‘Normative Power Europe’, a concept introduced by Ian Manners in 2002 in order to describe the international identity of the European Union (EU), remains a lasting point of reference for academic as well as political debates. However, many contributions to this discussion tend to essentialise notions of a collective identity where normative self-depictions are uncritically used as an explanation for the EU's external actions. The main challenge, thus, is to reconstruct how a self is invented in the conduct of foreign and security policies as a discourse of locating others and articulating insecurities. These discursive processes, I will argue, are highly productive of hierarchical relations and justification narratives overlooked by most research on the EU's security and defence policies. The results of a reconstruction of EU discourse on the European Security and Defence Policy missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo lead to the preliminary conclusion that the EU might increasingly be imagined as a ‘civilising power’, partly re-activating its imperial legacies of the 19th century.