The concept of Normative Power Europe (NPE), as developed by Ian Manners, conceives the Europe Union (EU) as an actor with an ideational nature, embodying common principles and shaping norm diffusion in the international system. In this work, we adapted Nathalie Tocci’s (2008) approach to the study of normative power based on three research questions: what does the EU want, how does it act, and what does it achieve. We will focus on human rights promotion, one of the EU founding principles and first mentioned in the 1973 Copenhagen declaration on European identity. In this research, we chose Georgia as a case study, a country with intentions of EU accession but part of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), and dealing with human rights violations in the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Our aims are to understand the EU’s objectives in the field of human rights in Georgia; how those objectives are manifested through processes of norm diffusion; and to examine potential results of EU involvement therein.
Keywords: European Union, Normative Power Europe, Human Rights, Georgia
Mónica Canário & David Ferreira | Centre for International Studies, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
Mónica Canário holds a bachelor degree in Political Science from ISCTE-IUL and a Master degree in International Studies (Middle East and North Africa specialization) from the same institution, with a dissertation on “The impact of the Arab Spring on the social and political status of women in Tunisia”. She also has three specializations by ISCTE-IUL: Refugees, Human Rights and Reception; The Idea of Europe; and The Middle East in World Politics. National coordinator of HeForShe Portugal since December 2016, she is a research assistant at the Center for International Studies (CEI-IUL) and attending a PhD in Political Science (International Relations specialization) where she is developing her thesis “The Europeanization as a tool for women empowerment in the European Neighbourhood Policy? The cases of Morocco and Tunisia”.
David Ferreira holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration (University of Minho, 2014) and a master’s degree in International Studies (ISCTE-IUL, 2016) with a specialization in European and Transatlantic Studies. His dissertation was titled: “Europeanization in Portugal: nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament”. He also completed two specialization seminars at ISCTE-IUL, namely “The idea of Europe: from the Lisbon Earthquake to the Lisbon Treaty” and “The Middle East in World Politics”, in 2017. He is currently an integrated researcher at the Center for International Studies (CEI-IUL) and a doctoral candidate in Political Science at ISCTE-IUL, specializing in International Relations. His Ph.D. thesis addresses nuclear weapons in U.S. foreign policy towards Russia. He has been a teaching assistant (bolseiro de 3º ciclo) during his three years in the Ph.D. program, and was a visiting doctoral student at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu (Estonia) from April to June of 2018.