EUROPEAN SECURITY FORUM
A JOINT INITIATIVE OF CEPS, IISS, DCAF AND GCSP

WHAT PROSPECTS FOR NORMATIVE FOREIGN POLICYIN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD?
ESF WORKING PAPER NO. 29
JULY 2008

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BYFRANÇOIS HEISBOURG
NATHALIE TOCCIDANIEL HAMILTON
ANDREY S.MAKARYCHEVLANXIN XIANG
RADHA KUMAR© COPYRIGHT 2008 CEPS, IISS, DCAF & GCSPISBN 13: 978-92-9079-802-6

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What prospects for normative foreign policy
in a multipolar world?
Working Paper No. 29of theEuropean Security Forum

Contents

Chairman’s Summing-up ..................................................................................................................... 1
François Heisbourg............................................................................................................................. 1
When and why does the EU act as a normative power in its neighbourhood?................................ 3
Nathalie Tocci ..................................................................................................................................... 3
The United States: A normative power? ............................................................................................. 9Daniel Hamilton .................................................................................................................................. 9
In Quest of Political Subjectivity: Russia’s ‘Normative Offensive’ and the Triple Politicisationof Norms ............................................................................................................................................... 14
Andrey S.Makarychev........................................................................................................................ 14
There is No Such Thing as a Normative Chinese model .................................................................. 20
Lanxin Xiang ..................................................................................................................................... 20
India as a Foreign Policy Actor – Normative Redux........................................................................ 24
Radha Kumar .................................................................................................................................... 24

Chairman’s Summing-up
François Heisbourg

T

he XXIXth meeting of the European Security Forum was also the opportunity to launch thebook “Who is a Normative Foreign Policy Actor ? The European Union and its global partners”
edited by one of our speakers, Nathalie Tocci. We were therefore fortunate to be able to draw
both from the presentations given at our 26 May meeting and from the work done by the contributors
to this timely book.

Lanxin Xiang, Professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva (IHED) presented his paper under the title“There is no such thing as a normative Chinese model”, underscoring that the Chinese view is ethicaland temporal rather than ‘spatial’ (i.e. in which politics are polarised along left/right lines). Thus
China likes Europe’s social (i.e. ethical) democracy, but not democracy as egalitarianism. China, wewere reminded, takes the long view. To the chairman’s doubts about Chinese views on the non-use offorce being close to those of the EU – after all, hadn’t China resorted to force to ‘teach a lesson’ toVietnam in 1979; and didn’t China publicly state the possibility of using force to recover Taiwan? –the speaker indicated that China tended to use force defensively (as in Korea in 1950 or against India
in 1962). Mention of Admiral Zheng He’s navy in the XVth century was made. Lanxin Xiang
reaffirmed the view made in his paper that the post-modern EU and traditional Chinese mentality bearstrong resemblances, and that EU and Chinese foreign policies could converge, notwithstanding
different approaches to the central place of democratisation in EU norms.
In her oral presentation Radha Kumar of the Delhi Policy Group also drew on the long historical view,emphasising the role of Kautilya (3rd century BC) as a source of Indian foreign policy inspiration
notably in defining the three pillars of state behaviour (engagement; adherence to rule-based norms
supervised by judges; transparency). She noted that these were at some variance with enlightenment
values as retailed through British colonial rule; they are closer to US approaches. She reminded us that
foreign policy in Indian history had been the product of Empire (Maurya, Moghol…). In domestic
terms, the constitutional emphasis is on collective rather than on individual rights; pluralism in a unioncomposed of language-based states goes further than in the US or European constitutions. Certain
rights (e.g. family law) are administered by the corresponding religion.
She noted that during the Cold War, India’s policy of non-engagement was at variance with thehistorical record. To a question from the chair noting the disconnect between India’s democratic
nature and Kautilyan legacy on the one hand, and a Realpolitik approach in Sudan and Myanmar
similar to that of China, she noted that:-

In Sudan, India is a profit-sharing partner in the greater Nile oil consortium, but is not physicallypresent as an actor on the ground;-

In Myanmar, India is courting the Junta as a response to Chinese influence.

In conclusion, she remarked that the Achilles heel of Indian foreign policy was its sometimes
unrealistic strand, as in the opposition of part of the body-politic (e.g. the CP-ML) against the nuclear
deal with the US.
Andrey Makaryachev, Professor at the University of Nizhny-Novgorod, spoke to his paper entitled “Inquest of subjectivity: Russia’s normative offensive and the triple politicisation of norms”, noting that
Russia’s foreign policy had become increasingly norm-based in terms of the arguments used, as iswitnessed by the handling of the Kosovo issue. The disagreements are less on the general nature ofnorms (peace, security, democracy, liberty, human rights, etc.) than on their content; and there
continues to be a refusal of any kind of judgement on Russia’s domestic standards.

|1

2 | FRANÇOIS HEISBOURG

Walter Slocombe, former US Undersecretary of Defense presented the paper prepared by Daniel
Hamilton on “The United States: A normative power?” (a contributor to the book edited by Nathalie
Tocci). He stressed that a normative policy implies standards that are consistent, explicit anduniversal, noting the importance of the Enlightenment legacy. Since Kosovo had been mentioned, heunderlined the tension between normative ends and normative means; the Kosovo campaign had been
the opposite of an interest-driven war.
Nathalie Tocci, presenting her paper “When and Why Does the EU Act as a Normative Power in its
Neighbourhood?”, focused on the question of ends and means applied to the case of the EU. She notedthat it was easier to agree on norms than to act on them; that it’s easier to be normative when interests
are not involved; that there is a need for mechanisms to define the collective EU interest; and that
normativity tends to apply in contractual, civilian relations, whereas its ceases to be at a premium
when we face coercive influences.
Given the wealth of presentations, time for debate from the floor was limited. A German participant
raised the issue of the stability of a multi (or non)-polar system, as well as that of the consequences ofcultural relativism for war and peace: after all, there had been a lot of cultural relativism on show
between the contrasting presentations. He also wanted to draw out the panellists on the ‘tying ofhands’ in a normative foreign policy, an issue much dwelt upon in Ms. Tocci’s paper. A Dutch
participant wondered whether there could be agreement on universal norms between some of therather parochial great powers. A member of the Russian mission referred to his country’s desire fordeep reform of the OSCE, in terms of ODHIR (Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights)
and the election observers.
Lanxin Xiang, in response, noted that there is no universal Chinese set of norms, that China is agnostic
in this regard. He considered that multi-polarity can be stable, with a form of “democratisation ofinternational relations”.
Radha Kumar held the view that there is a core base of principles on which there can be agreement. As
for the tying of hands, she stated that the UN still remains the institution of choice, but that reform isrequired; unfortunately, the trend in this regard was towards fragmenting rather than universalising.
China needed to become a major player in the Bretton Woods institutions as well as in the Asia
context; but this would create complex reactions in the continent. Kosovo should be viewed as a
specific European issue, not as a broader, global precedent, noting that Serbia in the erstwhile
Yugoslav federal system had taken away Kosovo’s regional autonomy.
Andrey Makarychev was sceptical about universal norms. He posed the question: “Who are thepolitical actors of the international system?, since we now have alongside state actors, a number ofcollective actors (EU, NATO…), unrecognised states, NGO’s etc. What is the meaning ofinternational society under these conditions, and how much multiplicity can we afford in theinternational society?”
Walter Slocombe refused relativism when it comes to certain fundamental rights (such as the issue ofabuse of detainees). Countries can live together with vastly different internal regimes. It may be truethat everybody wraps their interests in norms and values: but the proposition can work the other way
around (e.g. adopting democratic norms is usually good for interests such as business and peace).
Nathalie Tocci reasserted the need for consistency. Kosovo may be small, but the way it is handled isimportant from the standpoint of actors of the global international system. Referring to the Chinese
approaches, she also underscored the importance of the relational aspects of norms.

When and why does the EU act as a normative
power in its neighbourhood?1
Nathalie Tocci2
Introduction
Since its inception, the European Union was conceptualised as (and prided itself on being) a distinctly‘different’ type of international actor. Over the decades, it has been described as a ‘civilian’ (Dûchene,
1973, p.19), a ‘soft’ (Hill, 1990) and most recently a ‘normative’ power in international relations(Manners, 2002, 2006). The EU’s official texts make similar claims about the Union’s role in worldpolitics. Since the 1970s, in fact, norms and values began permeating European foreign policy
documents and declarations (see Hill & Smith, 2000). At a two-day meeting of EU heads of state on
14-15 December 1973, which resulted in a declaration on Europe's international identity, the delegatestalked about building a ‘just basis’ for international relations. The 1986 Single European Act called
upon the Community to “display the principles of democracy and compliance with the rule of law andwith human rights” in its conduct of external relations. The 1988 Rhodes European Council called for
an EU role in preserving international peace, promoting the solution to regional conflicts,
demonstrating solidarity for democracy, supporting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
strengthening the effectiveness of the United Nations and improving social and economic conditionsin less developed countries. The Maastricht Treaty went further, calling for the preservation of peaceand security, the promotion of international cooperation, the fight against international crime, thedevelopment of democracy and the rule of law, the respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms, and the support for economic and social development (Article J.1). Most explicitly, theLisbon Treaty states that in international affairs the EU would be guided by and would seek topromote the values on which the Union is founded, including democracy, human rights, fundamental
freedoms and the rule of law (Title V, Article 21; Title V, Article 2c).
This paper attempts to go beyond these assertions. Rather than assuming that the EU is a normativeinternational player simply by virtue of its declarations and its ‘different’ non-state nature, we take for
granted that in different geographical regions and at different points in time, the Union’s foreign
policies have taken on dramatically different forms. If by a normative foreign policy we mean
pursuing normative foreign policy goals through normatively deployed means and having a discernible
normative impact, then what emerges, perhaps inevitably, is that the EU is not always normative, as is
the case with any other international actor. The fact that the EU is a sui generis actor as opposed tostates such as the US, Russia, China or India, does not fundamentally alter the reality of its foreign
policy practice. As we shall see below, at times EU foreign policy has been normative, while at othertimes it has been status quo oriented, at other times still it has been realist and even imperialistic. For
the purpose of this paper, a realpolitik actor is one that pursues self-interest, in violation of laws andnorms; an imperial actor is one that pursues normative goals but does so in violation of existing norms
in the deployment of its foreign policy instruments; a status quo actor is one that pursues self-interestin compliance with existing norms and laws.
In order to make sense of these different types of foreign policy approaches, this paper teases out the
principal dynamics at work in determining why the EU acts the way it does in different cases, anddraws some lessons about the nature of the EU’s role in the world.

