Unpacking Normative Power Europe: EU promotion of security norm cluster in ASEAN

The concept of Normative Power Europe (NPE) has sparked widespread debate over the EU’s external relations and its role in world politics. Whist the EU studies community has engaged with the NPE literature and studied EU norm-entrepreneurship at theoretical and empirical levels, the NPE literature suffers from two major shortcomings: first, it falls short in uncovering the multifaceted nature of EU diffusion objects across different policy areas; second, the effectiveness of EU norm diffusion remains underexplored. To remedy these limitations, this article aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the EU’s projection of normative power by drawing on analytical tools from diffusion literature. By doing so, this research argues that the EU’s projection of normative power in relation to other international actors can be conceptualised as a process of diffusion of EU norm-clusters in various policy areas. It also reconceptualises the impact of the EU’s normative power as varying diffusion outcomes. By undertaking an empirical case study of the EU–ASEAN security cooperation, this research adopts the analytical framework to unpack the EU’s projection of normative power and diffusion of security-related norm-cluster in relation to ASEAN.