ABSTRACT
It is generally acknowledged that, since the spring of 2005, the European Union (EU) has entered a form of crisis. The nature and scope of it still need to be defined. One could argue, at the very least, that the French and Dutch rejection of the European constitutional treaty, closely followed by the failure of the June 2005 EU budget talks, signalled a return of Euro-pessimism. This trend will probably redefine the landscape of EU studies – echoing the quake that struck the integration theory field in the 1970s (Haas 1975) – even though the European integration process itself will go on. From the more general point of view of International Relations (IR) analysis, this yet to-be-defined crisis highlights the problem of defining Europe’s international identity as well as its actual impact on world politics. From François Duchêne’s characterization of Europe as a civilian power (Duchêne 1972) to Ian Manners’ concept of normative power Europe (Manners 2002), there has been a growing consensus around the idea of both the singularity and the novelty of Europe’s presence on the international scene. The why and how of this presence have, however, constituted an object of debate among EU scholars (Howse and Nicolaidis 2002; Diez 2005; Smith 2005; Telo 2005; Sjursen 2006). But as Thomas Diez has pointed out (Diez 2005), the discussion around the notion of normative power in itself, which defines for the time being Europe’s special presence in world affairs, has been so closely associated with the EU’s political trajectory that it tends to loose sight of the larger, i.e. larger than Europe, meaning of this notion.
