ABSTRACT
The recent construction of multilevel governance within and between states of the European Union has led to a plethora of commentary upon the ethical possibilities and practical pitfalls of a new ‘post-national constellation’ (Calhoun 2002; Diez and Whitman 2002; Zürn 2002).2 For some celebrated commentators, such as Jürgen Habermas, the new European public sphere offers hope of a true world citizenship that can be extended outwards to progressively subsume within it the unilateralism and belligerency of the United States (Habermas 2006). Indeed, within international relations (IR) the very possibility of applying normative political theory to make sense of the anarchical international system of states has received a significant boost by the ongoing project of the European Union (Dobson 2006).3 It is possible, some claim, that the cosmopolitan values of the European public sphere could come to inform an EU foreign policy. Specifically, the EU might exercise a transformative ‘normative power’ that eschews the poles of a realist proto-superpower and an idealist ‘EUtopia’ in order to substantively promote the conditions of possibility for world citizenship (Roscrance 1998; Dunne 2008; Manners 2008). Such views are not merely academic, but are evident amongst the wider European foreign policy intelligentsia.4
