The European Union’s Normative Power in Planetary Politics

Exploring and rethinking the boundaries of the European Union’s action and inaction invites recognition that: (i) we are living in an era of rapidly accelerating 'planetary politics'; (ii) the 'normative power' approach provides a normative, explanatory, and practical theory of EU action within this era; (iii) the EU in planetary politics must interweave social, economic, environmental, conflictual, and political actions in concert. Rapidly accelerating planetary politics demand an understanding of the holistic earth system, its critically-interdependent local-global and north-south relations, and its intergenerational context and time horizon.
Within this context, ‘multiple crises’ are an inevitability that enable and constrain responses of all global actors. The normative power approach, normatively located in critical social theory, argues for an understanding of ‘European communion’ alternatively read as a constellation of communities, a cosmopolitan space, or a form of cosmopolitical coexistence. In practical terms, this provides an argument for action located in ‘normative justification’ deploying both an immanent and pragmatic critique of EU principles, actions, and impacts.
Finally, the EU’s normative power must interweave actions in concert to address social issues (inequality, refugees, racism), economic issues (neoliberalism, austerity, precarity), environmental issues (unsustainable consumption, life-threatening pollution, biodiversity extinction, global warming), conflict issues (ubernationalism, state failure, mass atrocities), and political issues (faux-sovereignty, dis/integration, democratic decline) both within and without Europe.