating them as individual case studies would be inappropriate. This approach, in contrast, allows us to compare “human rights” to the other sort of normative agendas that the EU has and advances in various fields: economic rights and liberties, for instance, an agenda of aggressive response to climate change, and so on. Each of these also has an enormous moral component associated with it, and each of these could be in the future fruitful grounds for comparison because of the different factors that would be associated with the success or failure of the EU in implementing its normative agenda.

3. Literature Review

The review of the literature will be divided into two components: first, we will examine the literature discussing the various aspects of the Normative Power Europe theory. We will first discuss the different perspectives on Normative Power Europe with the goal of clarifying what precisely Normative Power Europe is. This will take the form of an investigation into the kinds of legitimacy that international actors can display, the discussion of a theoretical model for Normative Power, and an examination of whether it is coherent to admit of the possibility that the EU could genuinely be a normative power while also treating the Normative Power Europe framework as merely a critical lens rather than an ontological reality. Second, we will discuss the arguments that have been advanced that can be considered to support the formulation of

Normative Power Europe that we have adopted. Third, we will discuss some objections to the framework of Normative Power Europe; we will conclude by discussing why the literature demonstrates at least that Normative Power Europe is a useful critical lens for this inquiry and why we have selected the “ideal type” framework for Normative Power Europe. We will then briefly examine the literature pertaining to the EU’s role at the United Nations in general, with the goal of clarifying the nature and magnitude of influence that he European Union wields.

Normative Power Europe

We begin by briefly examining two conceptions of Normative Power Europe: first, as a realist ontology; second, as a critical ontology or analytic lens (Parker & Rosamond, 2013). The “realist ontology” we may define as the position that the prevailing narrative of Normative Power Europe is true or at least that it could be true — it says, in other words, that Normative Power Europe is either true or false, and we can look at the behavior of the EU and figure out which it is. The “critical ontology” is the perspective that Normative Power Europe is useful as an analytic lens through which we can investigate the behavior of the EU and determine its internal consistency and evaluate its future trajectory. Telo (2006) argues that a normative power ontology of the EU is viable and even compatible with a realist conception. Telo suggests that the relationship between the EU and its history is both a vehicle for contested norms and a

fundamentally different relationship than that between, for instance, the United States and its history.

In what is perhaps the most essential reading on Normative Power Europe (yet almost certainly one of the most overlooked), Gulmez and Gulmez (2013) provide a useful discussion of the concept of legitimacy as it relates to Normative Power Europe, arguing that the concept of normative power, although it has traditionally been understood without direct reference to legitimacy, cannot be coherently understood without it. Gulmez and Gulmez advance a

conception of legitimacy of being as three types, of which only two are directly normative, but the third of which, strategic interest legitimacy, is essential to the accomplishment of any normative agenda that depends on the compliance of norm-violating actors. This “strategic interest maximization” legitimacy is a pragmatic sort of legitimacy, resting as it does on “the self-interested calculations of [its]most immediate audiences/constituents.” The clearest example

of this sort of legitimacy, the way that it operates in a non-normative fashion, but the way that it is essential to an understanding of how Normative Power Europe achieves its normative goals, is the expansion of the European Union and the normative standards that new member states were required to adopt. They adopted these standards not necessarily out of acquiescence to the EU’s normative claims but rather because of the strategic legitimacy of the EU: it had tangible benefits to offer the new members, which it bartered in exchange for their acquiescence to its normative goals.

The other two facets of legitimacy are more directly normative: first, legitimacy as cognitive standard setting, which is essentially the ability to make a certain standard of

governance “taken for granted” (Gulmez & Gulmez, 2013). Of the three kinds of legitimacy to which Normative Power Europe lays claim, cognitive standard setting is the most subtle and covert. The idea behind this sort of legitimacy is that by setting an example of member-state behavior and values, and conveying the impression that this is the normal behavior in “civilized” nations, Normative Power Europe redefines the concepts that influenced nations use to think about themselves. By way of example, Gulmez and Gulmez offer Turkey, which in response to EU influence changed the way that it thought about minorities (ceasing to define them in solely religious terms) and secularization.

The final source of legitimacy, normative agenda setting, is of the most direct concern for our present inquiry (Gulmez & Gulmez, 2013). Normative legitimacy, which is most central to the Normative Power Europe thesis, itself has three components: consequential legitimacy, or the ability to produce change; procedural legitimacy, or behavior seeking to influence other actors in normatively acceptable ways (for instance, honest dealings not characterized by coercion);

structural legitimacy, or acting in a manner characterized by the norms that the EU professes internally (e.g. adopting standards for human rights within the EU).

