Norms, Power and Europe: A New Agenda for Study of the EU and International Relations

Abstract

It was only after the astonishing event of the fall of the Berlin Wall that the European Union (EU) genuinely started reckoning with the principles it stands for and the role it is prepared to play at the international stage. During the Cold War, scholarly arguments on the long march of EU integration were mainly concerned with the content and implementation of integration explained within the framework of mainstream integration theories (e.g. Rosamond 2000; Wiener and Diez 2004). In these discussions, nobody seemed aware of the fact that a fundamental question was left unanswered by both academic and policy circles: what do these policies and their (mis)conduct reveal about the basic foundations of the Union? In the post-Cold War era, the academic community has mostly been occupied with this broad question on the ‘software dimensions’ of EU politics (Lucarelli 2006) from different theoretical viewpoints with an aim to go beyond the traditional explanations of the EU integration and to find an explanatory framework for changing relations between the EU and the rest of the world.