I Stand by You: the EU as a Defender of Norms Against the Use of Force

This paper examines the EU’s role in defending or resurrecting norms against the use of force, whether by friends or foes. The complex nature of crises often calls on the EU to act as a double-faced Janus of might and right, and choosing when to disguise one as the other can be challenging at best. Doing so becomes even more complicated when the use of force increasingly supersedes norms such as those of human rights or against territorial conquest (Hathaway and Shapiro 2025, Finnemore 2001). Part of the literature on norm contestation or decline argues that norms can indeed be challenged, but they rarely die (Panke and Petersohn 2016, Percy and Sandholtz 2022). By adopting a process tracing approach to capture normative change across time, the paper will consider the EU’s role in upholding norms against territorial conquest in the case of the Russian intervention in Ukraine (2014 and 2022) and human rights norms in Syria after 2011, when the government failed to protect its own citizens. The paper will first draw on the pluralist-solidarist debate which disputes the primacy of either individuals or states in the international society of states (Bull 1996, Wight 1966). Both perspectives argue for the limitation of the use of force, but they offer competing approaches regarding the legitimacy of intervention (Wheeler 2001). The pluralist perspective favors order and promotes the principle of sovereignty as non-intervention, while the solidarist one highlights consensus and the primacy of justice over order. The approach is based on the idea that the EU, as an actor, can simultaneously reinforce sovereignty and order, while co-opting international actors into normative structures that exhibit “sovereignty without statehood” (Halden 2011). To explore how the EU displays solidarity with states or individuals in defending or promoting norms against the use of force, this paper examines the EU engagement from a relationalist perspective. Theoretical frameworks that offer relational views on the boundary between formal and informal control, anarchy and hierarchy, or structure versus agent influence, enable us to account for the EU’s “patterns of transactions” (Nexon ) in negotiating norms against the use of force. Whether these transactions are negotiated by individual member states, groups of states within the EU or the EU as a whole is also telling for the general patterns of interaction that the EU can institutionalize.