However, because Gulmez and Gulmez do not differentiate between attempts and

successes, there is still a gap in our understanding of Normative Power Europe, and we must turn elsewhere in the literature to find a practical application of this theoretical understanding. We also take issue with some of the suggestions of Gulmez and Gulmez (namely, that consequential legitimacy is the end of the story; that trying and failing to influence norms internationally is no different from not trying at all). Lenz (2013) argues that where the EU appears to be failing to genuinely propagate norms internationally, this is in fact because of the inherent limits of ideological diffusion and not because of any deficiency in the normative power Europe hypothesis; indeed, they suggest that normative power is forceful even in contexts in which it does not succeed in supplanting previously-established norms. This is in fact highly consistent with Gulmez and Gulmez’s notion of “cognitive standard setting” that we described earlier.

In order to prepare ourselves to apply the concept of Normative Power Europe and evaluate EU behaviors for consistency with Normative Power Europe, we must turn to Forsberg (2011), who advances a conception of normative power as an “ideal type.” An ideal type is “the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present, and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged... into a unified thought-construct” (1199). There are two important characteristics of the ideal type for our analysis. The first is that it is perhaps the only theoretical construct capable of permitting us to speak without qualification as to whether the EU acts or does not act as a normative power in a particular case, because the ideal type represents a broad and loose synthesis of many intuitive definitions of a term. Using a stricter definition and treating Normative Power Europe as an uncontested concept, we would find it

necessary to sharply qualify our conclusions, as Normative Power Europe is amenable to so many different definitions that a blanket assertion that the EU acts or does not act as a normative power would be highly misleading. The second important consequence of the “ideal type” conception of normative power is that we cannot ask whether Normative Power Europe is true or false; the most that we can do is say that the EU approximates to varying degrees in varying contexts the ideal type of a normative power. We will examine the component parts of this ideal type in more detail in chapter 3.

In Support of Normative Power Europe

We turn now to the literature that argues that Normative Power Europe is an appropriate lens, in one form or another, with which to think about the actions of the EU. Tuominen (2013) argues that the label of “normative power” is an appropriate extension of traditional conceptions of Europe as a “civilian power” for several reasons. The first reason to adopt the “normative power” label is that it preserves the connotations of the EU as a “civilian power” (that is, a preference for economic and social “soft” power over military coercion) while acknowledging the changing reality that the EU is not entirely a “civilian” power, and the complete lack of hard power that “civilian power” suggests is inappropriate. Moreover, Tuominen suggests that the Normative Power Europe narrative is an accurate descriptor of how the EU sees itself and indeed serves as a model for EU behavior, even if the EU lives up to this model imperfectly. The lens of Normative Power Europe, for Tuominen, accurately captures the way that the post-cold war EU draws on the changing norms of globalization to construct a role for itself on the world stage.

Diez and Pace (2011) underscore, also, that the use of hard power is not incompatible with a conception of Normative Power Europe as characterizing EU actions in the same way that

a conception of “civilian power Europe” would be. They examine the EU’s use of military forces during and after conflicts to adopt a peacekeeping or mediatory role and discuss the coherence of this use of military force with the dominant narrative of Normative Power Europe. They argue that even the use of military force, in this context, is really just an extension of normative influence and that the Normative Power Europe framework, although it demands at least some use of persuasion as a means of influence, is also compatible with the use of military force to impose or encourage the adoption of norms. Similarly, Bjorkdahl (2011) argues, contra Boening, that normative power is consonant with military power. For Bjorkdahl, what is essential is not necessarily normative mechanisms of influence but rather the normative goals and normative achievements of the European Union. If the EU succeeds in exporting its normative principles, then the Normative Power Europe thesis is satisfied, and military power is not at all inconsistent with this sort of accomplishment. Bjorkdahl would suggest, therefore, that the “procedural legitimacy” component of Normative Power Europe is not essential, or at least that it is overvalued.

