Normative Power Europe in a Changing World: A Discussion André Gerrits (ed.) December 2009 NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CLINGENDAEL CIP-Data Koninklijke bibliotheek, The Hague Gerrits, André (ed.) Normative Power Europe in a Changing World: A Discussion / A. Gerrits (ed.), L. Aggestam, I. Manners, T. Romanova, A. Toje, Y. Wang – The Hague, Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael. Clingendael European Papers No. 5 ISBN 978-90-5031-148-9 Desk top publishing by Cheryna Abdoel Wahid Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael Clingendael European Studies Programme Clingendael 7 2597 VH The Hague Phone number +31(0)70 - 3245384 Telefax +31(0)70 - 3282002 P.O. Box 93080 2509 AB The Hague E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.clingendael.nl The Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael is an independent institute for research, training and public information on international affairs. 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Contents Normative Power Europe: Introductory Observations on a 1 Controversial Notion André Gerrits The EU’s Normative Power in Changing World Politics 9 Ian Manners The World in Our Mind: Normative Power in a Multi-Polar World 25 Lisbeth Aggestam Normative Power in Europe after the Post-Cold War 37 Asle Toje Normative Power Europe: A Russian View 51 Tatiana Romanova The Identity Dilemmas of EU Normative Power: Observations 67 from Chinese Traditional Culture Yiwei Wang Into the Future: Some Concluding Remarks 77 André Gerrits References 81 About the Authors 91 Normative Power Europe: Introductory Observations on a Controversial Notion André Gerrits Introduction Paradigms change rapidly in discussions on global politics. While we celebrated the triumph of the ‘West’ less than two decades ago, we now face the dawn of the post-American, if not the ‘post-Western’ world: ‘the decline of the West and the rise of the rest’. ‘Europe’, the European Union (EU),1 occupies a special place in the ongoing discussion. First, opinions diverge dramatically on the role and relevance of Europe in world politics. There is considerably wider diversity of opinion on the future of the European Union as an international actor than on the United States, China and – although less apparent – on (re-) emerging powers such as Russia, Brazil and India. Interpretations cover the whole spectrum. They vary from Europe as an (increasingly) irrelevant factor in global relations (Kagan 2008; and Zakaria 2008), to the European Union as one of the three main empires of the twenty-first century (Khanna 2008). This large variety of explanations follows from two circumstances: one, the EU is a fundamentally 1) ‘Europe’ and the ‘European Union’ are used alternately throughout this publication, mainly for reasons of style and readability. This does not in any way imply that Europe and the European Union are considered identical. This would not only be factually wrong, but also inappropriate. The casual monopolization of the term Europe by the European Union rightly irritates those European countries that do not belong to the Union, as Tatiana Romanova convincingly argues for the Russian Federation in this volume. 1 novel and unique international actor, and in this respect, Europe knows no predecessor, no equivalent, not even a dominant theory; and two, academic and political interpretations of the international role and relevance of Europe are very closely, if not causally, related. Political assessments of the identities and policies of the European Union feed into the academic debate, and vice versa – more so again, I would hypothetically argue, than in the case of most other global actors. A second major feature of the discussion on Europe’s global relevance is that it is heavily dominated by European researchers and, more importantly, that it is particularly (if not almost exclusively) among Europeans that Europe is taken seriously as an international actor. This, among other factors, makes the debate rather Euro-centrist. However, Europeans and non-Europeans often tend to think differently about the role and relevance of the European Union. And third, whenever Europe is accepted as a major global actor, this usually comes with an emphasis on Europe’s distinct power. Europe’s power and influence in world politics are considered to be essentially different from those of other major players, in terms of Europe’s ambitions, sources, instruments, policies and results. A string of adjectives has been introduced to characterize Europe’s distinct global relevance. Europe or the European Union would be a ‘civilian power’ (Telò 2007), a ‘post-modern power’ (Cooper 2003), an ‘ethical’ (Aggestam 2008a), a ‘structuring’ (Keukeleire and MacNaughtan 2008), a ‘transformative’ (Leonard 2005), a ‘soft’ (Nye 2002, 2004, 2005), or a ‘normative’ (Manners 2002) power. Without downplaying the differences between these definitions, they are all confluent from a 1972 article by Jean Monnet’s French biographer and European civil servant, François Duchêne, in which he characterized the European Community as an emerging ‘civilian’– that is, non-military – power (Duchêne 1972). All of the authors mentioned above interpret the EU as a relevant actor in global politics, whose power and influence are not so much based on military might and other coercive means (which does not exclude other material, mostly economic, sources of power) as on the attractiveness of its example, reflecting such diverse practices, norms and values as shared sovereignty, welfare-state arrangements, multilateralism, democracy, human rights and environmental policies. Among these designations of European ‘power’, Ian Manners’ notion of normative power has probably drawn most attention. From its inception in the early 2000s, the notion of ‘normative power’ has raised substantial interest and debate among scholars (linked to wider discussions on the ‘nature’ of the EU as an international actor and on the relevance of norms, perceptions and ‘roles’ in international relations) as well as policy-makers. This Clingendael Paper focuses on the relevance of ‘Normative Power Europe’ in the context of the changing global relations mentioned above. Does normative power answer the specific challenges that the current shifts in world politics present to Europe? For this reason, Ian Manners (Roskilde University) has been asked to 2 elaborate on the topicality of normative power. Lisbeth Aggestam (University of Bath) and Asle Toje (Norwegian School of Management, Oslo) have been invited to add their assessments of the relevance of the concept of ‘Normative Power Europe’. Additionally, and mindful of the ‘Europe-centred’ nature of the debate on normative power, Tatiana Romanova (School of International Relations, St Petersburg State University) and Yiwei Wang (Center for American Studies, Fudan University, People’s Republic of China) have been asked to discuss Russian and Chinese perceptions, respectively, of Europe’s normative power.2 This introductory chapter intends to discuss briefly some of the major academic and political issues that are involved in the discussions on ‘Normative Power Europe’. Normative Power Revisited Defining Europe as a distinct international actor is not new. The current discussion on normative power revisits an earlier attempt to define the specific nature of Europe’s international role and relevance, which was initiated by Duchêne’s concept of Europe as a civilian power. Duchêne was inspired by what he observed during the mid-1970s as cardinal changes in the nature and distribution of power in international relations. The dawning debacle of US military intervention in South-East Asia, the emergence of non-military powers such as the German Federation and Japan, as well as the first serious signs of detente in East–West relations, all seem to point in the same direction: conventional power politics and the political relevance of large-scale military might seemed to have reached their limits. Optimism, however, reigned briefly (the notion of civilian, normative and related concepts have an intrinsically optimistic connotation). The return to traditional military power politics and East–West confrontation from the end of the 1970s, marked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a new round in the arms race as initiated by the Reagan administration in the United States, effectively killed the discussion on Europe as a (relevant) civilian power. As ‘civilian power’ then, the discussion on the notion of ‘Normative Power Europe’ today also seems strongly influenced by a confluence of developments that are partly beyond the powers of Europe itself. Apart from important steps taken in the direction of a common foreign and security policy, as well as the EU’s highly successful enlargement strategy, other factors that have contributed to the friendly international environment that is conducive to the re-emergence