"We need both" - Identifying the different stages of norm promotion. The European Union as a promoter of values:the case of the Eastern Partnership.

Abstract

The question of why agents adopt new norms have been adressed by a number of scholars, pointing at the importance of incentives as well as identification. Yet, less attention has been directed towards how norm promoters understand strategies for spreading values. More specifically, previous research has failed to consider the crucial role played by the officials assigned to convert the political goal of promoting values into functional policies. Aiming to bridge this gap as well as to increase our knowledge of the EU‟s newest foreign policy initiative, the Eastern Partnership, this thesis examines how the officials involved in the policy preparations reason about strategies for norm promotion. What assumptions were the basis for the discussions and how are the mechanisms of norm promotion understood? Interviews with civil servants representing the European Commission and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicate that offering incentives and fostering socialisation are considered mutually reinforcing strategies which should be combined rather than chosen between. Moreover, the result suggests that the issue of context-dependency is a determining factor in the process of norm promotion/adoption. Hence, the main conclusion is that the officials regard the ideal strategy for promoting norms as one which takes the context of the norm target into account and invokes both the logic of consequence and logic of appropriateness.