ABSTRACT
The EU’s role as a geopolitical actor is often assessed in terms of civilian and normative power approaches (see Chapter 2). These debates have generally had both a descriptive and prescriptive character by trying to analyse the EU’s role as well as laying out visions of what the EU should be or do on the global stage (Nicolaïdis and Howse 2002). The roles ascribed to the EU have been fairly consistent over the decades of European integration, from the civilian power notion of the early 1970s to the more contemporary notion of normative power Europe (NPE). Of course, these often idealistic notions have also been challenged by those denying the EU the status of any kind of power due to its inherent (political and military) limitations (Bull 1982; Maull 2005; Hyde-Price 2006; Menon 2014). However, an aspect that almost all of the debates on Europe’s collective geopolitical role share, is the positioning of the EU as a geopolitical actor that is ‘better’ than others (Diez 2005; Rogers 2009): better than the USA and Russia during the Cold War, better than the USA during George W. Bush neoconservative revisionism, better than Chinese autocracy, etc. The reason for this alleged superiority has always been found in Europe’s supposed more civilian, normative, moral, ‘fair’ orientation in comparison to other global powers.
