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EUROPEAN STUDIES CENTRE
ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
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Europe in a Non-European World - Report
February 8 - 9 2007
Convenors: Franziska Brantner, Andrew Hurrell, Kalypso Nicolaïdis
Oxford University’s new research project “Europe in a Non- European world” (ENEW)
organized its first workshop on February 8-9 th 2007 in Oxford.
The objective of this research project is to overcome the Euro-centric focus of the
studying of Europe’s role in world politics by de-centering the analysis.
The workshop’s objective was to map the challenges and set the parameters of the debate.
In the 19 th century, Europeans sought to shape the world according to their own image:
The key actors conceived were sovereign states with territorial boundaries based on
homogenous nations. ‘Global’ relations guided by international law, standards of
civilization, Christianity - European exports defined the parameters of the world politics
to come.
Today, it seems, Europeans must learn to think of themselves as part of a “non-European
world”. In such a world a much broader variety of actors than nation states exist and exert
considerable influence. The relations among actors are not necessarily guided by
international law or European principles but are based on a broad set of competing
values, ideas and beliefs. In a non-European world many actors remain highly sensitive to
hints of neo-colonial behaviour -of exporting the European image to other world regions
or countries- while power is often located elsewhere.
For the last 50 years, the EU has accumulated the experience, instruments and ideas that
may help it coming to terms with playing a peripheral yet crucial role. If this is true, what
should we make of the dominant discourse referring to the EU as a different kind of -
civilian, transformative, normative - power? Does the EU indeed have a unique role to
play in world politics predicated on the projection of its own experience onto nations,
other regions as well as on the global stage? Or can the world cope with multiple
normative centers? What is the perception of non-Europeans, not only of the EU’s actual
or desirable role but of an emerging multi-regional system of international relations?
The project brings together the expertise around the university and in its international
network of collaborators to address these questions from a critical historical, legal, and
strategic view point. It focuses in particular on how non-European actors, including its
neighbours, perceive Europe’s global status and make sense of its attempts to diffuse its
norms.
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February 8
The Clash of Universalisms - Or why Europe needs a post-colonial Ethos.
Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Director, European Studies Center, Oxford
Kalypso Nicolaidis started off the workshop by critically analyzing the EU's universalist
discourse – or “EU-niversalism”. She tackled the normative European universalist
discourse which seeks to establish itself against that of the United States – Kantian
republicanism that inspires the EU versus the US's liberal tradition grounded in both
Hobbes and Locke; Europe’s social capitalism vs. US liberal capitalism; Europeans as
natural custodians of the earth as opposed to the US and its “death culture”; and finally
Europe's superiority in terms of understanding complexity, its inconclusiveness and
culture of doubt vs. the dogmatic and naïve American version of for example democracy
promotion. Nicolaidis emphasised that such “clashes” are too often mischaracterised on
essentialist grounds, over-generalising and failing to recognize internal diversity on both
sides. But above all, the consequences of such “othering” might backfire when the EU
attempts to establish its role in a “non-European” world. Recognizing the need for a
galvanizing story for Europeans’ role in the world, her recommendation is to establish as
“the other” Europe’s own colonial past. Nicolaidis suggested that if some variant of
European universalism is to survive and fit with competing discourse emanating from the
rest of the (decolonised) world, it must find a path between echoing its historical legacy
of “standards of civilization” and pure relativism.
Mapping Globality: A Historical Perspective
Karoline Postel Vinay, Senior Research Fellow, Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches
Internationales (CERI), Sciences Po Paris
Karoline Postel Vinay continued the discussion by addressing the process by which the
international system became “global”. She focused on the notion of “globality” (different
from universality and international). Globality refers to world orders and how world
orders turned “global”. In the 19th century, with the ambition of Weltpolitik, came a
change of scale of European power politics and the geo-political “globality” as
legitimized concept and relevant framework for the analysis for international action. This
European consciousness of globality challenged non European world orders. For the
Chinese world order for example, Postel Vinay argued that European “globality” did not
only pose a relative but an absolute challenge – the sino-centric world was no longer the
world, but part of the world, of (European) globality. The former “barbarian”/non-world
was integrated into the “one world order”, though of course clear hierarchies between
different parts of the one world were the direct consequence. Europeans decided which
parts were “relevant” - or not. After the Europeans had set the stage for “globality”, the
Americans wrote the plot: President Woodrow Wilson framed the discourse as a ‘world
war of freedom against tyranny’. An example for this American plot/narrative is how the
“Great War” turned into a “World War”, and the 1939-1945 war, a second "World
War"”, thereby often supplementing or replacing local and regional historical contexts of
the wars of the 20th century with global contexts. The following “Cold War” narrative
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was contested as a global narrative (North-South narrative); whereas the two currently
existing narratives of “globalization” (as world order and not as moment in history of
human exchanges) and the “war on terror” have not yet found other challengers than the
narrative of the Islamic Umma. What role for a (new) European narrative in a non-
European world?
