The EU in Peacebuilding: Actorness, Normativity and Identity

Today’s Europe is mainly founded on an idealisation of this historical self and its normative aspirations for the future. The EU’s construction as a successful peace project (its past) and the emphasis on the EU’s ‘aspirations’ (its future) mark the EU’s role in peacebuilding today. This paper looks into the interplay between the EU’s three temporal selves (past, present and future) in order to reveal how the EU’s past (peaceful integration) and future (normative aspirations) selves feed into the construction of its current self as an international actor and empower it to pursue its peacebuilding activities, especially in its neighbourhood. Its major argument is that the discourse of successful peaceful European integration (which is used to construct the EU’s past self) and the rhetoric on the Union’s normative aspirations about peacebuilding (which is employed to represent its future self) help constitute its present identity and legitimize its practices (liberal peacebuilding) today. The paper thus makes a second reading of the EU’s current peacebuilding efforts and tries to reveal the Union’s governmentality in this regard – the technologies and security apparatuses that it employs in order to change the behaviour of the receiving societies, and the knowledges (re)produced to legitimize them. It also looks into how the three temporal selves of the EU are produced and reproduced as ‘ideal’ and how the EU is empowered as an actor through such governmentality.