1

This paper is largely drawn from N. Tocci et al. (2008), The EU as a Normative Foreign Policy Actor, CEPS
Working Document No. 281, CEPS, Brussels.
2
Nathalie Tocci is Senior Fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, and Research Fellow at CEPS.
|34 | NATHALIE TOCCIThe EU as a multifaceted foreign policy actor
We can quite easily think of cases in which the EU has acted in a variety of different ways in worldpolitics. Table 1 sets out cases in which the EU acted as a normative, realpolitik, imperial and statusquo power, as well as cases in which the impact of EU foreign policies reflected (intended) orotherwise (unintended) the original foreign policy goals.
Table 1. The EU’s role in the world: Selected sub-case studies
Normative

Realpolitik

Imperialistic

Status Quo

Intended

Unintended Intended Unintended Intended Unintended Intended

Unintended

Central &EasternEuropeBelarus

Ukraine

Goals

Means

Results

Case
Study

Non-normative

RussiaSyria

KosovoIsraelPalestineNorth
AfricaNormative

In cases such as the eastern enlargement and policies towards neighbouring Belarus, the EU has
pursued normative goals (political and economic reform) through policy instruments that were craftedand deployed within the confines of the law (the accession policy and targeted sanctions respectively).
Yet while the EU succeeded in engendering democratisation and economic modernisation in Eastern
Europe, its double-track strategy of sanctioning the Belarus regime while supporting civil society has,to date, failed to alter the nature and strength of the authoritarian regime in Minsk. The Belarus
leadership has not reacted positively to EU sanctions, while EU actors recognise that they have been
unable to convey effectively their message of support to the Belarusian population.
By contrast, in the case of Russia and Syria, the EU has behaved in an overall realpolitik manner. Visà-vis Russia, commercial and energy interests explain the sidetracking of EU political pressure on
Moscow in the context of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and the Four Common Spaces;
pressure has neither been exerted through dialogue nor conditionality. Likewise in Syria, realist
concerns, such as preserving the regional balance of power between Israel and its neighbours, andfollowing the line set by the US, have had a larger sway over EU policies than aims to see politicaltransformation in Syria and a law-based agreement between Syria and Israel. In turn, the deployment
of EU policy means has been rather inconsistent, ranging from un-kept promises of ratifying Syria’s
Association Agreement, to sporadic pressure on the regime (i.e. regarding Lebanon) without constantattention to Syria’s deficient human rights record.

WHEN AND WHY DOES THE EU ACT AS A NORMATIVE POWER IN ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD? | 5

In Kosovo and Israel-Palestine, the EU has behaved as an imperialistic actor, meaning an actor intent
on creating new norms in the violation of existing international law. While intervening in the pursuitof normative goals (i.e. the prevention and rectification of injustice in Kosovo, and a two-state solution
and respect for human rights in the Middle East;), the EU has often sidelined or violated internationallaw. In the case of Kosovo this has taken place both in the context of war, unsanctioned by the UN, inwhich several member states took part. In the case of the Middle East, the EU, through its bilateral
cooperation with Israel, has on several occasions (related to trade and research principally) extended
benefits to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories in violation of the Geneva conventions. Yet
results have differed. While Kosovo’s independence has been recognised, possibly leading to arevisionist setting of ‘new norms’, in the Middle East, by contrast, a viable two-state solution appears
to be an increasingly distant chimera (the Annapolis process notwithstanding), and violations ofhuman rights and international law persist unabated.
Finally, the EU has acted as a status quo player in North Africa and Ukraine. In both cases, the Union
has primarily pursued non-normative goals. In North Africa, the EU prioritised its trade andincreasingly its security interests over the promotion of political reform. Moreover, its trade policies,
while beneficial to itself, have been detrimental to the growth and modernisation of the dependent
North African economies, given its refusal to liberalise trade in agricultural products. In Ukraine on
the other hand, while favouring Kiev’s European orientation and its reform process in principle,
especially since the orange revolution, normative aims have been hollowed-out by the resistance ofseveral member states to grant Ukraine a European perspective, not least out of fear of an eventual
dilution of their power internally within the EU. In both cases, however, the means pursued by the EU
were normative. Relations have been conducted through EU contractual relations, including the
Association Agreements, the Partnership and Cooperation Agreements, and, more recently, theEuropean Neighbourhood Policy. Given that the EU has been on the stronger side of these contractual
ties, Brussels has ensured that the pursuit of its self-interest has been channelled through clear andtransparent legal rules. The results have differed however. In North Africa, EU involvement has not
opened the way for a deep process of political and economic transformation, while in Ukraine, despitewidespread feelings of deception on the part of the EU and ongoing political instability and corruption,
the post-revolution period has seen the consolidation of democracy.

The dynamics at work in EU foreign policy
But what do these cases tell us about the EU as a (normative) foreign policy actor? And more precisely
what are the factors determining how and why the EU acts in specific ways in different foreign policy
instances? Several broad lessons can be brought to the fore.
Beginning with the goals pursued, we can contrast the normative and imperialistic cases in which the
EU opts for normative goals, with the realpolitik and the status quo cases, in which self-interest
prevails. Why did the EU prioritise normative goals in cases such as Eastern Europe, Belarus, Kosovo
and Palestine; but not in Syria, Russia, North Africa and Ukraine?
Analysing these cases, it emerges that when the EU has acted as a normative or imperialistic power,
pursuing normative goals, normative and self-interest objectives have either overlapped or have notcontradicted each other. In the case of Belarus, the EU has been able to pursue its (limited) tradeinterests alongside its democracy-driven sanctions. In the case of Eastern Europe instead, in view ofthe paramount strategic objective of ‘reuniting Europe’, the EU could not tolerate the candidate
countries’ blatant violations of norms, in so far as these could ultimately threaten the EU from within.
In this respect, enlargement policy can be seen as a special case precisely because it is not, strictu
senso, foreign policy. Likewise in the two imperialistic cases, after decades (in Israel-Palestine) or
years (in Kosovo) of standstill, the member states converged at the level of rhetoric, to pursue
normative objectives consisting in a rights-based, two-state solution in both Israel-Palestine andSerbia-Kosovo. In both cases, discursively agreeing on normative goals has been the least6 | NATHALIE TOCCI

controversial option for the EU, despite the fact that, particularly in the case of Kosovo, importantdifferences between member states remain.
In the realpolitik and status quo cases, instead, the configuration of self interests and intra-EU
divisions has been far more pronounced, leading to a prioritisation of self-interest. On the one hand,strong and competing self-interests such as energy security (Russia), transatlantic cooperation in the
Middle East (Syria), commercial interests and the management of migration flows (North Africa), andmember state preservation of their internal power (Ukraine) have trumped competing normative
objectives. On the other hand, the primary concern of several member states to pursue their disjointed
self-interests at the expense of EU-wide objectives, and member state ability in EU foreign policy toveto collective action explains the prioritisation of self-interest in these cases.
Turning to the foreign policy means used, here normative behaviour can be found in the normative andthe status quo case studies, in contrast to the realpolitik and imperialistic cases, in which the EU has
acted in contravention of or sidelined international law and multilateral institutions. The primary,albeit not only, explanation of why this has been the case seems to lie in the EU’s internal capability,
although in a manner that partly contradicts the intuitive consensus about EU foreign policy. The
problem in fact does not seem to lie in the fact that the EU has insufficient capabilities (e.g., in the
military domain). Normative means tend to be deployed when the EU chooses to act within theconfines of its international agreements with third states and has limited or no coercive instruments at
its disposal. Indeed, normative means have been deployed in cases where the primary vehicles of EU
policy have been contractual relations, whether the accession process (Eastern Europe), the association
process (North Africa), the Partnership and Cooperation process (Belarus) or the ENP (Ukraine).
By contrast, whereas the EU has disposed of contractual options in the realpolitik and imperialistic
cases, it has either chosen not to make use of these instruments (Syria) or it has pursued its objectives
beyond the blueprint and stated aims of these contracts (Russia, Kosovo and Israel-Palestine). Of
course, in some cases, the EU has been strongly pressed by external actors and factors to sideline rules
and law. In the Middle East, the US has induced the Union to either avoid concluding a contractual
agreement (Syria), or to set aside or violate the norms, rules and laws embedded in these agreements(Israel-Palestine). In the other cases, Russia’s new assertiveness has either obstructed international
legal channels (Kosovo) or cornered the Union into sidelining the human rights and democracy
standards spelt out in its bilateral agreements with Moscow.
Yet while important in defining or constraining foreign policy means, the external environment is
critical above all in influencing the EU’s foreign policy impact. Naturally, what the EU does is theprimary determinant of its impact. Hence, it is far more likely that the Union will have a normative
impact when it pursues normative goals and means (Eastern Europe) than when it acts in animperialistic, realpolitik or status quo way. But on the one hand, the Belarus case exemplifies that thisis not always the case and that the Union can fail to engender a normative result despite its pursuit of
normative goals through normative means. On the other hand, the cases of Syria, Ukraine and Kosovo
suggest that the EU can have a normative impact even when either its goals or policy means are notnormative.
Especially in these non-intuitive cases, the role of the external environment is of the essence. A
conducive external context is of primary importance for an effective normative impact. In Syria,
Damascus’ isolation by the West and its many internal weaknesses explain in part why, to someextent, the Ba’ath regime has abided by international norms, especially in terms of retreating from
Lebanon and accepting an international presence there. Furthermore, the EU is Syria’s first trading
partner and is viewed as a less aggressive actor than the US. Hence, against all odds, Damascus strives
to keep a door open to Brussels. In Kosovo, despite Russian resistance, the West has the power toassert the end-game and recognise secession, even if in contravention of international law. In Ukraine,
paradoxically it is the nearby pressurising influence of Moscow that has induced pro-reform actors inKiev to latch on to the EU irrespective of what the Union says and does and in spite of the EU’s
lukewarm reception of Ukraine’s membership ambitions. In the case of Eastern Europe however, theWHEN AND WHY DOES THE EU ACT AS A NORMATIVE POWER IN ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD? | 7

complementary support of the US and the international financial institutions, as well as the warm
reception of EU involvement by the Eastern European countries has served to bolster the effectivenessof normative EU goals and means.
By contrast, an unfavourable external environment, coupled with EU weakness vis-à-vis third states or
the wider milieu, reduces the likelihood of a normative impact. In Belarus, in the absence of free
media, the Belarus leadership has divulgated its own vision of reality, hardened its stance andinstumentalised Western pressure to induce a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Belarus’ relatively stableeconomic situation and its geopolitical anchorage to Russia have also made the country less dependent
upon Europe. In Russia, the discovery of energy leverage and an accompanying political(re)assertiveness on the international scene have contributed to undermining the effectiveness of the
EU’s normative message, and allowed Moscow to play member state interests against each other. In
the Middle East, the EU’s acceptance of playing second fiddle to the US, its preoccupation withmaintaining close ties with Israel and the hold that Israel itself has on the EU have all induced theUnion to strive for a modicum of stability in the region and respect rights. Finally in North Africa,
whereas the EU has sufficiently strong bargaining power vis-à-vis the Maghreb countries, theresilience of these regimes has reduced the prospect that the EU’s (secondary) normative goals will
have a discernible impact on the ground.

Transforming the EU into a normative power in the world
The discussion on means and impact points to a conundrum. On the one hand, the EU is more likely to
pursue normative means when power relations between the EU and a third state are relatively balanced
and relations develop within the confines of mutually negotiated agreements. On the other hand,
power and particularly relational power seems to be of critical importance to engendering a normative
impact, given that even the best of intentions may be an insufficient condition of success (Belarus).
How can the EU escape this conundrum and maximise its chances of acting as a ‘normative power’(Manners, 2002), as it repeatedly proclaims its role in the world?
In so far as the EU and its member states do not live, at least not always, on Kagan’s Venus (Kagan,
2003), but rather are also driven by self-interest just like any other international actor, there is little
point in naively asserting that the EU should sideline its interests and goals in the name of its
proclaimed norms. Desirable as it may be, simply calling for this to happen will not change thedynamics at work. Neither can the EU single-handedly affect the external environment in which its
foreign policies unfold. While it can certainly influence the external context, particularly in its
neighbourhood where it has real foreign policy presence, it is also bound to rely on fortuitous external
circumstances to effectively assert its normative power.
One suggestion is to improve the EU’s internal capabilities. This would not necessarily mean
strengthening capabilities in the classic sense of the term such as for example organising greater
economic leverage or building military capacity. Strengthening capabilities in these terms could, bycontrast, damage the EU’s normative role by generating internal EU incentives to bend the law inorder to pursue foreign policy goals in the interests of the EU or its member states. Instead, the Union
could strengthen its web of contractual relations with third states in a manner that would ‘tie its own
hands’, thus reducing its ability to act non-normatively. This would entail developing further the set ofrules and laws that bind EU external behaviour in relation to third states, and link these rules andnorms explicitly to the obligations set under international law. It would also entail establishing or
strengthening the EU’s internal institutional watchdog mechanisms, ensuring that when one EU actor(such as the Council or Commission) behaves or is tempted to behave in contravention of set rules,
others (such as the Parliament) are ready and able to prevent this from happening. Understanding theimportance of working in this direction is predicated upon an appreciation that the EU is notnecessarily normative and that its internal actors are often driven by the very same set of interests andpriorities that motivate other international actors. A shift in this direction would also substantiate

8 | NATHALIE TOCCI

claims that the EU’s sui generis nature reflects a truly novel identity as a normative actor in worldpolitics.

