Between Norms and Geopolitics: The EU's Role Conception in Responses to Protest Movements in Serbia

The European Union has long presented itself as a normative actor, committed to promoting democracy and the rule of law in its neighbourhood. Yet the way it frames protest movements in candidate countries presents a more complicated picture. Drawing on interactionist role theory and the distinction between normative and geopolitical meta-roles, this paper asks what EU official communication reveals about the EU’s role conception in a period of intensifying geopolitical competition. Through a qualitative content analysis of European Commission and European Parliament outputs, we compare EU institutions’ framing of two Serbian protest movements: the explicitly anti-authoritarian One out of Five Million movement (2018–2020) and the initially apolitical student protests (2024–ongoing), which implicitly challenged Russian and Chinese influence. Based on the analysis, we find that the EU's normative role conception was never fully expressed to begin with, with the near-silence surrounding the first movement reflecting a stabilitocratic prioritisation of regime stability. The student protests attracted considerably more attention, with geopolitical elements emerging alongside stronger normative framing. Rather than replacing normativity, geopoliticisation appears to have disrupted the stabilitocratic logic, paradoxically creating the conditions for stronger normative frames.