To Be or Not to Be a Normative Power: The EU’s Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Russia. Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance Papers 2/2013

The ‘Normative Power Europe’ debate has been a leitmotif in the academic discourse for over a decade. Far from being obsolete, the topic is as relevant as when the term was first coined by Ian Manners in 2002.1 ‘To be or not to be a normative power’ is certainly one of the existential dilemmas in the foreign policy of the European Union. This paper, however, intends to move beyond the black-and-white debate on whether the European Union is a normative power and to make it more nuanced by examining the factors that make it such. Contrary to the conventional perception that the European Union is a necessarily ‘benign’ force in the world, it assumes that it has aspirations to be a viable international actor. Consequently, it pursues different types of foreign policy behaviour with a varying degree of normativity in them. The paper addresses the question of under what conditions the European Union is a ‘normative power’. The findings of the study demonstrate that the ‘normative power’ of the European Union is conditioned upon internal and external elements, engaged in a complex interaction with a decisive role played by the often neglected external elements.

Towards a Stronger Conception of Democracy in the Strasbourg Convention

The purpose of this article is to examine the promotion of democracy through human rights law. The focus will be on the possibilities for using the European Convention on Human Rights to promote participatory democracy. The author argues that the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court is beginning to recognise some participatory measures such as the requirement of consultation, notably under Article 8 of the Convention.

The EU’s Human Rights Promotion in China and Myanmar: Trading Rights for Might? EU Diplomacy Paper No. 5, October 2014

This paper aims to answer two questions: generally, to what extent the human rights promotion of the European Union (EU) in third countries is consistent, and more specifically, why the EU’s approach towards human rights promotion in China and Myanmar differs despite similar breaches of human rights. It compares the EU’s approach to the two countries over two time periods in the late 1980s and 1990s in the context of the EU’s evolving human rights promotion. Based on the two case studies, this paper finds that the EU’s human rights promotion in third countries varies significantly. Whereas one would expect the EU’s approach to become increasingly assertive throughout the 1990s, this has only been the case with Myanmar. China’s economic and political importance to the EU appears to have counterweighed the general rise in European attention to third countries’ human rights records. In other words, this paper finds that commercial interests take precedence over human rights concerns in case of important trading partners.