ABSTRACT
The ambition of the European Union (EU) to be a global actor has gone hand in hand with a set of external actions and foreign policy choices marked by forms of discourse focusing on the promotion and dissemination of norms that are understood to have contributed to the EU’s integration and pacification (Kolvra, 2012; Jorgensen, 2014; Rosamond, 2014). However, a closer examination of the EU’s foreign policy (Telò and Ponjaert, 2013) highlights the real-world tensions between, on the one hand, the will to see the EU emerge as a competitive regional bloc enjoying a favourable relative power posture within the world order and, on the other hand, the hope of framing the European experience of regional integration as an innovative model with universal appeal. The tensions inherent in the normative discourses associated with the EU’s foreign policy are quite revealing when considering the EU’s positions in the international arena, in particular within the United Nations (UN). As it interacts with other international actors within such institutionalized fora, the discourses deployed by the EU and their normative underpinnings contribute towards drawing the boundaries which help define the EU’s distinctive foreign policy and its associated identity (Diez, 2014). As such, evolutions in the EU’s discourse within international organizations such as the UN are symptomatic of the processes of identification and differentiation at play in the EU’s continued efforts to carve at a distinctive role for itself on the international stage. The resulting inherent tensions in the EU’s normative discourse sees its external action and international positioning hesitate between a wish to recognize existing diversities, a necessary need for pluralism, and the obligation to defend its own interests and values. As a result, in its normative discourse, the EU will often seek to overcome such inherent wavering by presenting its normative interpretations as being universal in scope.
