Europe's new civilizing missions: the EU's normative power discourse

Abstract

This article focuses on two cases of the European Union (EU)'s efforts to promote its values and norms in its immediate neighbourhood, first in central and eastern Europe after the fall of communism, and then in North Africa and the Middle East after the fall of oppressive regimes there. These two neighbourhoods are seen as the EU's peripheries that need to be taken care of lest they become a source of political or economic instability. This explains the use of the imperial paradigm for analysing the content of the EU's normative power discourse. The article shows numerous parallels between the rhetoric of EU officials and the writings of leading philosophers in the Enlightenment period. While there is little doubt that the imperial discourse helped the EU to legitimize its enlargement project in central and eastern Europe, the Arab world seems less eager to ‘import’ European norms for a variety of reasons analysed in the article.