Normative Power In International Relations

"Power is the most basic and richest concept in political science. It can be sliced, sub-divided almost any number of ways. When social scientists do this it may look like unnecessary hairsplitting. But it is more like cutting a many - faceted diamond: each cut brings out a new facet, a new insight."
These famous words by Galtung adequately reflect the continuous efforts of different scholars to coin a term which best describes the type of power the European Union is actually perceived as in international relations. Joining other authors, Ian Manners also made an attempt to formulate the concept of normative power Europe to indicate the EU. The introduction of this notion in 2002 has received various applause as well as criticism. In an interview

Most of these studies, nevertheless, focus on the EU’s Eastern neighbors in the framework of the European Neighborhood Policy. In comparison, there are far fewer researches conducted to examine if the EU acts as a normative power in its relations with Asian countries. Especially, no research has been carried out to explore this issue in EU – Vietnam relations. Therefore, it is expected that the fulfillment of a study on the EU’s exercise of normative power in its relations with Vietnam can help to fill this

A qualitative research method was employed so as to achieve the objective of the paper. Through analyzing primary sources and secondary sources, the involvement of the EU in promoting good governance in Vietnam was explored. The former is composed of materials issued by the EU institutions, Vietnamese government and other international organizations such as the United Nation and the World Bank, while the latter consists of books, journal and newspaper articles, as well as reports.
This paper is divided into four main chapters. The first chapter is the introduction which states the relevance of the research, the research question, the structure of the thesis and the research methods. In the second part, the theoretical framework employed is discussed. This paper was developed based on Manner’s concept of normative power and Tocci’s theory of a normative foreign policy, which provides three dimensions to evaluate if an actor can be considered as a normative power, including normative goals, normative means, and normative impact. The concept and principles of good governance are also discussed in this part. The next chapter presents the main empirical findings pertaining to the three indicators mentioned above in order to find out the answer to the research question. The paper ends with a conclusion which summarizes the main points discussed,