Reconsider Normative Power Europe

Ian Manners suggested the concept of Normative Power Europe (NPE) almost twenty years ago. On one hand, this concept has been praised, as NPE indicates a new research direction in European studies; on the other hand, NPE is harshly criticised because of its blurred theoretical base, conflicts with other powers, like civil power and military power, and controversial application on reality. More importantly, NPE gives a new perspective to analyse the EU as a democracy model. However, in recent years, the democracy of the EU is strongly criticised from both inside and outside the Union, and NPE is marginalised from academic debates. This paper aims to reconsider NPE in Europe, its original context, from the thoughts and ideas of Hannah Arendt, which will be helpful to review NPE as a capability of shaping what is normal, and the power dynamics of NPE as a process. Manners considers the EU as an international actor, which stretches the research scale and makes the concept vivid. In other words, the debate on NPE is at least mainly, if not all, about power dynamics outside the EU. However, this paper tries to pull back a bit and unfold this ability in Europe. The structure of this paper will be as follows: the first part will be a brief review on NPE, Arendt’s idea about public and private realms and community identity. The second part is the reconsideration of NPE from the arguments that Arendt conceptualised. The following will bridge the opinions of Arendt and Foucault to reconsider the “power” of NPE further. The last part will try to expand these findings to respond to the debates on and critiques of NPE. I argue that normative power is a process guiding Europeans, or European states, to an equal situation to have freedom, meanwhile, it is also a wall defining others and us. Reconsidering NPE from Arendt’s perspective help us to link the current democracy in practice and the origin of democracy. It opens a new agenda for the democracy debates in the EU. By reconsidering NPE, we may deconstruct the paradigm of democracy and lead to a new direction of how to study and measure democracy.