However, they suggest that despite the EU’s behavior corresponding to the Normative Power Europe narrative in the case of Cyprus, it improperly conflated contingent, “possessory” ends with more generalized non-possessory ones; in other words, the multi-polar nature of the EU provided an unfortunate opportunity for Greek Cypriots to use the EU’s intervention to advance their own ends. This, they suggest, is incompatible with the image the EU sought to convey by its interventions. Diez (2013) also suggests that a post-colonial understanding of normative influence reveals that even under the Normative Power Europe framework, the influence the EU exerts (even if it is motivated by a sincere desire to advance certain norms, and even if it is not targeted at benefiting the EU) is undeniably hegemony. However, Deiz also

argues that this is not necessarily a bad thing — rather, a Foucaultian reading of this sort of hegemony reveals that it is at its heart a productive endeavor, and the potential for EU intervention to reshape conflicts and transcend the use of force is desirable from most mainstream normative perspectives. What is of concern for Diez is the potential for the

Normative Power Europe narrative to contribute to Othering — the EU against all of those who do not agree with its “enlightened” morality.

Bickerton (2011) uses a somewhat simplistic critical account of Normative Power Europe to suggest that the EU’s use of normative power is not only not hegemonic but that it is primarily internally directed. He argues that the projection of external normative influence is driven by a desire to establish a coherent narrative of the EU for the benefit of its member states. It is for this reason, he suggests, that the simplistic account (“Normative Power Europe means EU as a force for good”) has persisted for so long — because the idea is not that it is necessarily true, but that it drives unity and identity within the EU.

Aggestam (2008) in the landmark issue on “Ethical Power Europe” inverts the usual narrative here by suggesting not that the emergence of normative power into the realm of foreign policy is the vehicle of European hegemonic aspirations but rather that it was this emergence that served as a necessary precondition for the EU to become a unified actor on the world stage. This perspective is somewhat like the “identity” argument put forward by Bickerton above, but with a critical difference. Here, the argument is not that the Normative Power narrative is being used by the EU to provide an identity and a focus for its soft power, but rather that the international political conditions that made it possible for Normative Power to be taken seriously as a legitimate unifying factor were themselves a necessary precondition for the emergence of the EU. To put it another way, the argument here is not that the EU crafted a notion of normative

power around which it could focus its projection of influence but rather that the international community began to recognize the possibility of a normative power, and this emerging recognition permitted the EU to begin projecting its power in a normative way.

Birchfield (2011) adopts a realist ontology and uses empirical investigation of EU development policy to evaluate EU behavior with the projections of Normative Power Europe. Birchfield suggests that the behavior of the European Union is consistent with the thesis of Normative Power Europe; however, without further investigation into subjective criteria as well as the objective and empirical behavior analysis, this account of Normative Power Europe is only moderately persuasive.

Against Normative Power Europe

Perhaps the most forceful and direct critique of Normative Power Europe comes from structural realism. Hyde-Price (2006) argues that conceptions of Europe as a normative actor are overly reductionist because they implicitly posit a “unipolar” Europe that has a single normative agenda. He stresses a structural realist approach that posits a “multipolar” Europe in which the EU is a tool of member states, who use it to advance competing and at times incompatible agendas. The structural realist perspective, in other words, suggests that the EU as an institution is itself merely a potential for normative power and does not itself carry any normative baggage; that potential can be appropriated by whatever member state or group of member states prevails in the internal conflict and used for whatever political end is at least not blatantly inconsistent with the Normative Power Europe thesis. What is useful about this critique is how it discusses the very limited role that military power has played in the influence of the EU; a traditional critique of the structural realist perspective against Normative Power Europe is that such a perspective does not well explain the EU’s reluctance to resort to the use of hard power. The

approach of some of those who favor the Normative Power Europe narrative and who think that Normative Power Europe is a good thing is to say that the “soft power” approach of the EU shows its ideological consistency and is a major strength. Hyde-Price’s account, in contrast, suggests that “soft power” is the only form of power available to such a divided organization. The indiscriminate use of hard power by such a divided polity composed of sovereigns would inevitably lead to the destruction of the EU.

This point is worth developing in a bit more detail: the nature of “soft power” is that it can be deployed in opposition to other “soft power” without inevitably leading to an

entrenchment of the conflict; this is especially the case with normative influence, because it is expected that on the world stage there will often be disagreements about what norms should prevail, and friendly nations can in fact have very different normative perspectives. EU member states that disagree with the EU’s use of normative influence to accomplish a particular end are therefore free to resist this normative influence by propagating their own norms. Not so, of course, with military power.

Manners (2013) — to whom we owe a great debt for the development of the Normative Power Europe framework — argues that “normative power” as it is now understood is simply a neoliberal gloss used by Europe to legitimate its re-colonial ambitions by disguising the extent to which “normative power” is simple hegemony. He does not object to the framework itself — of course — but rather to the connotation of “doing good” that it often possesses. Because he adopts a more skeptical attitude than Diez towards the sincerity of Normative Power Europe’s influence, and because he is not amenable to the idea that Normative Power Europe could have on the whole positive effects that justify the use of hegemonic influence, we have characterized him as speaking against the conception of Normative Power Europe that we adopt here.

