Introduction

Ever since the 1970s, scholars of the external dimension of the European Integration project have engaged in conceptual and empirical debates about the nature of the European Union (EU) as a specific ‘actor’ and ‘power’ in world politics. Particularly the competing paradigms of ‘Civilian Power Europe’ and ‘Military Power Europe’ have given rise to a wide range of ‘variations of the same theme’: the question of whether the external dimension of European integration is a new form of ‘post-realist’ power in global affairs that has overcome the spectre of great power competition and geopolitics on the one hand, or the view that the EU is just an extension of geopolitics by other means on the other hand.

In this context, ‘Civilian Power Europe’, first coined by François Duchêne in 1973 in an international context of great power ‘détente’, entailed a view (and EU-endorsed paradigm and discourse) of the EEC as indeed an allegedly novel foreign policy power that had moved beyond ‘traditional’ military and geopolitical power and instead reshaped international affairs through trade, international law and the values of human rights and democracy. In essence, this concept and paradigm had undergone various re-formulations during the 1990s (Maull, 1990) and 2000s (Smith, 2005) and variations, such as the EU as a ‘normative power’ (Manners, 2000, 2002), ‘transformative power’ (Leonard, 2005), soft power (Nielsen, 2013) or ‘Liberal Power Europe’ (Wagner, 2017), stressing the non-coercive and normative aspects of the EU and its commitment to multilateralism and global governance (Jørgensen, 2015).