ReferencesDûchene, F. (1973), “The European Community and the Uncertainties of Interdependence”, in M.
Kohnstamm and W. Hager (eds), A Nation Writ Large? Foreign Policy Problems before theEuropean Community, London: Macmillan.
Hill, C. (1990), “European foreign policy: Power bloc, civilian model – or flop?”, in R. Reinhardt(ed.), The Evolution of an International Actor, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Hill, C. and K. Smith (2000), European Foreign Policy: Key documents, London: Routledge.
Kagan, R. (2003), Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Manners, I. (2002), “Normative Power Europe: A contradiction in terms?”, Journal of Common
Market Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 235-258.
Tocci, N. with H. Darbouche, M. Emerson, S. Fernandes, R. Hanau-Santini, G. Noutcheva and C.
Portela (2008), The EU as a Normative Foreign Policy Actor, CEPS Working Document No.
281, CEPS, Brussels.

The United States: A normative power?
Daniel Hamilton1
The shifting centres of gravity in US foreign policy
This paper on US foreign policy summarises the conclusions of a larger study, which in turn is acontribution to a multi-country project (concerning also the EU, China, India and Russia), publishedby CEPS and edited by Tocci et al. This project has used a common analytical framework, consistingof several stylised foreign policy paradigms: normative, realpolitik, imperial, and status quo. Tocci
acknowledges that the same international actor can display all these types of foreign policy in different
regions and in different policy areas at different points in time. The US case study indicated that theUS, at least can – and does in fact – engage in each of these ways simultaneously.
But what do these typologies really tell us? Do they help us answer the question of whether the US is anormative power? While the US may at times indulge in all of types of foreign policy, this howeverbegs the deeper question: overall, which most closely reflects the core of US foreign policy? Whichexamples are representative of deeper currents in American society, and which are not? Which are
exemplars and which are exceptions?
Our first finding is to refute the rather superficial claim that the US used to be a normative power but
isn’t today. While most ‘normative power EU’ theorists acknowledge, in the words of Diez andManners (2007, pp. 170, 174, 186), that the US “has exemplified the concept of a normative power
during parts of its history”, particularly “in the inter-war and immediate post-war periods”, they denythat this has been true more recently. As this study has shown, however, the US advanced normativeand non-normative goals, and deployed normative and non-normative means, before and after WorldWar II, just as it does today. The reality is that the relative value or cost of these options has presented
itself to every US Administration and Congress; the US has not swung from purely normative phases
to non-normative ones.
This underscores my point that the more appropriate question is not whether the US is a normative
actor but the degree to which it is one. I submit that this is also the more appropriate question when it
comes to analysing other countries as well. To answer this question it is necessary to determine where
the real centre of gravity lies when it comes to characterising the US role in the world. This requires us
in turn to assign some kind of weighting to the different paradigms.
Overall, my review of US foreign policy indicates that the United States has been and continues to be
simultaneously a guardian of norms established by the international community; a norm entrepreneur
challenging those norms and on balance pushing the international community toward stronger norms
enshrining human rights and the rule of law and democratic societies; a norm externaliser when it tries
to advance norms for others that it is reluctant to apply to itself; and a norm blocker when it comes toissues that may threaten its position, or that exacerbate domestic divisions among the co-equal
branches of US government or among the fluid yet often conflicting currents of American domestic
thought regarding America’s role in the world.
In addition, due to shifting political constellations and the separation of powers inherent in the US
constitutional system, it is not easy to predict where the US may come out on any particular normative
issue. The open and rather fluid nature of the US system indicates that coalitions transcending nominal

1

Daniel S. Hamilton is the Richard von Weizsäcker Professor and Director of the Center for Transatlantic
Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.
|9

10 | DANIEL HAMILTON

party allegiances need to be built on most issues, and the strength and durability of such coalitions
depend not only on the issue at hand, but on its relationship to many other issues.2
Moreover, the particular weight of any one of these typologies varies over time. In general it may besaid that the ‘normative intended’ dimension carries considerable weight and is a legitimate source ofpride within the US foreign policy tradition. There are of course cases in which the US seeks toadvance normative goals through normative means, but with major unintended consequences, but on
the whole these appear to be less weighty. Over the course of the past 90 years the US has also
exhibited a strong tradition of hegemonic (as opposed to imperial) behaviour. There have been flashesof imperialism, but overall they have been subsumed within a broader pattern of hegemony. While one
can certainly identify cases of US realpolitik, intended or unintended, overall they appear to arise on amore case-by-case, ad hoc basis and thus seem less representative than the other two categories. There
are fewer identifiable cases of US status quo orientation, but here again the case study approach limits
the analysis, since the US is considered widely to be a major, if not the main, custodian and steward of
the current international system.
In sum, the mainstream of US foreign policy tends more often than not to reflect a varying blend of
normative and hegemonic approaches. This mainstream tradition, however, has been challenged by thehistorically unusual Wilsonian-Jacksonian coalition that over the past six years has dominated the US
executive branch, with only some countervailing influence by the legislative and judicial branches.
Challenges to the mainstream in the 1990s instead came more often than not from influential
Jacksonian and Jeffersonian elements in the Congress. These shifting coalitions indicate that it ispremature to conclude that the US has turned from the fundamental instincts that have guided it for the
past sixty years. The rhetoric of the major contenders for the presidency in 2008, in fact, seems truer tomainstream tradition than to US activities of the recent past. Clinton, McCain and Obama eachessentially claim to be the person best able to pass what Henry Kissinger has called the historical test
for this generation of American leaders: how to use preponderant US power to achieve an international
consensus behind widely accepted norms that will protect American values in a more uncertain future.
As we have seen, there is a particularly acute tension within the normative-hegemonic approach, andthat is the extent to which the US is willing or able to bind itself to the norms it advances for others.
This tension has characterised US foreign policy for many decades. For instance, no country was more
responsible than the United States for the creation of the United Nations, and President Harry Trumanwas clear from the outset what this would mean. On June 25, 1945, in his closing address to the San
Francisco conference that drafted the UN Charter, he stated, ‘[W]e all have to recognize, no matter
how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please”. This
statement has not always sat comfortably with Truman’s successors. As Stephen Schlesinger (2006)
notes, “Washington discovered soon after the UN’s birth that despite its veto power in the Security
Council, it could not always control its wayward child. As a result, ever since 1945, US leaders haveapproached the UN with ambivalence: hoping, on the one hand, to use it to further US national
security interests, while, on the other hand, worrying that too much involvement might constrain the
United States' ability to act”.3 This tension has characterised America’s approach to most international
institutions and norms, even though public opinion polls consistently record strong public support for
multilateral approaches to international challenges.
The US has not always mastered this tension well. As Kalypso Nicolaidis (2004) notes, “in nonAmerican eyes, there is a world of differences between the ‘righteous might’ of Roosevelt’s era andthe self-righteous might of George W. Bush”.

2

The same, I would argue, can be said of the EU and individual EU member states. The exact mix changes ineach state.
3
See also Bull (1977).

THE UNITED STATES: A NORMATIVE POWER? | 11

On balance, however, and despite exceptions, over the past sixty years the US has sought to manage
its normative-hegemonic interplay by accepting some limits on its power and being bound by broader
international norms and commitments, in exchange for greater legitimacy and acceptance of its
leadership by others. The unresolved question in the post-Cold War, post-September 11 world is
whether the US and other key players are prepared to stick with this bargain, or whether the US will
increasingly act as a ‘norm externaliser’, i.e. using its power to advance broad norms for others but
refusing to apply such norms to itself, and whether other nations will refuse the ‘followership’ thatleadership requires. “Nothing undermines US authority more than the perception that the United Statesconsiders itself too powerful to be bound by the norms we preach to others” notes former US National
Security Advisor Sandy Berger (2004).

Comparing the US and the EU
Since this project was prompted by consideration of the EU as a normative power, and since much of
the literature in this regard contains explicit or implicit references to the United States, a few points
warrant consideration.
First, much of the literature on the EU’s alleged ‘normative power’ ignores some fundamental
underpinnings of European order that have enabled conceptions of normative power to develop and be
exercised at all. During the first half of the 20th century most Europeans squandered any pretension
they might have had to normative leadership through two World Wars and continued colonial rule.
Following World War II, the US security guarantee removed – at least for half a continent – a key
source of European conflict: the perceived need by mistrustful European states to build arms andalliances against their own neighbours. The American security commitment offered west Europeans anumbrella under which they could reconcile and agree on new norms that could offer a common
foundation upon which they could work together and with others. Over time, the reassurances offered
by a supportive – yet comfortably distant – hegemon enabled Europeans to create a community within
which they could derive their security from each other rather than against each other. The very
creation of the EU and the ability of its members to domesticate their foreign policies and render themnormative rested on security guarantees provided by the United States.
It is perhaps easy today to forget that NATO was the umbrella under which the European integration
project could proceed, or that postwar institutions were created as much to prevent west Europeansfrom again dragging the world into conflict and depression as to prevent Soviet dominance orcommunist infiltration. Kalypso Nicolaidis (2004) notes that “[T]he creation of a quasifederation
without collective security as a driving force was an aberration of history made possible to a great
extent by the US”.4
Moreover, this security logic continues even today – despite the end of the Cold War, despite
September 11, and despite transatlantic and inner-EU squabbles over Iraq and other issues. The UScontinues to provide the ultimate reassurance enabling Europeans to reconcile, build and extend theirUnion. This is as evident in Kosovo today as it has been throughout the Balkans for the past decadeand more.5 This logic has been particularly evident in the determination of Central and Eastern
European states to join NATO as well as the EU. New member states have been very clear about this4

There is perhaps a relevant historical analogy, however: the young US also enjoyed the luxury of believing in
its own normative uniqueness in the 19th century because it was protected by the British navy from being
dragged into inner-European conflicts. This constructed a space in which Americans could enjoy a rare vacationfrom harder international realities – and in which such notions as American “exceptionalism” and “the virtues ofisolationism” flowered and became such powerful guiding narratives.
5
During the Kosovo war and its aftermath, the US used the slogan “the only exit strategy is an integration
strategy” to press the EU to recognise the logic of its own enlargement and to work with southeast Europeans tocreate conditions enabling them to join the larger Union, even as it also agreed to extend its own security
commitments to those countries willing and able to join the Atlantic Alliance.