Boening et al. (2013, Chapter “Foreword”) suggest that the EU does have normative goals, use normative methods, and builds its identity around the narrative of normative power; however, there is one central way in which they deviate from any traditional conception of normative power. They argue that the EU’s military power is gradually eroding and that there is decreasing unity with respect to the application of this military power. Further, they argue that military power and unity in applying that military power were a necessary precondition for the EU’s normative influence, and that the erosion of the military power is both caused by the normative turn in EU influence projection and itself will lead to a decline in the EU’s influence projection. In essence, the argument here is that a focus on soft power entails a focus on “unity in diversity,” but the preservation of hard power requires an emphasis on unity and a willingness to overcome rather than preserve diversity; the erosion of hard power ultimately jeopardizes the “unity” component of the EU’s soft power. This argument is in many respects very similar to the argument advanced by Hyde-Price, with one critical caveat: Hyde-Price argues that the diversity of the EU makes a coherent and consistent use of hard power impossible or at least undesirable, while Boening et al. argue that an increased use of hard power is not only possible but is actually essential for the influence of the EU to be preserved.

Conclusions

We attempt, now, to briefly draw some conclusions about the nature and appropriateness of the Normative Power Europe narrative. The first conclusion that we must draw, unfortunately, is that there are no conclusions we can draw about Normative Power Europe that would in fact be consistent across the body of literature. The literature seems almost hopelessly muddled here. We have discussed those who use a critical ontology of Normative Power Europe, and those who use a realist ontology; we have discussed those who think the realist ontology is viable but untrue

and those who think it is entirely accurate and consistent with the evidence; we have discussed those who think the critical ontology is useful, and those who feel it simply obscures

objectionable hegemony. Forsberg (2011) is thus vindicated. As he points out, to insist on any single conception of Normative Power Europe (realist or anti-realist, performative or

consequentialist, exclusive or inclusive of military power) would be to do violence to a great deal of the literature that pertains to the narrative (or framework, or theory), and in order to be

entirely honest, we would have to qualify our conclusions so sharply that they would be of little relevance to anyone using a different conception of Normative Power Europe. We therefore will use the “ideal type” of normative power in investigating the coherence of EU actions with the Normative Power Europe narrative; a framework that we will elaborate in chapter 3.

Interestingly, the “ideal type” approach can be considered both a realist ontology of Normative Power Europe and a critical ontology; it is a realist ontology in that there is a standard for

Normative Power to which the EU can conform or not conform in varying degrees; it is a critical ontology in that every power conforms to the Normative Power framework to at least some extent, and the more interesting question is what their degree of conformity can reveal.

The European Union at the United Nations

As mentioned above, there is scant literature concerning a reading of the EU’s influence at the UN through the lens of Normative Power. There is some literature concerning the degree to which the EU exerts influence on the United Nations as a collective, however, and some of this relates to concerns that could loosely be described as normative. We will examine this literature here. Of consternation to those who think Normative Power Europe should entail a

points to declining EU influence throughout the UN to promote an international rule of law based on human rights and justice” (Gowan & Brantner, 2008). This is borne out elsewhere in the literature, as well — the “middle powers” in the EU, though they speak consistently on many issues, are not successful or at least not as successful as they were in promoting the EU agenda in human rights. There are numerous explanations for this, including the possibility that the EU is seen as having declining moral authority; that changing geopolitical conditions are reducing the value of aligning a state’s geopolitical agenda with that of the EU; or that for other reasons a greater number of influential actors have aligned against and succeeded in counteracting the voice of the EU at the United Nations.

Indirectly addressing the possibility of one of these explanations, Laatikainen (2006) argues that the genuine commitment of the middle powers to multilateralism has contributed to EU legitimacy at the UN. The EU obtains much of its strategic legitimacy from the UK, France, and Germany, but much of its moral legitimacy from the so-called “middle powers” — States that have done more than pay lip service to the dictates of multilateralism (generally unlike the great powers) but that could pursue a pseudo-unilateralism if they so wished (differentiating them from the lesser powers). The consistent support of the middle powers for the EU’s human rights agenda — in many cases, the middle powers are the driving factor behind the consistent advancement of the human rights agenda — at least suggests that any decline in the influence of the EU with respect to human rights is not due to a perceived erosion of moral legitimacy, because as Laatikainen points out, the middle powers are well-regarded as having moral legitimacy in the international arena due to their commitment to multilateralism.

