As You Like It: European Union Normative Power in the European Neighbourhood Policy

Abstract

This chapter addresses some of the methodological, theoretical and empirical challenges of studying the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). It will argue that analysing the youthful ENP presents a wide variety of challenges for scholars of the EU’s relations with its near neighbours, in particular the question of theoretical presuppositions. The chapter will discuss these challenges in four parts involving the methodological location of the ENP, the theoretical framing of the ENP, a ‘normative power’ approach to the ENP and concluding with a brief analytical reflection. The chapter also carries an argument — that the challenges of studying the ENP are least well served by traditional approaches to political science, and might be better advanced by rethinking these presumptions. Thus, conventional presumptions of ‘much ado about nothing’ in the ENP may benefit from a reflection on the extent to which these presumptions are determinate in analysing whether the ENP is ‘as you like it’.