12 | DANIEL HAMILTON

relationship: while they have been keen to integrate with European societies within the EU, they are
ultimately reassured in doing so through their membership in NATO.
The ‘normative power’ Europe discourse is strangely silent on this point. I was struck that the casestudy of EU enlargement in the EU working paper failed to even mention the parallel process ofNATO enlargement and the obvious relationship between the two. While each operates according to
its own particular logic, most EU countries are NATO countries, and the same officials andpopulations have been addressing the same historic opportunity: to extend to as much of the European
continent as possible the democratic, free-market space where war simply does not happen.
This relates to a point Diez and Manners (2007, pp. 176, 180) have made about the relationshipbetween normative and military power. “In contrast to civilian power”, they note, “normative power is
not the opposite of military power. It is entirely conceivable that military force is used to back up the
spread of normative values” and that “military capabilities may underpin normative power”. I couldn’t
agree more. What is important to add, however, is that in some instances the military capabilities – andpolitical commitment – that underpin the EU’s ability to project normative power are provided not by
the EU but by the United States.
Second, much of the literature describing “normative power EU” is highly selective, including policies
of EU member states when it is convenient and excluding them when it is not. There are twodimensions to this. The first has to do with foreign policy, where authority and competence still residelargely with member states. The EU, qua EU, in fact, has little real purview over the vast range of
foreign policy decisions confronting any particular EU nation. Any consideration of the EU as anormative foreign policy actor, therefore, needs to consider the actions of individual EU member
states, not just examples of common EU action. This is important for our purposes because thetendency is to compare the EU with the United States. In one such comparison, for instance, Diez andManners (2007, p. 182) argue that the US readily resorts to force, whereas “the fact” is that “the EUor, rather, EU member states consider the use of force a last resort”. Really? What about the British
and Polish invasion of Iraq and Spanish support for it? What about German, British, French, Dutch
etc. intervention in the Balkans without a UN mandate? What about French or British interventions in
Africa or the British intervention in the Falklands? My point is not to criticise such decisions, it is to
ask for greater analytical rigour – for this, too, is the EU.
The other dimension has to do with domestic policies, or the extent to which EU member states havecoordinated and ‘domesticated’ aspects of their interactions with one another. There is no doubt that inmany areas there have been historic successes, even as progress is halting in other areas. The issue iswhether the EU’s ‘normative power’ is enhanced by projecting such ‘domesticated’ policies abroad or
by advancing them at home. This debate, new to the EU, echoes the long-standing American debate
between Jeffersonians and Wilsonians. The EU’s normative power in this regard seems to be more
influential simply through its example at home – the fact that nations that regularly used violenceagainst each other now join together in common cause in a variety of traditionally domestic policy
areas. There seem to be relatively few examples where the EU has projected its ‘domesticated’
policies abroad. The death penalty seems to be a prominent one, but even here success seems limited
largely to Europe and Latin America, and problems of ratification and implementation in vast parts of
the world remain (Katzenstein, 2006). Nonetheless, the possibilities are intriguing.
If one looks for examples beyond treaties and international law, however, one uncovers somepromising experiments in the international extension of domesticated EU policies – particularly with
the US. The recently created Transatlantic Economic Council, for instance, is in essence an effort totie the US and the EU into a consultative process that identifies and then seeks to resolve domestic
regulatory or policy barriers to the deeper integration of their economies, and to consider whether
common standards developed through this process could form the basis for broader international
norms. Yet it is striking that most of the literature either ignores the US dimension or goes to great
pains to define “normative power EU” against the US example.

THE UNITED STATES: A NORMATIVE POWER? | 13

These considerations lead to a third point – the role of the United States, or perhaps more accurately,
stereotypes of the United States, in European debates about ‘identity politics’. Proponents of“normative power EU” refreshingly acknowledge that the notion of ‘normative power’ is part of thebroader debate about identity politics in Europe, and as such requires an ‘other’ against which such
identities are constructed. “Not only is the success of this representation” of normative power EU “aprecondition for other actors to agree to the norms set out by the EU”, state Diez and Manners (2007,
pp. 173-188), “it also constructs an identity of the EU against an image of others in the ‘outside
world’”. After reviewing the literature, however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ‘other’,whom, the adherents of “normative power EU” are constructing their arguments ‘against’ is in fact the
EU’s closest partner, the United States.
Diez and Manners explicitly seek to draw such distinctions. They argue that the American tradition of‘exceptionalism’ essentially disqualifies the US from being considered a normative power, whereas itis precisely what they believe to be Europe’s ‘ordinariness’ that provides “normative power EU” withsuch strength and attraction. This represents almost wilful ignorance of the strong exceptionalist
rhetoric that is part and parcel of daily European political debates. In fact, the very premise of
normative power is that Europe is uniquely positioned to guide humanity to a better future.
The more compelling distinction, it seems to me, is rooted in each partner’s sense of its own
exceptionalism. As Kalypso Nicolaidis (2004) notes, historians trace difficulties between France andthe US to their similar sense of mission, of being the upholders of political and philosophical models
for the world through the avowedly universal reach of their respective 18th century revolutions. I
would add that German critiques of the US are also rooted in part in a German sense of
exceptionalism: since Germany had been exceptionally evil, many Germans today believe theircountry must be exceptionally good. Since the US helped inculcate such beliefs in German society
over two generations, it is particularly grating for Germans when US achievements fail to meet US
aspirations, or when US demands of solidarity force Germans to abandon black and white in favour ofgrey. The moralistic undertone to much German critique is inescapable, even when it is not explicit.
These dilemmas arise in part because both the US and the EU think of themselves as normative
powers projecting their internal norms of democracy and human rights abroad. Nevertheless these twocompeting exceptionalisms are of a different kind. As Nicolaidis (2004) notes:
Their respective founding myths, the escape from despotism and the escape from nationalism,
tyranny from above and tyranny from below, led both entities to elevate commitment to therule of law as their core. But this was domestic law in the US, supra-national law in the EU;
this meant checks and balance between branches of government on one side, between stateson the other. While the US progressively became a federal state, the EU, admittedly still in its
infancy, is braced to remain a federal union of nation-states. In the last two decades, whileboth the US and the EU have been fertile grounds for exploring “subsidiarity”, and multilevelgovernance, the EU alone has explored ways of doing this without coordination by acentralized state, through methods that might one day be relevant to global governance. US
exceptionalism is a national project; European a postnational one.6

Within this distinction lies an opportunity: to reconcile these different ‘normative’ traditions rather
than to deny the legitimacy of one or the other or to ignore the common foundations upon which they
are based – all in all, an attractive agenda for US-EU relations.

6

See also Hamilton (2004); Keohane (2002); Brimmer (2006).

In Quest of Political Subjectivity: Russia’s‘Normative Offensive’ and the Triple
Politicisation of Norms
Andrey S.Makarychev1

R

ussia is usually portrayed as either a fundamentally pragmatic or a Realpolitik type ofinternational actor. Yet the end of Putin’s presidency was marked by what might befiguratively called Russia’s ‘normative offensive’: surprisingly enough, Russian foreign policy
discourse became – at least rhetorically - increasingly normative. In fact Moscow seems not only to
accept the normative challenges thrown down by parts of Europe but even to politically counter-attackin the normative battlefield. According to a renowned Russian journalist, “pragmatism is death for
Russia. Without a value-oriented positioning Russia would simply turn into a resource-rich object ofalien subjects’ policies”.2
Starting from the outbreak of the ‘colour revolutions’ in countries of its ‘near abroad’ Russia, indeed,
has invested heavily in the infrastructure of a soft power.3 This type of reaction could be discerned, forexample, in the State Duma statement of October 2nd, 2007 accusing the Saakashvili regime ofviolating the principles of democracy and abusing human rights, including tightening control over
opposition, the media and dissidents. In the case of Ukraine, Russia’s key normative argument refers
to the security decisions taken without due account of public opinion as “non-democratic” (of course,
the point here is the Ukrainian NATO application). In 2008 Russia proudly announced theestablishment of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) with two key headquarters – inParis and New York. This move, quite new in the tradition of Russian foreign policy, can beinterpreted as a direct response to the activities of European and American foundations and think tanks
in Russia and, simultaneously, as an alternative to the Western interpretations of normativity in worldpolitics.
In theory, there are two important facets to normative behaviour. Firstly, a normative power has to be
grounded in a certain set of ideas, as opposed to the pursuance of purely material advantages.
Secondly, a normative power has to be based upon multilateral institutions, as opposed to unilateral
actions. Only a combination of these two aspects gives a proper model of normativity in international
relations. Seen from this perspective, the emergent normative framework of Russian foreign policy so
far seems to be deficient. Even the cooperation within the Northern Dimension initiative, in spite of its
undeniable normative background in terms of establishing multilateral trans-border mechanisms, waslargely perceived by sub-national elites in Russian regions as a source of economic and financial
gains. By the same token, Russia’s commitments to international legal norms in the Kosovo issue were
contaminated by the unveiled pursuance of economic goals as well. Russia’s harsh criticism ofEstonia’s decision to remove the Second World War monument in 2007 did not reveal acomprehensive normative policy conduct either: it was based upon a strong ideational background but
lacked both a clear institutional dimension and mechanisms of coordination with other (at least postSoviet) countries.

1

Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Nizhny Novgorod Linguistic University.
Maxim Shevchenko, interview with “Russkii zhurnal” online journal, 28 February 2008 (available at
http://www.russ.ru).
3
Nicu Popescu, Russia’s Soft Power Ambitions, CEPS Policy Brief No. 115, CEPS, Brussels, October 2006, p.1.
2

14 |

IN QUEST OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY | 15

Against this background one may presume that the normative turn in Kremlin foreign policy can be
discussed as one of its political instruments aimed at reinstalling Russia as one of key international
subjects and an organic part of the ‘international society’– a status which, Moscow feels, is either
disputed or directly challenged by many in the West. As the IDC Director put it, the Freedom House’s
ranking of Russia at the level of countries like Angola, Libya and Uzbekistan is an exclusionary andunfair move that makes Russia resist and rebut it.4 In the meantime, the sensitiveness of Russianauthorities to such normative gestures from the part of an international NGO is a good proof of theunderstanding that the only way to gain political subjectivity in international society is through therecognition of a country’s democratic credentials and, consequently, observance of democratic
procedures.5
In this paper I will argue that it is exactly this political logic that sustains Russia’s ‘normative
offensive’; it is therefore, political effects that such a turn eventually entails. More specifically, there
are three modalities inherent in the politicisation of norms.
Firstly, most of Russian opinion- and policy-makers admit that there is always a certain degree ofpolitical decisionism in a normative type of foreign policy. This argument splits into two parts.
On the one hand, in the likely cases of collision between different norms it is a political decision thatprioritises one over another. For instance, in discussing the Kosovo situation from the normative pointof view, Vladimir Putin implicitly admitted that there might be a conflict between the two constitutive
principles of international society - territorial integrity vs. peoples’ right to self-determination. Yet,according to him, the first principle has to prevail, since the second deserves a double negative
marking as a left-over of the Soviet strategy in times of colonialism.6
On the other hand, in many cases norms applicable to one situation might appear to be irrelevant to orquestionable in other – even seemingly similar - cases. Coming back to the Kosovo incident, many
Russian analysts deem that global politics are defined not by shared rules of the game but rather bysovereign decisions on the part of the pivotal actors, first of all the United States and the European
Union, who most of the time tend to act in a decisionist way.7 This argument appears to parallel thereasoning of those European experts who suggest that “the EU has a very ‘undemocratic’ approach,since it tends to select its interlocutors” in a variety of issues related to human rights and democracy.8
Secondly, one “of the political effects of norms”9 is the perspective of exclusion looming large behind
their implementation. Normativity presupposes an interplay between inclusion and exclusion: certain
norms are referred to as ‘constitutive’, while others are ignored or marginalised. The normative appeal“is more and more marked by a frontier … between those who succeeded in remaining ‘within’ (the‘developed’, those to whom the rules of human rights, social security, etc., still apply) and the others,
the excluded (the main concern of the ‘developed’ with regard to them is how to contain their
explosive potential, even if the price to be paid is the neglect of elementary democratic principles)”.10
4Itogi, No. 5 (p. 607), 19 March 2008.
Andrei Bystritskii, “Gibel’ ili kontsert” (Death or concert), Apologiya, No. 9, 2006, p. 15.
6
Vladimir Putin’s interview with journalists of G8 Countries, 4 June 2007 (available at
http://www.kremlin.ru/texts/appears/2007/06/132365.shtml).
7
Alexander Shubin, “Kosovo: general’noe otstuplenie prodolzhaetsa” (Kosovo: total retreat in progress), APN
Agency web site, posted 25 February 2008 (http://www.apn.ru/publications/print19286.html).
8
Stefania Panebianco, “Political conditionality in EU Mediterranean Policy: the EU (in)capability to favour
concrete prospects of change”, paper presented at the conference “La fin du moment democratique? Un defi pourl’Europe”, CERI, Paris, 11-12 May 2007, p. 8.
9Vincent Pouliot, “The essence of constructivism”, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 7,
No. 3, October 2004, p. 324.
10
Slavoj Zizek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, edited by Rex Butler and Scott
Stephens, London & New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 21.
5