Tuominen (2013) suggests that the inherent nature of the UN as supporting a very broad multilateralism (far broader than the “middle power” multilateralism that has most consistently

advanced a human rights agenda within and without the EU) reduces the potential influence of the EU within the UN and may in fact erode the influence that the EU wields in general. This is especially so when combined, as we will see, with the pseudo-unilateral behavior that is possible from the Security Council, of which two members (China and Russia) have relatively

consistently either opposed or ignored human rights agendas with the potential to negatively impact them.

Smith (2006) examines the EU human rights agenda at the UN from a number of perspectives. The core of her investigation is into the impact of coordination efforts that the EU representatives in the UN participate in, efforts that have the effect of unifying the EU on matters of foreign policy even if there is a lack of internal unity. It is suggested from the data that these coordination meetings do not improve the cohesion of the EU with respect to voting on human rights; however, it is also possible that the EU implemented these coordination meetings as a means of responding to the potential negative effects of EU expansion on human-rights voting cohesion. If this is the case, then we could expect the slight positive trend on the part of EU voting cohesion to actually indicate significant effectiveness of the coordination meetings in producing cohesion in UN voting. Similarly, Hosli et al. (2010) find that EU cohesion at the UN strengthened even after rounds of expansion, and that coordination efforts are effective. Although this is not the focus of Smith’s investigation, it is worth pointing out that she found that the EU has dropped certain human rights positions for political reasons despite no change in the underlying situation — for instance, the proposal of a human rights resolution on Iraq in 2003 was withdrawn despite no change in the underlying human-rights situation. This doubtless contributes to any erosion in the EU’s image as a “normative power,” if only because of the inconsistency between the EU’s rhetoric and its actions.

4. Norm Propagation within the European Union

There are two aspects of norm propagation within the European Union that we will examine in some detail here: normative generation and normative integration. These two aspects of norm propagation in the European Union correspond well to the complementary aspects of the European Union as a multipolar entity that aspires to unipolarity, at least in some respects. Perhaps the most important aspect of investigating norm propagation within the European Union is that it enables us to examine the degree to which Normative Power Europe is used as a

unifying narrative for the EU internally, and the degree to which Normative Power Europe is used simply as a legitimizing narrative externally.

Normative Generation

The process of normative “generation” is perhaps poorly named, although the

terminology is intuitive. Each member nation within the EU already has its own norms that it wishes to propagate or at least to preserve. The process of normative generation is really more a process of balancing — of establishing a single set of norms to “prevail” in a sharply multipolar system (Heijden, 2010). The point here is that in the balancing process, strictly normative

concerns often give way to non-normative ones. Questions of political influence and the practical impact of the adoption of a set of norms on some member-states are nearly as relevant as simple

balancing process is heavily tied in to non-normative concerns, the process is itself partially constitutive of the EU identity as a body that decides normative questions in a multipolar balancing of competing normative perspectives (Scheipers & Sicurelli, 2007). This is to say, in other words, that the “self” constructed by the narrative of Normative Power Europe is one in which the propagation of norms is the central concern, at least within normative discourse (Diez, 2005). The balancing process is one in which very often non-normative concerns play a key role, but this does not impair the ability of the EU to use the balancing process as a sort of idealized expression of the EU’s identity as a normative power.

Normative Integration

We can also refer to the process of normative integration as the process of “ normative mainstreaming” (Heijden, 2010). The normative mainstreaming process has, as Gulmez and Gulmez would suggest, three components: a strategic component, a normative one, and a

cognitive one (Gulmez & Gulmez, 2013). With respect to the strategic component, it is of course in the strategic interest of EU member states to adopt the norms and other rules that have been adopted by the EU as a whole, if only for the purpose of remaining within the EU or not needlessly squandering political capital fighting a losing battle. But the strategic component, although it may produce lip service to the new norms in some cases, is not really how the “work” of changing norms is done in mainstreaming. Rather, it is the normative and cognitive

component that are essential to mainstreaming. With respect to the normative component, in addition to the forms of persuasion that are employed during the balancing process, there is also the impulse for a state to align its actions with its norms — call it a “state-level cognitive

dissonance.” This blends with the cognitive standard-setting aspect of the mainstreaming process. In the standard-setting component, the simple fact of being the formally-endorsed

normative agenda of the EU (of which the individual states are, of course, members) has the effect of changing standards for “normal” over time, such that the eschewed norms may come to seem less and less reasonable (Gulmez & Gulmez, 2013). This is tied in with the question of reflexivity — that is, the question of whether the EU portrays itself as it really is or rather as it would like to be (Scheipers & Sicurelli, 2007). The most compelling argument by far is that it portrays itself as it would like to be, and that this lack of reflexitivity is responsible for some degree of credibility loss on the part of the EU when it comes to its normative agenda. Conclusion