February 9
Norms and preferences in a globalized word: what Europe stands for?
Zaki Laïdi, Senior Research Fellow, CERI, Sciences Po Paris
Mark Leonard, Director, Open Society Initiative for Europe
Zaki Laidi started his presentation by criticizing Manners’s normative power approach
for its lack of critical distance between what Europe stands for in principle and what
Europe does as actor. Thus, Laidi proposed to contain this tendency by linking the notion
of norm to the notion of preferences. The EU does not stand for abstract values, but for
those that reflect social preferences that are imbedded in European societies, which do
evolve over time. These preferences furthermore reflect European interests, which the EU
promotes and defends.
Nevertheless, Europe will not become a classical superpower because Europeans do not
regard themselves as the ultimate guarantors of their own security and because Europeans
do not define politics in terms of “friend and foe”, the ultimate goal is not “victory”.
Europeans refuse power politics, realpolitik and the assumptions of power politics (they
believe in interdependence and global governance). As we are assisting in the comeback
of power politics, this refusal and “non equipment to deal with power politics” threaten to
weaken Europe.
Mark Leonard agreed with Laidi that norms reflect interests; in addition, in the European
context, the postulated norms are a surrogate for agreeing on interests. Member states do
hide behind norms when they cannot agree in purely “interest terms”.
He then drew a scenario for the next 15 years suggesting that we should expect the return
of ideological struggles. He argued that the obvious shift in economic power will be
overlaid by ideological shift over world order; he foresees networks of countries united
by ideas about how the world should be run; countries will align according to them being
either democratic or autocratic and according to their support for “power” or “law”.
For example, regarding the US, he argued that the US is a democracy but will invest less
in international institutions; for the US, power will trump law. This battler over
ideologies will bring a new balance of soft power and a global battle to co-opt swing
states, e.g. Caucasus, South East Asia, or India. The EU should learn to exploit the
differences within other countries, e.g. support the environmental lobby and
multilateralists in the US. The EU should continue to create international institutions that
embody its values –ICC , Kyoto –and “bully” other countries to accept its values. But in
the end, the vision for the EU is to embody “reciprocal altruism”.
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European power in a multipolar system: How does Europe project its values,
policies and standards?
Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme, House of Lords
Laurence Whitehead, Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford
Michael Jay followed up on Leonard’s challenge by elaborating how Europe could adapt
to the changing conditions. He emphasized that the values espoused and projected are
those in the preamble of the Treaty of Rome: rule of law, democracy, human rights. He
then, based on his long-standing experience in the international arena, developed upon
how others see the EU. According to him, it is a mixed picture, depending on who you
talk to and what they see us doing. In Washington, the EU has low visibility as such,
except on trade issues where the EU causes irritation, but of course high visibility of the
member states and no visibility of EU as such outside DC. In Asia, the EU is still
recognized as trading power, but also seen as an aging, uncompetitive economic bloc.
Often, countries from that region, as well as Gulf States, are interested in Europe’s role in
conflict resolution—regional groupings helping to resolve sub-regional conflicts.
Jay furthermore argued that increased economic competitiveness of the EU is essential
for its continued ability to project its values abroad.
Laurence Whitehead elaborated on the intriguing question why the EU’s non-coercive
approach worked better in Central America than in the Balkans. In the San Jose process,
the EU projected its values in a non-coercive way, it applied in its policies the principles
the EU is standing for and its willingness to stand by and support the transition towards
democracy. He then described how the ACP – EU relation projects on the ACP countries
what the EU is, e.g. how the EU Commission interacts with the ACP secretariat, despite
the low legitimacy and accountability of the ACP secretariat.
Finally, he highlighted that policies within the EU are as important as external policies,
for example immigration policy and its consequences on how non-Europeans perceive
the EU.
General overview of the debate
The challenge the project faces is to understand Europe in the light of what others look
for. We cannot seriously understand what we are standing for if we do not compare it to
what others stand for. If we follow the trend of describing our values/norms as driven by
“good” and that others have to comply –the risk is high of replicating European policies
of the 19 th century.
Furthermore, “inside” and “outside” have become increasingly blurred because
globalization challenged the disctinction between internal and external policies as well as
their meaning for different actors.
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The following themes and questions emerged during the workshop and will be part of the
future discussion of the project:
Universalisms
- What “universalisms” can we find? How do they relate to each other? (historically
and in the present) How does the EU fit in or not?
- How do actors in different countries interact with “universal” norms?
- When is universalism legitimate in the eyes of others? How to achieve that
“states” implement “universal” values?