16 | ANDREY S.MAKARYCHEV

Consequently, “the ‘normal’ ones are the ones born in the ‘normal’ fabric of the so-called European
culture and believed to be a product of an imagined and invented European and culturally
homogeneous civilization … which is placed in contrast to the ‘deviant’, the non-native … the oneborn outside Europe”.11
All this is arguably very much relevant to EU – Russian relations, since, as many European authors
assume, “through its normative-power narrative, Brussels necessarily ‘others’ those international
actors that lack moral fervour… Moreover, in this tradition of thought, the term ‘norm’ is a close
conceptual affiliate of the term ‘legitimacy’”.12 As a pertinent example, one may refer to the Polish‘Eastern Dimension’ project that introduced ‘Easterness’ not as a unifying platform for shared values
but as a concept that “underlines the existence of a divide between”13 the accession countries, on the
one hand, and Russia – on the other.
Russian views – even of ostensibly liberal profile - do not seem to differ much from those mentioned
above: “Under the guise of European values, the EU pursues a peculiar kind of bureaucratic
imperialism that seeks to modify and partially control EU’s neighbourhood through various
instruments like the ENP, the Common Spaces, the Energy Charter, etc.”, one author argues.14
Another Russian scholar deems that the expansion of EU’s “normative empire” represents a politicalchallenge to Russia15 and pushes her outside the so called “new (enlarged) West”.
As a reverse side of this challenge, Russia has every reason to perceive the European normative
discourse as constitutive of her own international subjecthood: in an indicative utterance of Natalia
Narochnitskaya, “the IDC has to make Europeans question the widely spread stereotype of Russians as
a barbaric nation”.16 Thus, the Russian game is two-fold: on the one hand, Moscow does accept thenormative distance with Europe, though reformulates it in her own way: “today the West is short ofnon-economic values”. What stems from this enunciation is that the West is in no way ‘untouchable’on normative grounds and, therefore, its pretensions to monopolise the interpretation of democracy
have to be rebuffed.17 Yet on the other hand, Russia – through a variety of discursive moves – is eager
to (re)imagine a Europe she might feel comfortable with (“We are to defend not a Europe of gay
parades, but a Europe of Mozart, Goethe and Schiller”).18
Thirdly, the normative type of international policy behaviour leaves ample space for “normative
disagreements”,19 i.e. contestation and re-definition of key normative signifiers.
A major source of discursive discord between Russia and the EU could be discerned in the way bothparties utilise the normative language of communication. While frequently using the same normative
11

Henk van Houtum & Roos Pijpers, “The European Union as a Gated Community: Two-Faced Border andImmigration Regime of the EU”, Antipode. A Radical Journal of Geography, Vol. 39, No. 2, March 2007, p.
296.
12Michael Merlingen, “Everything Is Dangerous: A Critique of ‘Normative Power Europe’”, Security Dialogue,Vol. 38, No. 4, December 2007, p. 438.
13
Christopher Browning & Pertti Joenniemi, “The European Union’s Two Dimensions: The Eastern and theNorthern”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 34, No. 4, December 2003, p. 471.
14
Sergei Medvedev, The Crisis in EU-Russia Relations: Between “Sovereignty” and “Europeanization”,
Working paper WP14/2007/02, Moscow: Higher School of Economics, 2007, p. 13.
15
Dmitrii Trenin, “Identichnost’ i integratsiya: Rossiya i Zapad v XXI veke” (Identity and integration: Russia
and the West in the 21st Century), Pro et Contra, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2004, p. 12.
16
Natalia Narochnitskaya, “Evropa tak blizoruka” (Europe is so shortsighted), Stoletie Internet newspaper, 29
February 2008 (available at http://stoletie.ru/print.php?printid=7922).
17
Anatoliy
Kucherena,press
conference
at
IDC,
28
January
2008(availableat
http://www.kucherena.ru/events/27/-/42/).
18
Natalia Narochnitskaya, op. cit.
19
Jurgen Habermas, The Divided West, Cambridge, UK and Malden, US: Policy Press, 2006, p. 29.

IN QUEST OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY | 17

vocabulary, European and Russian discourse-makers deliberately infuse them with different meanings.
It is exactly where the sources of misunderstanding come from, provoking - as a chain reaction tothese discursive ruptures – multiple attempts to symbolize the differences. A few examples could be
pertinent at this juncture, all based upon Ian Manners’ identification of key norms that shape EU
policies.20 These norms, arguably, might be tackled, in terms of Ernesto Laclau, as “privileged,
hegemonic signifiers which structure, as nodal points, the ensemble of a discursive formation”. Yet,in the meantime, these signifiers tend to remain vague and imprecise, and it is exactly what constitutes
for Laclau “the very nature of the political”.21
Peace (and, therefore, security). Here we see a clear perceptional gap: for countries like the UK it is
the Kremlin that represents a security threat (and, therefore, ought to be securitized) due to its
complicity in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, while for Russia herself it is the UK, which hosts
key figures of the Chechen terrorist groups that is perceived as a security problem. The Russian
government has repeatedly raised similar issues in diplomatic talks with Denmark, Sweden and someother European countries.
Democracy. European discourse contains a number of arguments critical to EU democratic credentials.
Some authors argue that in the Balkans, “an election is less about domestic legitimacy than about
international legitimacy”.22 Others, in the meantime, deem that democracy promotion became a typeof “technique of governance beyond political discussion”, which faces problems wherever “the power
relations are so asymmetrical that the attempts to legitimize and rationalize the projection of power
through technocratic means fail”.23
Even the most liberal of Russian policy analysts side with this critique and speak of the “democratic
deficit” within the European integration process.24 Meanwhile, in Russia this argument is paralleled by
an attempt to automatically project the concept of democracy – originally crafted for describing thestate of domestic political regime – to the whole international area. It is within this context that one
has to discuss the concept of ‘democratic multipolarity’, which posits that the idea of democracy,
being transferred from the domestic to the international domain, is denotative of a plurality of interests
whatever the nature of these interests might be. It is debatable whether a ‘democratic multipolarity’model with such key actors as, for instance, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, Nigeria or Venezuela
would lead to a more secure world.
The simultaneous activation of the ‘sovereign democracy’ and ‘democratic multipolarity’ concepts
renders a profound effect on the way the normative type of arguments is employed by Russianauthorities. On the one hand, the Kremlin refuses to recognise the legitimacy of any attempts to assess
the quality of domestic electoral or human rights norms (since Russia’s democracy is a sovereign one,no foreign government can impose its standards or judge whether domestic practices correspond to
any norm external to Russia). On the other hand, Russia keeps a free hand in appraising theinternational behaviour of other countries, expecting them to act ‘democratically’, i.e. respect theinterests of all parties involved. In other words, having foreclosed the internal political space fromexternal criticism, Moscow claims to possess a full right to point a finger at those countries it thinks
are ‘violators’ of ‘international democracy’ (reduced, as I have mentioned earlier, to the plurality of

20

Ian Manners, “Normative Power in Europe: A Contradiction in Terms”, Journal of Common Market Studies,No. 40(2), 2002, pp. 235-258.
21
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York: Verso, 2005, p. 99.
22Jacques Rupnik, “European Union’s approaches to ‘democracy promotion’”, paper presented at the conference“La fin du moment democratique? Un defi pour l’Europe”, CERI, Paris, 11-12 May 2007, p. 8.
23David Chandler, “Democracy Promotion and the Simulation of the European Union”, paper presented at theconference “La fin du moment democratique? Un defi pour l’Europe”, CERI, Paris, 11-12 May 2007, p. 1.
24
Timofei Bordachov, Predely evropiezatsii (Limits of Europeanisation), Moscow: Higher School of Economics
Publishers, 2007, pp. 162-163.

18 | ANDREY S.MAKARYCHEV

actors). By doing so, Russia claims that foreign policies of countries that speak of themselves as
democracies are not that democratic at all: in particular, Putin referred to the European support of the‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine as an intervention from the outside which, as a form of externalpressure, allegedly can’t be democratic.
The rule of law. Again, Russia’s response to Europe in this domain redirects attention from thedomestic understanding of the ‘rule of law’ to the international one. Putin repeatedly expressed his
doubts about whether European countries are sincere in their legal commitments as soon as it comes totheir foreign policies. The Kosovo debate is perhaps a good case in point.
Another line of reasoning is the questioning of the leadership of the Western countries in terms of theattractiveness of their legal culture. Thus, according to Narochnitskaya, the right of French children to
denounce their parents is highly controversial for Russians. She then gives another example of legal
imperfections, this time in the United States where, according to her observations, most of the time
voters’ identities are not being properly checked.25
Liberty. There is a strong Russian conservative discourse aimed at drawing a line of distinction
between the Western and the Russian versions of liberty. According to the conservative tradition of
thinking, liberty is not about making individual choices, but about something more fundamental –getting rid of sin, including the alleged freedom to commit blasphemy and sacrilege.26 Many Russianpolitical thinkers are convinced of Russia’s ability to confess and defend “genuinely Christian and,
therefore, genuinely European values, among which the key one is the value of free human beings
whose liberty is derived from its creation on the basis of the image of the Lord”.27
Russian official discourse seems to be more nuanced in this respect. Foreign Minister refers to
Russia’s eagerness to contribute to the formation of “a single Euro—Atlantic space of freedom anddemocracy” – a strategy that partly explains the creation of the IDC. Yet in the meantime, thenumerous references to normative arguments lead Russia to criticise those Western countries that, in
Russia’s opinion, “are ready to forgive the friendly governments for everything – from cracking down
opposition and pressuring on business to open repressions and even crimes against opponents”.28
Respect for human rights. In Europe, the key criticism in this domain is grounded on the presumptionthat “the West presents itself in a form bereft of any normative core as long as its concern for humanrights only extends to promoting free markets abroad”.29 The key Russian argument seems to be a bit
different – it points to the questioning of the universal and absolute applicability of the human rights
concept. It is highly indicative that these claims come largely from religious circles. Thus, according
to a key figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, in the public sphere “it is the moral norms that could
be used as restrictions for human rights implementation”.30 Otherwise, the logic goes on, the humanrights agenda might turn aggressive, as exemplified by public demands to legalise same-sex marriages,
the adoption of children by homosexual couples, gays’ employment in public education, etc.
There is another twist in Russia’s human rights discourse – the increasing attempts to raise concerns
about the state of human rights in the EU countries. As the chairman of the “United Russia” party puts