This chapter suggests that Normative Power Europe serves as a unifying narrative for the member states that is used to move towards a unified attitude towards key normative issues, and that the processes of norm generation and norm integration are also used as a way of

strengthening the EU’s normative multilateral credentials. What I mean by this last point is that the EU derives much of its international legitimacy from two points: first, the adherence of the “middle powers” within the EU to the narrative of Normative Power Europe and their active work towards expanding the normative power of Europe; second, the constant efforts that the EU makes towards “unity within diversity,” despite the fact that some areas exist in which no unity is possible (for instance, the rights of indigenous peoples) (Smith, 2006). The process of normative generation and integration is the mechanism by which the EU “puts its money where its mouth is” and demonstrates its commitment to the idea of norm propagation through multilateralism to the broader international community.

In this respect, I suggest that the existence of disunity within the EU is actually on the whole beneficial to Normative Power Europe, for two reasons. First, in terms of the narrative of Normative Power Europe as it is used to construct the identity of member states and of the body

as a whole, the entire point of the EU and bodies like it is that multilateral engagement can be used to productively overcome disagreements about norms — perhaps not always producing unanimity, but always at least producing some coherent programme of action that allows member states to feel that their sovereignty is being respected while at the same time making real

normative progress. By participating in the process of norm generation and integration, even those who are opposed to the particular norms integrated and generated are tacitly admitting the legitimacy of the EU scheme of norm propagation and strengthening their commitment to it. Second, in terms of the narrative of Normative Power Europe as it is used to legitimize the influence that the EU exerts over the norms of other states, the process of norm propagation demonstrates a sort of multivocality — it says, in other words, that the influence being exerted is not on behalf of a small elite of nations that are far removed from the difficulties of

implementing this normative agenda in the influenced countries. Rather, this influence is being exerted on behalf of twenty-seven highly diverse member states that, although they may have disagreements, are fundamentally committed to the proposition that influence of this nature is legitimate.

5. Human Rights

We now turn to our case for examination: human rights and the EU’s actions within and without the UN. We examine those actions for consistency — if the EU fails to advance a human rights agenda outside of the UN, it is most consistent with the Normative Power Europe

framework that it would also not advance such an agenda within the UN. If in fact it does

advance such an agenda within the UN, the Normative Power framework suggests that we ought to look for a different explanation as to the EU’s actions; in other words, that either it is not motivated by normative goals in acting at the UN, or it is not motivated by normative goals in its actions outside of the UN.

Human Rights and the EU outside the UN

Because the United Nations has traditionally been the vehicle — or at least a vehicle — for redressing egregious violations of human rights, and because this vehicle is to some extent exclusive, the magnitude of the human rights interests that we will discuss in this section is somewhat less than the magnitude discussed in the next section. By this I mean that the EU’s advancement of human rights is traditionally of three kinds: first, by requiring that actors in the “European Neighborhood” behave themselves, in essence (Tuominen, 2013), which is primarily an inwards-directed activity (van der Vleuten, 2016); second, by exerting influence on those with whom it enters into trade deals (van der Vleuten, 2013), which although outwardly-directed is

before the United Nations for resolution; third, by advocating loudly for the United Nations and other, similar bodies to take action on issues of pressing human rights concern. Consequently, an examination of the influence that the EU exerts that is outwardly-directed but does not involve the United Nations will be limited to issues of comparatively less concern or urgency (as, if they were more urgent, the EU would also be agitating for action on the part of the UN).

One key way in which the EU’s moral legitimacy has somewhat eroded by the adoption of inconsistent policies outside of the UN is through its varying degrees of action and inaction with respect to gender equality. We bring up gender equality here because gender equality, unlike (e.g.) the right to be free of political oppression, is susceptible to violations that are in varying degrees egregious or less egregious. It has dimensions that are less egregious, for instance, the provision or failure to provide equal pay for equal work independent of sex, and it has

dimensions that are more egregious and have wound up before the United Nations Human Rights Council, for instance, the practice of Female Genital Mutilation. And so I want to highlight this particular human rights concern because I think it is emblematic of the EU’s commitment to its normative principles more broadly, and in that respect is telling with respect to Normative Power Europe.

