Authors
Kamil Zwolski1; 1 University of Southampton, UK Discussion
According to the standard conceptualisation of the EU as a normative power, as proposed by Ian Manners and others, the EU can no longer be defined as a normative power following its responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Arguably, it has long been accepted in the literature that the EU is a normative power of some kind, and even EU policy practitioners are sometimes keen to conceptualise the EU as such. The reality of the EU's international identity, however, has been changing and evolving over the last decade or so, with the EU Global Strategy as a meaningful signal that the EU may no longer meet the criteria for the definition of a normative power that we typically work with. More dramatically, the EU's response to the war in Ukraine has been anything but 'reflexive' or 'conciliatory'. The EU (rightly) chose one side in this conflict recognised Russia as a de facto enemy. The EU's turn towards a seemingly more traditional, even 'geopolitical' understanding of power, can be construed as the death of normative power Europe. What I suggest in this paper, however, is that the EU can now be considered more of a normative power than it was before given its unequivocal commitment to the value of peace, democracy, human rights and – above all - defending the victim of aggression. 
