Goods are not only tangible things, like military hardware or trade goods, but may also be normative in nature. In this chapter, Rumelili and Towns emphasize the centrality of international symbolic and normative goods in maintaining or challenging hegemony. International orders may be characterized by different systems of supply of normative goods and status. They analyze the role played by ranking organizations and the country performance indices they produce in transforming norms into a set of normative goods. Such country performance indices provide moral value in three ways: They supply public and comparative information, which constructs moral hierarchies; they define norms by assigning moral value to specific indicators; and they distribute moral status to states through the ranking systems they employ. States may acquire normative goods to challenge the dominant position of the United States, or they may challenge the existing set of normative goods to undermine the liberal normative order that undergirds US hegemony. Conceiving of norms as goods alerts us to a distinct terrain where hegemony is challenged in a bottom-up and gradual fashion, through putatively technical measures and standards.

What do constructivist theory and the experiences of international institutions tell us about what kinds of community to build and how to build communities in international relations? Recently, the constructivist scholarship in international relations (IR) has invested a significant deal of theoretical and empirical attention in security communities and processes of interstate community-building. The very fact that certain states have transcended the realist world of power politics to conduct their relations on the basis of mutual trust and identification has been taken as solid evidence that progress is possible in international relations. In normative terms, interstate community-building has been considered a positive development in two respects. First of all, it has been widely believed that community relations based on mutual trust and identification consolidate a condition of stable peace, where states come to neither expect nor prepare for war against each other. Secondly, interstate communities in the context of membered institutions serve as fruitful grounds for the consolidation and outward diffusion of international norms, specifically through the imposition of membership conditionality. Constructivist scholars have pointed to various examples of interstate communities, both within and outside the context of membered international institutions, such as the European Union (EU), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the US–Canadian relationship, the US–Israeli relationship and the group of democratic states writ large.

Introduction

Greek–Turkish relations, in many ways, provide a fruitful case for scholars interested in the EU's role in the transformation of border conflicts. First of all, it is a case where the impact of the EU is widely mentioned, but not yet comprehensively and systematically studied (Rumelili 2004a). Secondly, because the EU has been a factor in Greek–Turkish relations since the early 1970s, the case contains many useful insights about the historical evolution of the EU's role as a ‘perturbator’ of conflicts, and the conditions under which the EU can positively impact border conflicts. There is a clear puzzle in the EU involvement in Greek–Turkish conflicts: up until the late 1990s, the EU failed to have a positive impact. Countering the links made between European integration and peace, Greek–Turkish conflicts multiplied and intensified as Greece and Turkey developed closer institutional relations with the EU. However, clearly since 1999, we observe a promising rapprochement between Turkey and Greece within the EU context (Rumelili 2003a; 2004a). How the role of the EU changed from an additional forum for Greek–Turkish rivalry to a foundation for Greek–Turkish reconciliation is a very interesting empirical question that contains valuable insights for understanding the conditions for successful EU involvement in border conflicts.

This chapter will argue that the positive impact of the EU on Greek–Turkish relations has been realised through a complex interaction between domestic and EU-level conditions.