In some respects, the EU does demonstrate a commitment to normative projection with respect to gender equality; by way of example, the EU demonstrates that its professed normative commitment to gender equality is in fact genuine in its development policies (Debusscher, 2013). By tailoring its development policies to provide an incentive to developing nations to work towards gender equality, the EU has demonstrated that it is committed to promoting gender equality through the use of soft power. However, economic development aid has a decidedly normative component to it, even though a purely economic justification would also suffice. And

so this example alone is not enough to tell us about the consistency of the EU’s norm projection with respect to contexts that are not inherently normative — for instance, trade deals.

With respect to non-normative contexts, the EU role as a normative model with respect to gender equality is somewhat vitiated by its relationship with the Southern African Development Community, and its failure to make use of that role in promoting gender equality. (van der Vleuten, 2013). With respect to the SADC, the EU has evidently decided to subordinate gender equality to economic integration. (van der Vleuten, 2013). The EU’s trade deals with the SADC were entered into despite the fact that the SADC nations have a somewhat deplorable record on gender equality, even if we limit our inquiry solely to the question of economic equality. What is important here is not just that the EU entered into deals with the SADC, but that it did not use the leverage these deals provided to advance the cause of gender equality that it professes to highly value.

There is at least one plausible explanation for this: that the EU does so because of the dangers that it sees in challenging the normative sovereignty of nations and trade organizations that are essentially dependent upon the EU (van der Vleuten, 2013). Understood through this lens, the EU’s failure to influence the SADC with respect to gender equality takes on a slightly different tone: it is not a question of economic pragmatism winning out over principled

normative projection but rather a question of engaging with developing nations and their trade alliances as if they were peers rather than dependents to which the EU would be justified in dictating normative terms.

We will evaluate another case for consistency: the role of the EU in protecting the rights of children, particularly with respect to labor laws (Iusmen, 2013). The external norm projection of the European Union is consistent with its internal rhetoric, at least insofar as it promulgates

norms that are contingent upon an approach revolving around the “needs” rather than the “rights” of childhood. Iusmen writes that the inaction of trade commissions with respect to children’s needs represents a failure of the Normative Power Europe model, suggesting that a sincere desire to promulgate norms protecting children would require the effective use of the trade organs of the EU as well as explicitly normative ones.

However, this is in fact highly consistent with our suggestion with respect to gender equality: that the EU reserves its normative projection for contexts that have an explicit or clearly-implicit normative component. Advancing gender equality through development policies is, by that metric, copacetic, but normative hegemony through the vehicle of trade policies, directed against nations that would essentially have no choice but to capitulate, would not be permissible. Similarly, the EU’s rhetoric is geared towards promoting a shift in the way that nations with poor track records on children’s labor protect children and use them in labor, but this rhetoric is not borne out by a consistent trade policy. This suggests not that the EU simply cannot make up its mind about what policies it wishes to promulgate but rather that there is something of a division, to EU decision-makers, between carrying out normative prescriptions through normative means and carrying them out through other means. Note that this is consistent with point 4 of our ideal type of normative power: the use of normative means to accomplish normative ends.

Human Rights and the EU at the UN

The UN, by contrast, is a context both explicitly and implicitly normative. It has numerous agencies dedicated to the enforcement of norms and the evaluation of state and pseudo-state behavior against international norms; it has a human rights council dedicated to discussing and deciding issues of governmental norms. Normative Power Europe is consequently

consistent with the EU declining to advance its human rights agenda in a non-normative context but advancing it vigorously within the United Nations. We will discuss, here, whether it succeeds in doing so.

First and foremost, it seems clear that the EU has at least attempted to advance a human rights agenda; that is, its actions have been at least somewhat consistent with criterion two, that the Normative Power has normative interests. Johansson-Nogués (2006) writes that gender equality and other de jure human rights have traditionally been a strong emphasis of the EU nations at the UN. Smith (2010) describes the strong cohesion of the EU with respect to questions of human rights, asserting that with a few exceptions (e.g. the rights of indigenous peoples) in which there are intractable disagreements between EU member states, the EU has portrayed a united front in working towards the fulfillment of its human rights agenda.

However, it is not at all clear that the EU coheres with the “power” component of normative power. Along with Smith (2010), Gowen and Brantner write that the EU has actually improved its cohesion on human rights in the UN (Gowan & Brantner, 2008). However, they also write that although the EU speaks with increasing urgency on matters of importance to its human rights agenda, the EU’s influence within the EU with respect to that agenda is steadily eroding, and it would be a mistake to describe the EU as a key driver of the UN’s norms with respect to human rights.