25

Natalia Narochnitskaya, op. cit.
Vladimir Semenko, “Konservativnaya reaktsiya ili konets istorii?” (Conservative reaction or end of history?),
Problemy razvitiya, No. 1 (5), 2007, pp. 26-33.
27
Arkadiy Maler, “Pochemu ot Dmitryia Medvedeva ne iskhodit netvarniy svet?” (Why Dmitrii Medvedev is
not brimming with light?), Part 2, Russkii zhurnal, 29 April 2008 (available at www.russ.ru).
28
Sergei Lavrov, “Vneshniaya politika Rossii: noviy etap” (Russia’s foreign policy: a new phase), Expert, No.
47, 17 December 2007.
29
Jurgen Habermas, The Divided West, Cambridge, UK and Malden, US: Policy Press, 2006, p. 12.
30
Mitropolit Kirill, speech delivered at the UNESCO Seminar “The Dialogue of Civilizations”, Problemy
razvitiya, No. 1 (5), 2007, pp. 20-22.
26IN QUEST OF POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY | 19

it, “Russia is very much troubled by the human rights situation in countries like Estonia and Latvia
where hundreds of thousands of people are deprived of basic civil rights … since they can’t elect andbe elected, and their native language can’t be used for communication with authorities”.31 It is at thispoint that the human rights discourse turns into Russia’s implicit – and somehow dissembling – claims
to be “more European than Europe itself”: “In making the case against the effacement of the Second
World War memories, Russia defends European values and the future of all Europe”,32 – the argument
goes on. In continuation, Russia is eager to portray itself as a country where ethnic and culturaldifferences are tolerated and respected, as demonstrated by the centuries-long co-existence of theRussian and Muslim population in Russia’s heartland. As Narochnitskaya claims, “Europe has
absolutely no right to accuse Russia of xenophobia, since in this respect Russia appears to be a much
healthier nation”.33
Therefore, one may see that normative discussions are an important part of Russia – EU relations. The
reasons behind the re-actualization of the normative discourse seem to stretch far beyond specificissues like, for example, the fairness of elections in Russia. Russia accepted the normative challenge
because of the awareness that it is exactly the normative matters that are being used by Westerncountries to define how ‘civilised humankind’ – one facing the threats of terrorism and other security
challenges – looks. In fact, Russia’s newborn normative zeal is a crucial tool in her attempts to be
accepted as a legitimate and constitutive member of the international community which, by and large,
might be equated with the West.34 In fact, what is at stake is the drawing of the borders of this‘international community’ and the distribution of roles within it.
The normative debates between Russia and Europe mostly deal with such issues as: a) which norms
should be given priority in particular situations; b) how far each of the two parties should go withinternationally promoting these norms; and c) whether ‘domestic’ norms may be equally applicable forthe international arena as well. Indeed, Russia wishes to be recognised in Europe as an equal partner in
norm-setting, but this intention is not to be understood as an indication of Russia’s possession of its‘own’ norms that Europe, arguably, either rejects or disregards. Russia seems to be ready to offer analternative reading of a set of norms constitutive of European identity, but definitely not to substitutethem with some kind of Russia-only norms or values.
By way of conclusion, one may argue that Russia apparently accepts strong political connotations ofnorm-based discourse, but the politicisation described above is never complete, since on certain
occasions it may be reversed by a series of implicitly de-politicised moves. One of them was Dmitry
Medvedev’s reference – made at the German – Russia Forum in Berlin, June 5th, 2008 – to humanrights issues as a value per se, irreducible to matters of political bargaining between Russia and theWest and not susceptible to any kind of political trade-offs. Another example of the same sort is
Moscow’s unease with NATO’s insistence on a logical linkage between the normative issues (like thestate of democracy in applicant countries) and security (their perspectives to join NATO). On the one
hand, the Kremlin fears being excluded from the NATO-centered security domain on the basis of
Russia’s alleged failure to meet Western standards of democracy. On the other hand, the troublesome
lesson Moscow may draw from the conflation of security and democracy arguments is that the more it
supports undemocratic practices in neighbouring countries, the fewer are their chances of NATOmembership. It is at this point that an inherently ‘undecidable’ character of Russia’s normative
discourse becomes obvious: it seeks to reinvent the values of democracy, human rights and the rule oflaw, but in the meantime seems to be succumbing to the temptation of pragmatically implementing
them as (supposedly) effective foreign policy tools.
31

Boris Gryzlov, “Rossiya i Evropa: zadachi razvitiya” (Russia and Europe: an Agenda for Development), in
Ideologiya natsional’nogo uspekha, Moscow: Center for Social Conservative Policy, 2007, p. 25.
32
Boris Gryzlov, op. cit, p. 25.
33
RBK Daily, 17 January 2008, No. 5 (74), p. 1.
34
Dmitrii Trenin, op. cit, p. 206.

There is No Such Thing
as a Normative Chinese model
Lanxin Xiang1
Misreading China’s Rise?
Many key concepts currently used in the West about China’s internal governance and foreign policy
can no longer be valid, especially those from the fields of political science and history. We need a newconceptual framework and analytical tools.2 The world's preoccupation with China's sudden rise as an
economic superpower is a matter of some bemusement among Chinese political leaders andintellectuals. Massive trade surpluses with the rest of the world? The embrace of free markets andglobalisation? The Chinese have been there before. As we see it, this is not China's rise, but rather its
restoration to its historical position of global influence.
Today's restoration constitutes China's third great encounter with the West, following the Jesuit
missions of the 16th century and the Opium Wars of the 1840s. The current encounter – this time
between equals – will produce much more than economic competition with the West. As China’s
economic strength grows, no one, not even the Chinese ourselves, can prevent China's influence fromspreading into politics, values and ideology. It is in those arenas that conflicts with the West, theUnited States in particular, can arise, and unfortunately, it is precisely in those areas thatmisunderstandings between China and the West run rampant.3
To come up with a normative Chinese model as regards world affairs, one must start with the simple
but often neglected fact that China has no faith in any universal value, hence has never offered any
model in the past and will never do so in the future. Chinese tradition stipulates that any governancestyle, either domestic or external, be contingent in a historical and cultural context. A normative model
would mean a value system that clamours for universal status, but China never believes in‘universalism’ of any kind and universalism (a word synonymous to Catholicism) can never betranslated accurately into the Chinese language.4

Domestic GovernanceWestern powers should abandon the idea that the ‘democratisation’ of China will definitely take placein the future. From the Chinese perspective, Western democracy in its post-Enlightenment form is a
Gothic, pseudo-secular system. It is deeply rooted in Christian theology. The United States today
holds the last defensive line of a political ideology buttressed by a three-fold theology: metaphysicalinterpretation of human history – the Hegelian philosophy of history, a teleological tool of analysis,
and an eschatological faith. China has none of the above. “Is Confucianism or Daoism a religion?” is aquestion the Westerners are never in a position to answer, but the Chinese never in a position to ask.

1

Lanxin Xiang is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies(HEI), Geneva.
2
For details, see Lanxin Xiang, Chuantong yu Duiwai Guanxi (Tradition and Chinese Foreign Relations),
Beijing: Sanlian Press, 2007 and “Don’t Use Western Language to Explain China”, Op-ed page, Global Times,
23 April 2008, Beijing.
3
See further analysis, Lanxin Xiang, “Why Washington Does Not Speak Chinese”, Outlook, Washington Post,
16 May 20054
For example, it would be most misleading to say that China has accepted at least ONE universal value by
signing up to the UN “Universal declaration of Human Rights”. In fact, the Chinese version is “The World
Declaration of Human Rights” (shije renquan xuanyan). The difference is obvious to those who know Chinese:
the world is dominated by nation states.
20 |A NORMATIVE CHINESE MODEL TOWARDS THE WORLD NEVER EXISTS | 21

The democratisation of China is not preordained by universalism. On the contrary, the traditional
Chinese political logic remains the dominant force in China. The communist party cannot escape thesame fate as all the dynasties before it. According to tradition, politics is a relationship between waterand boat. Water (people) can allow the boat (government) to float but can also overturn the boat. The
real issue of political legitimacy in China is thus not ‘democratic legitimacy’ (or procedural legitimacy
Chengxu Hefa, as the Chinese call it), but ‘deeds legitimacy’ (Zhengji Hefa) based on the continued
performance of the leadership. Most Western observers have missed this point.
The Chinese view about internal and international politics is more coherent than outsiders haverealised, since it is essentially an ethical one. In Chinese tradition, a ‘state’ is the extension of thefamily, as the Chinese term ‘Guojia’ (state-family, the official terminology for the ‘state’) indicates.
Thus, only moral authority can guarantee the long-term stability of a family as well as a state. It would
be misleading therefore to use Imperial Germany as a historical analogy in describing China’s ‘rise’
today. To put it simply, there is no inherent ‘power politics’ logic that would automatically lead China
into repressive policies at home and expansionist policies abroad. Any use of force has to be morally
justifiable. Even in actual warfare, winning without engaging in battle is considered the most ideal
result.

National Security
The Chinese view of national security is predicated on two factors: the modern Chinese experiencesince the Opium War of 1840s and the traditional culture concerning armed conflict. The first factor is
crucial, since modern China has been a victim rather than a beneficiary of the existing international
system (the Westphalia System). Before the Opium War, the Chinese perception of national security
was based on a relatively benign hegemony – a Sino-centric international relations network, known as
the Tributary System, in which China received ‘tribute’ (i.e. a formal diplomatic gesture by foreigncountries to present a gift to the Chinese emperor, symbolising the acceptance of Chinese leadership)in exchange for trade and protection.
The Westphalian conception of power and balance of power was unknown to the Chinese until theOpium War and was imposed by Western powers upon Asia to replace the Tributary System with anew ‘Treaty System’. Operating through competitive principles of free trade and extraterritoriality, theTreaty System never provided China with any real sense of national security. On the contrary, thesetwo principles inevitably turned China into a major playground of the political and economic rivalry
among the Great Powers. In other words, Western imperialism created, for the first time, a malignant‘balance of power’ system in Asia that had little to do with local culture. It was a miniature version ofEuropean power politics.
In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘rising’ Japanese made an extraordinarily bold attempt at
establishing a malignant hegemony in the region – the so-called “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere”, to replace the Treaty System. But this was a short-lived adventure. After a bloody civil war in
the late 1940s, the Chinese communist party was able to seize power, with popular support mobilised
successfully during the war against Japan. The dramatic ending of foreign domination means that
China has obtained, for the first time in modern history, the opportunity to design a national security
policy based upon its own national interests. But China’s humiliating past has always cast a longshadow on any security policy. Self-reliant economic development and strong national defence havebeen two main pillars of the new regime.
The second factor, the influence of cultural heritage, is no less important. From the very beginning of
the People’s Republic, the Chinese view of security has been influenced by China’s ancient tradition
and attitude regarding the use of force to deal with security threats. Some Western scholars havelabelled this factor as ‘strategic culture’. According to Iain Johnston, the dominant Chinese strategic

22 | LANXIN XIANG

culture is parabellum, a term he used to refer to Chinese ‘cultural realism’ – the alleged pro-offensive
approach to dealing with the threat from the enemy.5
This analytical framework seems useful, especially since it is designed to ‘correct’ the prevailing viewin the West about an inherent Chinese ‘pacifism’. But it is also misleading, because it suggests that
war and peace can be considered separate subjects in Chinese tradition, ignoring the interactive
dynamics of the two aspects of using force. The Confucian tradition dictates that the Chinese forego
territorial conquest and colonial adventure; hence the traditional Chinese purpose of using force has tobe fundamentally defensive, and linked to the desire of achieving a more durable peace at the frontiers
through military superiority. The prevailing inclination is neither aggressive nor offensive.
More significantly, domestic stability always takes priority, since true national security requires, above
all, building harmony within society, which cannot be achieved by any conquest of a foreign land. The
alleged Chinese’s propensity of using force is at best a pseudo-thesis, just like another pseudo-thesis:the ‘Venus vs. Mars’ parody, advanced by Robert Kagan,6 about Europe’s innate unwillingness to use
force in world affairs. The Europeans, like the Chinese, are by no means allergic or oblivious to theuse of force, they simply want to reduce the role of using force in international affairs and more
importantly, when force is necessary, it must be used with the consent of the international community
at large. The Sino-European preference for moral authority in using force should not be confused with
universal pacifism. Neither China nor the EU holds a typical pacifist view that rejects the use of force
under any circumstances. It is here that traditional China and ‘postmodern’ Europe meet.
Undoubtedly, the body that represents the moral authority of the international community has so far
been the United Nations. Therefore, the EU and China share a common interest in upholding UN
authority when force must be used in settling international disputes. Multilateral diplomacy is logicallyconsidered to be the foundation for seeking international consensus.

