ABSTRACT
This was the response from President of the European Commission, Jose´ Manuel Barroso, in 2007 when he was interviewed by Professor in International Politics, John Peterson, about Europe’s role in the world. Few citizens probably understood what this ‘normative power’ was supposed to mean. Still fewer were aware that Barroso was paraphrasing one of the most quoted articles on EU foreign policy, entitled ‘Normative Power Europe’ (Manners 2002).1 Manners argued that the EU had created a peculiar context in which nationalism was seen as a failure, and in which the Union stood as a particular and promising organization. In a later revision of his argument, Manners wrote: ‘As Jose´ Manuel Barroso argued when asked to comment on my normative power approach, the EU might be one of the most important normative powers in the world because of its ability to establish normative principles and apply them to different realities’ (Manners 2008, 60). This direct exchange between Barroso — a European political leader
— and Manners — a scholar specialized in EU studies — is not unique. The social sciences and the EU are deeply interwoven. On the one hand, European integration contributes to the production of particular forms of knowledge and specific research questions (e.g. the Eurobarometer, EU framework programmes, cross-national and cross-disciplinary mega-projects and various kinds of statistics used in benchmarking national performance). On the other hand, social science knowledge shapes European practices and institutions (e.g. the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the free movement of people and counter-terrorism).2
