ABSTRACT
This article sheds light on Europe as a normative power that is attractive to others. In doing so, it effectively turns the normative power Europe approach, which was originally advanced by Manners (2002, 2006) on its head. Rather than taking a view from the inside out, with the intention to diffuse norms from the centre towards the periphery of liberal communities,
it suggests the reverse perspective from the outside into these communities. While the former works according to the logic of appropriateness, the latter is guided by the principle of contestedness. This attraction is indicated by outsiders from other regions who choose to copy ‘bits and pieces’ (Curtin 1993) of the EU’s acquis communautaire. The beauty of European integration is thus perceived as lying in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. To my knowledge, this article is the first to take up this particular strategy. It is defined as the practice of strategic blueprinting. Drawing on an increasing number of references to the European Union (EU) that take the body of the acquis communautaire as a sort of pool containing hard and soft institutions which has been established over time and which bears the sociocultural imprint of the specific experience of European integration (Michalski and Wallace 1992; Gialdino 1995; Jørgensen 1998; Wiener 1998; Merlingen et al. 2000; Vauchez 2015) it is suggested that picking and choosing institutions (norms, principles, rules and routinised procedures) from this pool has consequences. In other words, although it seems promising with a view to advancing integration in their respective regional contexts, norm transfer from the EU context to other areas is expected to generate unexpected outcomes elsewhere. This article seeks to elaborate on this expectation. To that end, it assesses
the potential for socio-cultural detail that is provided by distinct approaches to norm transfer. The discussion is structured by leading insights from the (new) sociology-of-knowledge approach, including the four principles of symmetry, internal/external division, situatedness and contextualism.1
Given the scope and limited space provided by this special issue, the intention is to establish parameters to organise more specific and detailed empirical research on norm transfer along for the four principled dimensions of the new sociology of knowledge: first, to identify and define the practice (internal/external division); second, to situate the practice within the broader field of integration theories and the parallel development of integration policy and politics (symmetry principle); third, to reconstruct some cases in which the practice is applied (situatedness principle); and fourth, to offer a conclusion about the potential of this practice with regard to future development of global governance and global constitutionalism (contextualism). While the transfer of norms between established and emerging regional
orders or organisations is not new, the proposed concept of strategic blueprinting includes two innovative moves. The first regards the phenomenological dimension, i.e. the decision to engage in blueprinting is taken outside rather than inside the EU context of policy-making and politics. This includes a shift of perspective, which is conceptualised as a distinct new dynamic of engagement with the acquis communautaire. Relatedly, the second innovation regards the theoretical dimension, i.e. the reference to the EU’s set of formal and informal institutions and the decision to apply a selection (bits and pieces) of this acquis in another context, and it brings new — situated — cultural experiences to bear on these very bits and pieces of the acquis. It is argued that in order to understand the impact of this process, research needs to be sensitive to the cultural roots of hard and soft institutions, both in the context of the EU, and in the other, regional
212 Antje Wiener
