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The European Union and the World Summit on Sustainable Development: Normative Power Europe in Action?

TLDR
The claim that the EU played a leadership role at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development is examined using the concept of normative power Europe in this paper, and it is questioned whether the EU represents a normative power in the field of sustainable development.
Abstract
The claim that the EU played a leadership role at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development is examined using the concept of normative power Europe. We examine how the EU operationalized the concept of sustainable development before questioning whether the EU represents a normative power in the field of sustainable development. In doing so, we address two key concerns. First, we question the depth of the current EU's commitment to sustainable development. Second, we raise a number of important theoretical questions regarding Ian Manners' broader application of the concept of normative power Europe.

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Multi-Level Reinforcement: Explaining European Union Leadership in Climate Change Mitigation

TL;DR: The European Union has played a leading role in pushing for the establishment, ratification, and meaningful implementation of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, although it still has significant efforts to make to achieve its target of an 8 percent cut of greenhouse gas by 2008-2012 relative to the 1990 level.
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What kind of power

TL;DR: The argument that the EU is a humanitarian power has gained considerable attention Echoing discussions about recent developments in the international system towards a post-Westphalian order, the EU's actual foreign policy is in many ways a test case for such developments However, much remains to be done in terms of finding a satisfactory theoretical basis from which to examine this argument as mentioned in this paper.

The ‘Difference Engine’ Constructing and Representing the International Identity of the European Union

TL;DR: The authors argue that the distinctive polity perspectives and role representations of the European Union can be thought of as a form of difference engine, which drives the construction and representation of the EU's international identity.
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The political economy of ‘normative power’ Europe: EU environmental leadership in international biotechnology regulation

TL;DR: This article examined the transformation of the European Union from a laggard to a leader in the international politics of biotechnology regulation and identified shifts in the domestic political economy of agricultural biotechnology as the key factors behind the EU's support for a precautionary international regime on trade in genetically modified organisms.
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Normative power as hegemony

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify four key problems in the debate about normative power Europe that may be fruitfully tackled when linking it to the concept of hegemony, including the question about whether EU foreign and external policy is driven by norms or interests, the problem of inconsistent behaviour as a result of competing and contested norms, the question of the role of state and non-state actors, and problematic standing of normative power as an academic engagement, in particular in regard to whether the theory is of primarily explanatory, descriptive or normative value.
References
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The politics of environmental discourse

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify the emergence and increasing political importance of "ecological modernization" as a new concept in the language of environmental politics, which has come to replace the antagonistic debates of the 1970s, stresses the opportunities of environmental policy for modernizing the economy and stimulating the technological innovation.
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Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the European Union as a "normative power Europe".
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The Discourse of the Middle Ground Citizen Shell Commits to Sustainable Development

TL;DR: In this paper, Foucauldian theory is used to interpret a corporate social report published by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group to reveal the contours of an emerging corporate discourse of sustainability and the knowledge-power dynamics entailed by social reporting.
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Who Speaks for Europe? The Delegation of Trade Authority in the EU*

TL;DR: The European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) 1994 opinion, nor the 1997 reform of the trade policy process at Amsterdam delegated full negotiating authority to the Commission over the new trade issues of services and intellectual property as mentioned in this paper.
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