The EU’s Democratization: Normative Power Europe Meets External EU Perception Literature

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has been seen to function as a normative power that influences other states by diffusing its own norms at the international level, particularly through democracy promotion. These democratization efforts are based on the assumption that democratization within the European continent has brought a period of peaceful coexistence and that this success can be repeated outside the EU. The aim of this chapter is to provide new insights into the conversation on democratization efforts of the European Union by combining research on the democratization dimension of the EU as part of the Normative Power Europe (NPE) framework with the work done on the external perception of the EU. This enables the chapter to analyze how these EU efforts are perceived by the third countries that are the objects of its democratization efforts. Existing research has not established a strong link between the literature on NPE and external perception, or between democratization and NPE. This chapter connects these different strands of research in order to shed new light on the EU’s democratization efforts. In doing so, it provides new insights into the challenges that EU democracy promotion faces and paves the way for possible new areas of inquiry.

This work was supported by Slovak Research and Development Agency grant no. APVV-15-0732 (project “European Union’s Recognition Order and the Small Member State”).