Description
The argument that will I put forward in my paper is that the European Union (EU) can no longer be conceptualised as a normative power in international relations, and especially in relation to Russia and Eurasia following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. That the EU is a normative power has long been accepted by scholars and even EU policy officials because the concept painted a compelling image of the EU’s distinct international identity, which has obviously been different from the identity of the nation states. This distinctiveness, as Manners explained in his original conceptualisation, stemmed from the EU’s ‘historical context, hybrid polity and political-legal constitution’ (Manners, 2002, p. 240). The key to Manner’s claim to originality was his reconceptualisation of the EU’s global role away from the civilian – military dimension towards a normative one, entailing the ideational power over opinion, rather than stemming from material capacities. While this conceptualisation has performed a valuable role of making sense of the EU’s unique international security identity, I argue that we have clearly reached its limits when assessing the EU’s approach to the geopolitics of Russia and Eurasia.
