COMMITMENT, PREFERENCE, OR NECESSITY: THE EUROPEAN UNION AND NORMATIVE POWER AFTER THE MAASTRICHT TREATY

Abstract

This study attempts to understand the European Union’s reasoning for becoming and remaining a normative power after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Legal texts are explored in efforts to understand towards what direction the legal text pushes the international entity. Political and economic arguments are broken down in efforts to weigh the costs and benefits of maintaining normative power. I build a figure to visually represent the reasons behind the EU embracing normative power. Based on the research, the most rational direction for the European Union, taking into consideration most of its main contemporary concerns, is that which leads the entity towards combining ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power in efforts to create “smart power,” a concept coined by Joseph Nye Jr. (Nye Jr., 2008).