Foreign Policy and Global GovernanceIn the foreign policy arena, the experience of European integration is equally important, because it
provides real hope for China’s peaceful integration into the world. Beijing's declared foreign policy
principle is to promote “peace and development” (heping yu fazhan). This is certainly a great leap
forward from the days of Mao when ideology dominated China's external relations. However, thetheme of peace and development does not have a unique operating value, because every country canmake this general claim. One important, but little noticed, principle that Beijing has recently added toits grand strategy of ‘peaceful rise’ is a theory of “democratisation of international relations (guoji
guanxi minzhuhua)”. Uttered by an undemocratic state, such a theory has failed to be taken seriously.
However, it is precisely what China may demand from and hope to contribute to the futureinternational system.
By using the word ‘democratisation’, the Chinese seem to be searching for a way to embrace certain
fundamental values of the cultural West. Specifically, they are eager to see an internationalised versionof the key principles of the French Revolution of 1789. The principles of ‘Equality, Liberty andFraternity’ inspired a whole generation of the Chinese revolutionaries in the 20th century, whoestablished the People’s Republic. But the West seemed not only to have failed to stave off its
internecine wars, but also to have adopted a double standard when applying these principles to the
non-European world. The European Union is in fact the first successful experiment in applying theseprinciples to intergovernmental relations.

5

According to Iain Johnston, strategic culture consists of a central paradigm, designed to answer three questions:1. what role warfare has to play in human affairs; 2. the nature of threat and enemy; and 3. how effective is theuse of force in dealing with the threat? See Johnston, Cultural Realism, pp. 248-251, Princeton, 1995.
6
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, New York, 2001.

A NORMATIVE CHINESE MODEL TOWARDS THE WORLD NEVER EXISTS | 23

In practical terms, international ‘equality’ is another expression for the multipolar system;
international ‘liberty’ at least protects national independence; and international ‘fraternity’ requires anamicable and multilateral approach bound by international norms and regulations. This is the world
China has been desperately seeking since the Opium War of 1840. It took some 160 years for China toreconcile with a system that has inflicted enormous pains on its people in the past.
As a result, Chinese diplomatic outlook and behaviour have undergone fundamental transformations.
Two typical diplomatic behaviours have derived from the painful historical encounter with the West.
First there was the ‘G-One’ behaviour of distrusting any international system and its sub-systems. For
most of the Cold War, China was known as a G-One country, pursuing its own independent objectives
while jealously guarding its national sovereignty. The irony is, in comparison with the United States,
China had far more experience in unilateralist behaviour. Beijing never had much faith inmultilateralism, let alone alliances. Its only alliance experience with the Soviet Union ended in a bitter
confrontation.
Second, the ‘friend or foe’ mentality is gone. China never understood the European integration processuntil recently, because the European model of diplomatic ‘muddlism’ did not fit the Chinese
Communist notion of an effective strategy in a revolutionary world.
Today, China is no longer a revolutionary power. The new Eurasian orientation of China’s grandstrategy has brought about great changes to China’s foreign policy practices. Since the mid-1990s
China has abandoned the G-One posture, and begun to participate and initiate multilateralorganisations. China is an active member of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), a founder of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a recent member of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
and a proactive and constructive member of the UN Security Council. But China lost no independence
in multilateral diplomacy. For example, China is engaged actively in non-proliferation issues without
necessarily acceding to a Western conception of its rationale. Nevertheless, China has finally steppedout of the ‘Middle Kingdom Complex’.
More interestingly, in the process of rediscovering its own history, China has also discovered theunsurpassable advantage of handling its external relations with ‘go-go-muddlism’. The geopoliticalinstinct may tell the leadership in Beijing that the Euro-Asian orientation is far superior to a Pacificorientation when searching for a safe route to enter the world. The Euro-Asian continent is absent ofmajor strategic confrontations; a muddling-through diplomatic approach may take long time but issafer than the water-muddying approach in the Pacific. There the potentially explosive issues areabundant, such as the real or imaginary US-China strategic rivalry, the crisis on the Korean Peninsula,a rearming Japan and last but not least, the intractable Taiwan Question. China is eager to learn fromthe EU experience, for the EU happens to be the shining model of muddlism in the 20th century andthe current world.
In conclusion, Beijing is not seeking a place in the sun, but finding a place in the shade. The EuroAsian continent casts a long but comfortable shadow for years to come. With a grand strategy of‘peaceful rise through Euro-Asia’, a long-term peaceful Chinese foreign policy is thus on the horizon.
The West should focus not on changing the nature of Chinese internal and external policies, but
encourage China in a process of reclaiming traditional, Confucian values.

India as a Foreign Policy Actor –Normative Redux
Radha Kumar1
Introduction
Observers of Indian foreign policy are often puzzled by its inchoate combination of idealist rhetoric oninternational issues, post-modern nitpicking in negotiations and isolationist behaviour when it comesto matters of national interest. “What does India want?” they ask in frustration: “do you want to be amajor power, or do you just want to score points?”
The question is a difficult one to answer. When India achieved independence in 1947, the country’s
founding fathers assumed it would be a leading international player, expanding rules for normative
behaviour in relation to goals as well as means. But though India’s founding fathers produced grandpolicy visions, such as the 1946 Asian Relations Conference for an institutional structure to buffer
Asia against the Cold War, they were unable to translate their sweeping goals into action. The Chinese
revolution, followed by the Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian wars, brought the Cold War into theheart of Asia (Gonsalves 1991).
Sixty years later, India’s new policy-makers define India as ‘a rising power’ that is today beginning tomatch global goals and means in order to achieve the most favourable results for its citizens, and at thesame time expand normative principles for inter-state and transnational behaviour. India’s steady 89% growth over the past decade, and the Indian government’s proactive diplomacy in the same period,
allow Indian policy-makers to bring context and substance to the normative principles that theirpredecessors advocated – a development that one leading Indian analyst describes as “crossing the
Rubicon” from idealism to pragmatism (Mohan, 2003), and another as “India Unbound” (Das, 2002);
both phrases indicating what a large leap it is. During the Cold War, Indian policy-makers advocatedprinciples divorced from political reality, to use Morgenthau’s definition (Morgenthau, 1982), buttoday they seek to combine normative principles with national interest, in the way that most states do,
especially those with regional or major power ambitions.
As other papers in this series have pointed out, categories of what is normative vary from culture toculture, and are hotly debated across cultures (Tocci, 2007, pp. 2-3). The international norms that doexist do not represent an international consensus on even the lowest common denominators ofnormative international relations; when nations view themselves as normative foreign policy actors
they are inevitably selective.
In terms of definition, therefore, this paper inclines towards Daniel Hamilton’s argument that all states
behave normatively to a varying extent; what is important is the degree to which they are normative as
well as the issues that elicit their normative behaviour. Thus, for example, the US and China behave
least normatively when it comes to security threats (accepting that the use of force can be a normativemeans), while most of the EU countries and India tend to be more normative in their reactions. On theother hand, the US is most likely to come to the rescue of a persecuted state, the EU and India are lesslikely to and China is the least likely of all. Then again, the US and India provide far greater freedomof labour movement, including immigration, than do the EU or China; conversely, the US and China
are the greatest investors in other countries’ infrastructure development.
To these distinctions we need to add another variable: regional differentiation. If regional perceptions
are taken into account – how your neighbourhood views you – China would come off as less1

Professor Radha Kumar, Director of the Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Jamia Millia
Islamia University and trustee of the Delhi Policy Group, is a specialist on ethnic conflicts and peace processes.
24 |INDIA AS A FOREIGN POLICY ACTOR – NORMATIVE REDUX | 25

threatening than the US, EU or India, not to mention Russia. The EU pattern of pushing norms in its
immediate neighbourhood is not a common foreign policy practice; less intervention is consideredmore normative in most parts of Asia. This may partly be due to the post-colonial heritage in which
establishing sovereignty is itself a prime normative goal.
With these caveats, this paper applied Tocci’s typology to eight case studies of India’s foreign
relations – with Pakistan, China, Japan, the US, Nepal, Sikkim (now an Indian state), Myanmar andthe EU – to examine what kind of foreign policy actor India is, accounting for varied purposes andpower. Do India’s current foreign policy actions conform to its founding fathers’ vision? If they are
different, can they still be called normative? Have Indian views on what constitutes normative foreign
policy changed? What can other countries expect from India?

What do Indians consider to be normative foreign policy?
Indian views of what is normative in foreign policy are framed by the canonical 3rd-4th century text on
statecraft, Kautilya’s Arthashastra (laws of political economy), which highlighted three key pillars ofnormative state behaviour: engagement with the world, adherence to rule-based norms, andtransparency.
Written for the most outward looking of India’s several empires, the Mauryan dynasty, whose rulespanned the Indus valley and was home to one of the greatest universities of its time: the Buddhist seatof Taxila (now in Pakistan), the Arthashastra viewed the Mauryan empire’s neighbourhood as a coreforeign policy priority and defined its relations within a set of concentric circles. He also counselled
more general realist precepts: greater powers should be cultivated, equal or weaker powers could be
defeated through judicious alliances, and weaker powers could be attacked, patronised or ignored.
These views led to a debate on whether Kautilya was the ultimate political realist or whether the
Arthashastra skillfully combined elements of idealism with realpolitik serving the national interest(Boesche 2003; Alagappa 1998, pp. 74-5). The latter characterisation is more convincing – Kautilya
believed that alliances for peace were preferable to war even if war highlighted a country’s primacy
over others.
Had the traditional strand remained dominant in Indian foreign policy doctrine it would have been
easy to classify India as a normative (although not necessarily naively idealist) international player.
But British colonialism added a new element to Indian foreign policy – that of dependency. Whereas
previous empires had been rooted in India and adopted foreign policies that served Indian stateinterests, Britain was a far-away country and India’s foreign policy was adapted to suit British
interests. Thus what I term ‘unrealpolitik’ international action (because it subordinates national
interests to that of other countries) entered into Indian foreign policy.
Indian attitudes towards norms based on Enlightenment values were also complicated by the fact thatthese values arrived in India as a consequence of empire. Indians have tended to view European and tosome extent American references to normative behaviour with scepticism. Most Indian policy-makers
and analysts do not, for example, see a difference between European policies in Bosnia and Kosovo,and the US and allied invasion of Iraq. Humanitarian intervention, they argue, is not distinct from
regime change or ‘shock and awe’: it is more often a cover for imperial design (Institute of Peace andConflict Studies, 2003, pp. 44-5; Dixit, 1999; Naqvi, 1999).
In an attempt to rid itself of unrealpolitik, during the Cold War, India’s foreign policy focus was on
decolonisation and multilateral constraints over Great Power domination. Furthermore, Indian leaderssought consensus rather than using economic, political or military pressure to influence world affairs,
an approach that lasted well into the 1990s.
Following the 1962 war with China – which was largely Tibet-driven and in which India suffered acrushing defeat – and Nehru’s death in 1964, Indian foreign policy veered back to unrealpolitik, whichin this case put the interests of the USSR above its own. Unrealpolitik reached its zenith under Indian26 | RADHA KUMAR

