Empowering Africa: normative power in EU-Africa relations

Abstract

The EU's identity construction as a normative power has often been described as a practice by which the EU portrays itself as a force for good while at the same time depicting other actors as inferior, thereby disempowering them rhetorically. In contrast to this, our findings indicate that in its relations to Sub-Saharan Africa, the EU intends to empower African countries by referring to them in a framework of solidarity and partnership. We trace this mechanism of empowering by analysing how the EU promoted the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Kyoto Protocol to African countries while at the same time trying to enable these countries to play an active role in the negotiations related to these institutions as well as in the institutions themselves. At the same time, though, this attempt to empower Africa displays crucial limits concerning the effectiveness of the EU's attempts to promote norms and the international image of the EU itself. We argue that these limits might constrain the process of EU identity construction as a normative power