Achieving the status of a normative power is considered as the greatest success of European integration, which has opened new perspectives for EU as an international actor. The goal of this paper is to uncover the specificities of the mechanism of normative power in a peripheral country - Venezuela. Using qualitative discourse analysis and taking the EU as the model case, it looks at the normative aspects of foreign policy discourse and practice in Latin America. It gives an opportunity to analyze the functioning of normative power in the framework of regional leadership and identify whether the existing criteria of this phenomenon still apply in a wider comparative context. Besides, it will allow to conceptualize Latin American developments through the tools originally designed exclusively for the European context. In this manner the wider application of this concept can be a resource in overcoming the Eurocentrism of knowledge about world politics.
