Manners: More Normative Power than Ever

Beskrivelse

"I first started using the term ‘normative power’ to understand and explain and think about, the EU in global politics.

At that time it reflected, I think, a way of conceptualizing the EU as a global actor, but it was also equally importantly for me a way of thinking about what the EU did in global politics and the idea that we should focus on normative questions in the study of the EU as a global actor.

Events since the 1990s have dramatically changed the context in which the EU participates as a global actor and the global politics in which it participates. But I think the central argument or thesis that there is a type of international action, which can be described as normative power - the use of persuasion, argumentation, deliberation, based on norms which others can see have greater validity beyond simply national interest or European values - still has relevance today. Indeed I would say has more relevance for global politics than it did in the 1990s with the end of the Cold war.

Of course there are so many more actors speaking loudly on the global stage, as we would expect and indeed hope for, making claims about the universality, the appropriateness, the quality of the types of arguments they are making. So the intervention in Syria for instance is argued equally by Russia, most vociferously, that it is against the interests of the Syrian people and Syrian sovereignty.

And so the question is what constitutes normative power. And this ultimately is an answer which in this case would be resolved by, we would hope, [an] answer within the UN.

Is it still important today? Yes, it is still important today, and that is why I continue to do research on it."

Ian Manners spoke to Sara Westerberg in conjunction with the workshop "New Directions in European Foreign Policy” at the "Global Power Shifts?” conference at The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 28-30 August 2013.

Emne

Towards a European Global Strategy