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1966-75, 78-84), during which period India aligned itself firmly with
the USSR and its economy became dependent on the Soviet military-industrial complex.
With the end of the Cold War, India experienced what some called an opportunity to combine
normative and realpolitik goals (Kumar, 2006), and others defined as a conflict between the two(Mohan, 2003). But Indian policy-makers were slow to take advantage of this new opening. It was
only in the early years of the 21st century that Indian policy-makers made a concerted effort to reengage with the world; and this time it was the Kautilyan strand in Indian foreign policy that came tothe fore.
In contrast to India’s Cold War leaders, the country’s new policy-makers came to the conclusion that
if India was to pull its weight internationally it would have to become an economic and regional power(Dasgupta, 2003, pp. 92-111; Schiff, 2006). This was a view that had been cogently put by Kautilya
and kept alive during most of the Mughal Empire because its rulers became native to India, but wasthen lost during colonial rule and the Cold War.
After the first wave of economic liberalisation in 1990-1, when many of the bureaucratic constraints
on industrial growth were lifted, wave two of economic liberalisation prioritised resource andinfrastructure development. The new policy-makers believed that neither could be achieved without
integration into the global economy. So they swung into an active diplomatic campaign to improve
relations with the major powers, identified as the US, EU, Russia, Japan and China (Dasgupta, 2003)
and implement a ‘Look East’ policy in the wider Asian neighbourhood, especially the ASEAN
countries where the Indian ‘footprint’ had a long reach (Saran, 2003, p. 115).
India, which had eschewed membership of multilateral forums under Indira Gandhi, joined a slew ofregional trade and security organisations in the short span of a decade, such as ASEAN, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, the Asian Regional Forum, the Asia-Europe Meeting process and the East
Asia Summit. Finally, India’s new policy-makers also recognised that India would fail as a regional
power until it could turn its South Asian neighbours around. As a result, the Indian government
launched several new peacemaking initiatives – with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China,
Nepal, and Sri Lanka – hoping that these could help pull South Asia out of the slough of hostility andpoverty that it had slipped into following independence from British rule.
The new diplomacy had mixed results. On the whole it yielded rich dividends for improved relations
with the major powers and East Asia; but South Asia proved to be an uphill climb.

The Eight Case Studies
Indian Foreign Policy: Selected Case Studies
Type of Normative
Actor

Realpolitik

Imperial

Status Quo

Intended

Unintended

Intended

Unintended

Intended

Unintended

Intended

Unintended

Goals

Peace &
regional
integration

Coopera-tion Comm&ercialcoexistence

Economic &political
support

StableborderStablerelations

Realpolitik
withnormative
strandMaintainbilateral
relations

Means

CBMs
Trade border Navaltalks trade talks
exercises

Military
AnnexacooperationG tion
ovt. to Govt.
Diaspora

Political
Political/ aidpressure/pressure
open borders

Strongbilateral/wary EC/EP

ResultMoving to Realpolitik
norma-tive

Mixed

Norm
changing

Integration

Greater
acceptance

Status Quo

Moving tonormative

Case
Study

Pakistan

Japan

US

SikkimNepal

MyanmarEU

China

INDIA AS A FOREIGN POLICY ACTOR – NORMATIVE REDUX | 27

What kind of a foreign policy actor is India? From the cases above a mixed picture emerges, but
certain general conclusions can be derived nevertheless.
Speaking at a think tank in 2007, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon identified three key goals for
India foreign policy: “Firstly, ensuring a peaceful periphery; secondly, relations with the major
powers; and, thirdly, issues of the future, namely food security, water, energy and environment”2(Menon, 2007).
The means that he enlisted to pursue each goal were different. To build peace in the neighbourhood,
India looks to create social partnerships, offer economic benefits such as zero tariff for the poorer
South Asian countries, support cross-border infrastructure and development projects, stress‘civilisational linkages’ that grew from the ancient flow of people and ideas, and work for intraregional trade through SAARC, ASEAN and the East Asia Summit. Significantly, Menon described
the neighbourhood, as Saran did, in the same terms as Kautilya: “expanding circles of engagement,
starting with the immediate neighbourhood, West Asia, Central Asia, South-east Asia and the Indian
Ocean region”.
There is, however, a slight elision of categories in this description. Looking at the eight cases, there isa clear distinction between India’s policies in South Asia and India’s policies in East Asia. In SouthAsia, India has increasingly engaged in peacemaking both with its neighbours (Pakistan) and between
warring factions within its neighbours (Nepal). India has not been so proactive with the one SouthEast Asian country with which it shares a land border, Myanmar; and is gingerly in peacemaking withits most powerful neighbour, China.
Indian policy-makers, therefore, perceive a greater threat to the country’s security from instability in
its South Asian neighbours, an assessment that the US and EU share. They also act with more
confidence in seeking to resolve the threat, and have used a very wide range of normative means, fromback channels to hotlines to tracks one and two, from military to civilian CBMs, to help develop
normative neighbourhood relations. The EU is in some ways a model – India seeks greater regional
economic integration through SAARC as a means of peace-building in the region. It is significant that
Menon’s speech was remarkably silent when it came to the peace initiatives that India launched in thelate 20th and early 21st centuries. Whether this means that Indian policy-makers continue to havereservations about the scope of and for normative relations in South Asia is an open question.
Turning to the broader Asian neighbourhood, the first striking point is that India’s Look East policy
indicates a new departure for India, a focus on maritime interests. India has found it easier to develop
strong relations with its neighbours at sea than with its land neighbours, and these successes haveentered Indian doctrine. Today Indian policy-makers see India as “at the confluence of two seas”, to
use the words of the 17th century Indian ruler, Dara Shikoh, and India’s navy is involved in an
increasing number of multilateral exercises to improve maritime security.
India’s Look East policy has clearly been the primary impetus to India’s recent economic growth andhas deepened strategic relations with the major powers, whom Menon listed as the US, EU, Japan,
Russia and China (in that order). India-US strategic cooperation was founded on maritime security inSouth-East Asia and the Indian Ocean, as was India-Japan strategic cooperation, and the former was
accompanied by a rapid rise in trade. Up until 2005 the US was India’s largest trading partner, with a
trade volume of $32 billion that year. The US has now been outstripped as a trading partner by the EU
and China, but arguably it was the India-US strategic partnership that prompted the India-EU and
India-China partnerships, both of which gained substance only after they took off. Menon tellingly
commented that the India-US partnership had a “positive effect… on our dealings with the rest of theworld” (Menon, 2007).
2

Shri Shivshankar Menon, “The Challenges Ahead for India’s Foreign Policy”, Speech by the Indian Foreign
Secretary at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, 10 April 2007 (http://meaindia.nic.in/cgibin/db2www/meaxpsite/coverpage.d2w/coverpg?sec=ss&filename=speech/2007/04/11ss01.htm).

28 | RADHA KUMAR

That said, India’s goals in partnering with the Great Powers were quite different from India’s goals
with Asia; they were, in Menon’s words, “access to markets, high technology and resources crucial to
our future economic growth and development”. While Indian goals thus mix realpolitik and normative
elements, the means that India has used are by and large within the normative framework ofinternational law (the EU-India and India-Japan strategic partnerships). But they have also on occasion
sought to alter or expand international law (the US-India civil nuclear energy agreement). At the sametime, India is developing institutional partnerships, for example between space, technology, defence
and agricultural agencies (the EU and US), as well as through membership of regional forums (theASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit).
If these points indicate that India is beginning to expand as a normative foreign policy actor and has
been able to bring some depth to its normative behaviour as a rising power, it is also worth noting thatIndian policy-makers have encountered a surprising obstacle to achieving some of their goals, inparticular the civil nuclear energy agreement – domestic political opposition. This casts doubt onwhether there is internal consensus or even clarity on what constitutes the national interest, and raises
the question of whether the unrealpolitik strand in Indian foreign policy is as strong as ever.
These factors indicate that India might remain a rising rather than an established power for a longer
time than it would take if the country’s political parties had an overarching and non-partisan
conception of the national interest. This is unlikely to affect India’s behaviour as a normative foreign
policy actor, though it will dent policy-maker confidence and could mean that India’s ability to beeffective in its actions will be curtailed. Much depends on how well the India-EU and India-US
partnerships develop on the one hand, and how steadily India’s Look East policy progresses on theother hand. The potential is good: each set of relationships is based on a strong foundation of
goodwill, little strategic competition and Diaspora ties. The India-China relationship is more
complicated and lacks the foundation that the other three have, but it too could improve as the otherthree progress.
In short, India is steadily becoming a more influential as well as normative foreign policy actor,
despite domestic confusion, and this trend is set to grow over the coming decade.

References
Alagappa, M. (1998), Asian Security Practice: Material and Ideational Influences, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Boesche, R. (2003), “Kautilya’s Arthasastra on War and Diplomacy in Ancient India”, The Journal of
Military History, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 9-37.
Das, G. (2002), India Unbound, New York: Knopf.
Dasgupta, C. (2003), “India and the Changing Balance of Power”, in A. Sinha and M. Mohta (eds), Indian
Foreign Policy: Challenges and Opportunities, New Delhi: Academic Foundation.
Dixit, J.N. (1999), “Strikes against Sovereignty”, Indian Express, 15 April.
Gonsalves, E. (ed.) (1991), Asian Relations, New Delhi, Lancer International and India International
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Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (2003), Indo-US Relations: Promoting Synergy, Report of
Independent Core Group, New Delhi.
Kumar, R. (2006), “India and the World”, in M. Malhoutra (ed.), India: The Next Decade, New Delhi:
Academic Foundation.
Menon, S. (2007), “The Challenges Ahead for India’s Foreign Policy”, speech delivered at the Observer
Research Foundation, New Delhi, 10 April (http://meaindia.nic.in/cgi-bin/db2www/meaxpsite/coverpage.d2w/coverpg?sec=ss&filename=speech/2007/04/11ss01.htm).

INDIA AS A FOREIGN POLICY ACTOR – NORMATIVE REDUX | 29

Mohan, C.R. (2003), Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy, New York:Basingstoke.
Morgenthau, H. (1982), In Defense of the National Interest, Lanham, MD: University Press of America(reprint of the 1951 Alfred Knopf publication).
Naqvi, S. (1999), “The anatomy of a humanitarian disaster”, Indian Express, 9 April.
Saran, S. (2003), “Present Dimensions of the Indian Foreign Policy”, in A. Sinha and M. Mohta (eds),
Indian Foreign Policy: Challenges and Opportunities, New Delhi: Academic Foundation.
Saran, S. (2007), “60 Years of Independence: India’s Foreign Policy Challenges”, Institute for South AsianStudies, Singapore.
Schiff, J. (2006), “Opening its Doors: India’s Emergence on the Global Stage”, in C. Purfield and J. Schiff(eds), India Goes Global: Its Expanding Role in the World Economy, International Monetary Fund,
Washington, D.C.
Swamy, P.M. (1999), “India Takes on the Taliban at UN”, Rediffonnet, 5 October.

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