The nature of the EU’s regression on matters of normative importance within the UN is significant here. It appears, first and foremost, that the EU has yielded ground politically. For instance, after proposing a UNHRC resolution on the human rights abuses in Iraq, the EU withdrew this resolution despite the fact that nothing had actually changed in Iraq. This was not, of course, due to a lack of internal cohesion; the EU was not deeply divided on questions of the

abuse of ethnic minorities (Smith, 2006, 2010). Nor was it due to the EU simply abandoning that human rights issue entirely. So what we see is the same rhetoric being used on the part of the EU (the same rhetoric, in fact, that gave rise to the ethical sense of “normative power Europe”) but without the role of the EU as a driving force in human rights agenda-setting.

The nature of normative power is of course of many kinds. As we have discussed, there are varying ways that power can be used to accomplish normative ends; there are even different kinds of power that we might properly call “normative” in terms of the means that are used. By way of contrast, there is the role of persuasion and normative rhetoric in changing international attitudes about a particular normative issue, and there is the role of driving UNHRC discussion of that in highlighting it and bringing it to international attention (and even, perhaps, producing a UNHRC resolution on the issue). We see in this example a pivot on the part of the EU away from that latter kind of influence while it has remained with the former kind. Although this is not inconsistent with the Normative Power Europe framework, it may indicate a certain lack of commitment to those issues except for their rhetorical and identitarian value.

Mayer (2008), identifying a similar trend, discusses a shift from the concept of “ethical power” to “ethical responsibilities.” On this conception, the EU no longer sees itself internally as being an “ethical power” (or a Normative Power) at least with respect to the United Nations, but that it maintains the narrative of Normative Power Europe with respect at least to fulfilling its ethical responsibilities. Such a self-concept on the part of the European Union would satisfy many of the same roles as the Normative Power Europe narrative, while also absolving the EU of the obligation to squander its political capital for interests that do not really benefit the EU or its member nations. Karpantschof (2012) similarly suggests that political concerns prevent the EU from behaving as a normative actor within the UN. He describes the EU as “punching below its

weight” because its lack of cohesion and commitment to the normative goals that it professes has prevented it from exerting a consistent influence that is on a par with what it “ought to” have, if one looks at its central economic role and its enormous cultural influence.

Conclusions

With respect to the first aspect of normative power as an ideal type, it seems clear from the evidence we have available that not only does the EU have a normative identity, but that with a few exceptions this normative identity is a relatively coherent one. Smith (Smith, 2006, 2010) identifies some of those exceptions, and although they are significant from the point of view of establishing that the EU does not perfectly represent the normative type in this respect, we must keep in mind that the question of indigenous rights is hardly central to the core normative message that the EU and its member states wish to address. With respect to the second aspect, it seems equally clear that the EU does have normative interests, and that it views them as being of great importance. With that said, there is little evidence from the EU’s conduct at the United Nations that it subordinates any of its non-normative interests to its normative ones, and there is evidence from outside the UN that at least suggests that it does not subordinate non-normative interests, so it is difficult to assess how closely the EU coheres to this model. A second case study, one involving more explicitly economic interests and tradeoffs, would be valuable here.

With respect to the third aspect of normative power, that of being governed by norms, the evidence suggests very strongly that the EU actually does satisfy this criterion. If we read the EU cynically, as I suggested above, its failure to use trade agreements to achieve its human rights goals may suggest that it doesn’t really care all that much about those human rights goals;

however, especially with the case of the SADC, the economic tradeoff for accomplishing those goals would have been minimal. This suggests more strongly to me that the EU is behaving in a way governed by the norm of non-coercion. Similarly, within the United Nations, the EU also behaves in a way governed by the norm of non-coercion and of adhering to “traditional” methods of norm propagation: persuasion and attempts to find a consensus common ground. This overlaps with the fourth criteria, the use of normative means of power, so we assess also that the fourth criteria is somewhat strongly adhered to (although, again, additional cases would be profitable).

It is with respect to the fifth criteria that we see something of a weakening of the

Normative Power Europe case, at least with respect to the United Nations. Although the EU has at times been successful in advocating a normative agenda outside of the UN, and in the past in fact did wield a good deal of power at the UN as well, it seems now that its normative influence within the UN is deteriorating. This may be as a result of advocating for labor standards that certain actors, like China and Russia, object to; there may be other reasons. Whatever the ultimate cause, though, it seems that the Normative Power Europe narrative is not as strong as it once was, at least with respect to the United Nations.

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