From Regulatory Power to Catalytic Power Europe: The evolving role of the EU as an actor in global climate and energy governance

In the existing literature, the influence of the European Union in global affairs has been debated in partially overlapping strands of literature on the EU as a “normative power”, “regulatory” and “market power”. They have in common that they identify the diffusion of its norms and standards as the main vehicle through which the EU’s power has been articulated internationally, whether advertently or inadvertently. More recently, Goldthau and Sitter (2019) have pointed out how the EU has begun to employ its internal rule-making capacity selectively, in an effort to achieve targeted foreign policy aims. In this article, we argue that the evolving nature of European power is not limited to this new application of its regulatory capacities. We propose that the EU has also added new “catalytic” capacities in the realm of financing and network-building, which it is deploying to influence foreign partners. Building on this, the paper develops the notion of Catalytic Power Europe to conceptualize how the EU deploys these new state capacities as resources for projecting power in international affairs. Drawing on examples from climate and energy diplomacy, the paper illustrates how they have been deployed to achieve its external objectives in this policy field. It demonstrates that these go beyond existing conceptualisations that analyse the EU’s influence in global politics as a by-product of its regulatory capacity. It concludes with a discussion to what extent these new approaches are likely to merely complement or also partially supplant EU’s regulatory power.