The symbolic manifestations of the EU’s normative role in world politics

Abstract

The unfreezing of both the international order and the intellectual order in the post-Cold War era has encouraged fundamentally different ways of conceiving and understanding the roles of the European Union (EU) in world politics. In particular, the influences of social theory developed during the 1960s and 1970s were turned to by scholars eager to overcome the ‘failure of international relations as an intellectual project’ (Buzan and Little 2001). In this chapter, in line with the analytical framework developed in the book’s introductory chapter, I will engage in a five-part consideration of the symbolic manifestation of the EU’s normative role in world politics. By drawing on social theory I first suggest how understanding symbolism can help us to explain the EU’s normative role through the use of role theory, negotiated order and symbolic manifestation. I then proceed to use this understanding in a discussion of common EU role conceptions, including a normative role. Third, I look at the origins of the EU’s normative role by discussing its constitutive norms, together with some examples of their symbolic manifestation. Next, I examine how the EU’s normative role is institutionalized through a consideration of the EU’s symbolic manifestation in three distinct forms – totems, rituals and taboos. Finally, I conclude by discussing six examples of the EU’s normative role performance and role impact. In this chapter I argue that a fuller understanding of the EU’s roles in world politics, and in particular its normative role, requires us to engage in the study of the symbolic manifestation of these roles. In this respect the chapter will both develop a theoretical aspect of EU roles considered in the earlier part of the book and complement the more empirical contributions of the chapters in the later part of the book.