The normative ethics of the European Union

Abstract

The creative efforts of the European integration process have changed what passes for ‘normal’ in world politics. Simply by existing as different in a world of states and the relations between them, the European Union changes the normality of ‘international relations’. In this respect the EU is a normative power: it changes the norms, standards and prescriptions of world politics away from the bounded expectations of state-centricity. However, it is one thing to say that the EU is a normative power by virtue of its hybrid polity consisting of supranational and international forms of governance; it is another to argue that the EU acts in a normative (i.e. ethically good) way. The focus of this article will be on the ways in which we might judge the normative ethics of the EU in world politics by critically discussing the principles that it seeks to promote, the practices through which it promotes them, and the impact they have.1 The EU has been, is and always will be a normative power in world politics. This is a strong claim with a critical aim: to promote normative approaches to the study of the EU in world politics. This aim is built on the acknowledgement in critical theory that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, since ‘theory constitutes as well as explains the questions it asks (and those it does not ask)’.2 There is a simple temptation to attempt to analyse EU policy and influence in world politics empirically without ever asking why the EU is or is not acting, or how we might best judge what the EU should be doing in world politics. A