ABSTRACT
To what extent is the European Union (EU) a normative power with the ability to define what passes for ‘normal’ in a globalised world? As the statement from the European Consensus on Development illustrates, in the post-Cold War era the EU has increasingly claimed that its relations with the rest of the world are informed by the normative principles of peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, equality, social solidarity, sustainable development and good governance (see also the Treaty of Lisbon 2007: articles 1a and 10a). Assessing the extent to which the EU is willing and able to act as a normative power in just one chapter is an almost impossible task because of its polycentric polity and policy breadth, as well as the increasingly transnational nature of the globalised world in which the EU is trying to act. In order to overcome these problems and address the volume’s aim of analysing the EU’s social preferences and normative power, the chapter will look at just three areas of social preferences, each with a case study in the practice of normative power. Hence the cases of EU development aid, EU promotion of core labour standards (CLS), and EU crisis management will be the focus of this chapter. In each case study I shall first engage with secondary scholarship that seeks to analyse the chosen policy field in relation to EU normative power. Second, I shall try to assess from a more empirical perspective the extent to which the EU is acting as a normative power in each case study. The empirical aspect is particularly difficult because of the mixture of normative ethics that shape the EU’s relations with the globalised world, including virtue, deontological and consequentialist normative ethics.
