The European Union's Normative Power: Critical Perspectives and Perspectives on the Critical

What is the international identity of the European Union? The end of the cold war, the Treaty on European Union, and wars in Kuwait and the former Yugoslavia all raised methodological, theoretical and empirical questions over the study of the European Union's (EU) ‘international identity'. During this period it became increasingly clear that the study of the EU in world politics needed to engage with both critical social theory and normative international theory. This chapter represents a return to critical social theory - a holistic research programme that works within a cosmopolitical understanding of normative theory; that seeks to work ‘within categories of existing thought' regarding EU external actions, radicalise them and show ‘in varying degrees both their problems and their unrecognised possibilities' (Calhoun 1995: 23).