Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the World: Markets, Peace, Cosmopolitan Duty and the EU's Normative Power
| Date | 01 February 2014 |
| Published date | 01 February 2014 |
| Author | Ben Rosamond |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-856X.12013 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the
World: Markets, Peace, Cosmopolitan
Duty and the EU’s Normative Power
Ben Rosamond
Research Highlights and Abstract
• A sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’ that incorpo-
rates economic liberalism into the repertoire of the EU’s constitutive principles.
• The derivation of three ideal type liberal modes of justification for external action
and a discussion of their potential complementarities and contradictions.
• An application of the three modes to the case of EU external action.
This article—a sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’—observes that
the rationales for EU external action, while understandable in terms of the concept of ‘normative
power’, emerge from a variety of overlapping and potentially contradictory liberal arguments. For
the purposes of the argument, these liberalisms are organised into three ideal types: market
liberalism, the pursuit of peace through liberal means and the ethic of cosmopolitan duty. The
article suggests that while it is possible to associate different domains of EU external action with
different varieties of liberal discourse, it is often more appropriate to see these policy domains as sites
of struggle, negotiation and (perhaps) reconciliation between competing liberal projects.
Keywords: European Union; normative power; liberalism; ethics
Introduction
Recent discussion about the nature of EU external policy has tended to cluster
around the lively debate about ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE) (Manners 2002).
The idea of NPE tends to be explicitly aligned to a liberal view of EU ‘foreign policy’.
Its defenders—policy-makers as well as academics—suggest that because the EU is
constituted as a liberal order, its external actions are pre-disposed to be liberal in
character and effect.1This image of the EU as a liberal ‘force for good’ has been
central to its self-image for at least the past fifteen years, and certainly since the
signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997).2The most typical rebuttal of the NPE
thesis maintains that while the EU might premise its behaviour on normative
rhetoric, the practice of its external action needs to be understood in terms of
strategic/instrumental rationality. Indeed, it is sometimes maintained that a full and
proper evaluation of EU external action needs to take into account both norm-
motivated and interest-motivated behaviour, as if these were discrete empirical
categories.
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doi: 10.1111/1467-856X.12013 BJPIR: 2014 VOL 16, 133–148
© 2013 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2013
Political Studies Association
This article challenges the usefulness of the distinction between normative and
strategic motivations as being helpful for understanding the liberalism or otherwise
of (EU) foreign policy. For the most part, the article is supportive of the key
premises of the NPE approach to EU foreign policy and external action. Indeed, the
argument here shares three key premises with the NPE approach—two theoretical,
one empirical. The first is a broadly constructivist view of foreign policy—to agree
that ‘normative power’ is first and foremost about attempts to influence concep-
tions of what is ‘normal’ in world politics. This is a view (also shared with Schmidt’s
contribution to this collection) that treats an actor’s communicative discourse as
constitutive of interests and behaviour (see also Schmidt 2008)—hence the reluc-
tance here to draw a sharp analytical distinction between interest-driven and norm
(or value)-driven action (see variously Dodier 1993; Laffey and Weldes 1997; Hay
and Rosamond 2002; Blyth 2003; Hay 2011). The second shared premise is the
claim that an actor’s external policy is internally constituted (thereby requiring
inside-outside analytical strategies) as opposed to externally or structurally deter-
mined. The third point of basic agreement is empirical—that the constitutive prin-
ciples of ‘normative power Europe’ are liberal. But this third point of agreement is
offset by a substantial point of empirical disagreement, which is to suggest that an
account of NPE consistent with the first two points of theoretical consensus must
incorporate economic liberalism into its analysis. This amounts to saying (a) that the
EU is significantly (though not necessarily exclusively) constituted by economic
liberalism, (b) that its identity as a liberal market order is a significant determinant
of the EU’s external policy and (c) that a significant portion of the EU’s normative
influence in world politics consists of the propagation of economic liberal norms.
Three additional observations need to be made at this point. First, this line of
argument is not to suggest that the designation ‘market power’ (Damro 2012) is a
better understanding of the orientation and substance of EU external policy than
‘normative power’. To make such a move requires an understanding that reduces
normative power to value-driven behaviour that yields value-promoting outcomes.
This is not consistent with a close reading of the NPE argument and has the
consequence of identifying only particular norms and ideas—those associated with
liberal-cosmopolitan expressions of positive freedom—as being consistent with the
exercise of ‘normative power’. This in turn might disallow the analysis of the
normative power of ideas associated with liberalism as negative freedom/market
cosmopolitanism in the domain of the economy (Parker and Rosamond 2013). The
second observation is that an emphasis on the importance of market liberalism to
NPE does not necessarily mean that other liberal logics are absent or unimportant
to the operation of the EU’s normative power. Indeed, one of the main components
of the argument here is to sketch the logic of three ideal typical ‘liberalisms’ that are
manifest in the EU’s internal constitution and (thus) in its external policy. The third
point concerns economic liberalism, which, of course, should not be treated as a
unitary category. As is noted later in this piece, there are multiple varieties of
economic liberalism and the distinctions between them are important. The history
of EU economic liberalism is a delicate balancing act between these varieties (for
example ordoliberalism vs. neoliberalism), which carry within them quite different
accounts of the market and the role of public authority therein (Harvey 2005; Peck
2008 and 2010; Crouch 2011; Harcourt 2011; Bonefeld 2012; White 2012).
134 BEN ROSAMOND
© 2013 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2013 Political Studies Association
BJPIR, 2014, 16(1)
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