- How do non-Western, non-colonized powers engage with the European
universalist narrative?
- Is the critique of the EU universalist project all about the how? or also the what?
- Who feels empowered in other countries through the EU (discourse, policies,
model etc.), what internal dynamics and distributions does this spin off?
Global order and multipolarity
Power and governance – risk of putting them in separate boxes. It is not a coincidence
that the current power challenges coincide with governance challenges. The emerging
powers themselves are at these cross points. Law is also not only there to engineer global
governance, but also to protect sovereignty.
- How are other regional powers/networks of powers constructed?
- Multipolarity- how do other centers design the global order? And what role do
they assign (or not) to the EU?
- How do the different centers of power (among which Europe is one) engage with
each other?
- Can there be a plurality of world orders? Or one world order, which determines
which parts of the world matter and which ones not? Does the talk about “global
governance” necessarily require hierarchisation and fragmentation not only
between regions, states, but also non-state actors?
- Alliances: what are current international alliances that effectively manage power
distribution? How does the EU fit in or not? How do they relate to the EU or not?
Global order and multilateralism
- What are the “multilateralism” visions of emerging powers? What role do they
assign the EU in their vision?
- How do “non-European” powers and emerging powers inside international
organizations engage with the EU, how does it impact its promotion of its
preferences? How do these interactions change due to changing power realities?
How does the EU adapt, or not?
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- Dependence on international institutions- how do countries judge their relative
dependence on international organizations compared to the EU’s dependence on
them?
- Do differences in willingness to pool sovereignty reflect difference over interests,
or something more fundamental e.g. are EU member states generally more willing
to pool sovereignty than non European actors?
- Have the Europeans mystified the story of sovereignty pooling and global
governance, e.g. have the Europeans been able to overcome sovereignty because
they invented it and because they continue to have the strength of the state?
European preferences and global norms
- Under what conditions can Europeans translate their preferences into generalized,
even global norms?
- Do others perceive a difference between European “preferences”, “norms” and
“political action”?
- Can the EU continue to act as a “structuring power” (the EU creates the structures
that impose preferences and norms). Eg. with the enlargement the EU imposed its
norms- and structured its neighborhood. Does the EU want to do the same for the
rest of the world? Does the rest of the world want Europe?
- Other ways of translating preferences into norms: EU presses countries to join the
international institutions they value, pushes to increase the web of international
institutions, and embeds preferences into codes of conduct, e.g. Russian energy
charter.
- What is the place of power in this translation? (need for more sophisticated
understanding of attraction versus coercion, e.g. hard coercive power through
internal market)
- What are the points of interaction between EU and outside actors? How are these
structured (also in terms of power asymmetries)?
- How are US/EU extra-territorial policies perceived and acted upon
comparatively?
- Power asymmetries are an important aspect of “transformative power EU”. Are
power asymmetries nowadays too weak to allow for transformative power of the
EU? How does the EU adapt to these changing power asymmetries? How do
others adapt to changing centers of power. Does the EU try to write power
asymmetries or magnify them in its interactions?
- If interests of EU and norms of others conflict, where do we go?
Regionalisms
- What “regionalisms” can we find? How do they relate to each other? (historically
and currently)
- Comparative regionalism to study levels of governance, e.g. the EU process and
governance toolbox (Q: if only the process and easier to export because not
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contentious, so how should it be then our identity? If it is not boring for us, e.g.
enough for our identity, why do we think it is easier to export?)
- EU as laboratory, rabbit for regional integration/global governance
- EU is not only model –there are many others (e.g. NAFTA for questions of hard
borders)
- To what extent and in which areas is the EU a reference point for others?
- Global governance ---informal groups of big states within and around global
institutions –alliances (see regional alliances)
Franziska Brantner, February 23 rd 2007
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Participants
Jean Aitchison
Othon Anastasakis
Gulnur Aybet
Andrea Baumann
Dimitar Bechev
Christoper Bickerton
Sarmila Bose
Richard Caplan
Frederic Charillon
Anne Deighton
Reinhard Duessel
Matthew Eagleton-Pierce
Nora Fisher
Paul Flather
Rosemary Foot
Heather Grabbe
Benjamin Habig
Carolyn Haggis
Florian Hoffmann
Nino Japaridze
Michael Jay
Lee Jones
Michael Kaser
Markus Kornprobst
Nadiya Kravets
Julia Labeta
Zaki Laidi
John Law
Hartmut Lenz
Tobias Lenz
Mark Leonard
Kerem Oktem
Louis Pauly
Karoline Postel-Vinay
Jochen Prantl
Philip Strik
Stefan Szwed
Christian Tuschhoff
Juri Viehoff
Leïla Vignal
Stephen Weatherill
Laura Whitehead
Xiaofeng Yu
Berenika Zakrzewski
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