This study aims to examine the EU’s normative power through the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) before and after the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force. The study is a comparative study and was carried out through a document study of official documents and treaties. To pursue the aim the following questions were asked: What are the differences and similarities within the EU's common trade policy before and after the introduction of the Treaty of Lisbon and does the Treaty of Lisbon increased the normative ambition of the EU?   In this study Ian Manners theory Normative Power Europe has been categorized into direct normative actions and indirect normative actions. The empirical material is based on literature, primary document, Official Journal of the European Union and EU: s webpage.   The conclusions of this study show that the Treaty of Lisbon has changed the constitutional basis for the common commercial policy in several ways. The CCP has more room after the Treaty of Lisbon to develop and take on direct normative actions. The major difference is that the CCP now endorse all the Union’s objectives, principles and values which give the CCP more opportunities to set normative requirements and gain normative power.

The European Union (EU) is a formidable actor in contemporary international politics. Many prominent scholars devote their lives to studying both how European power came to be and analyzing the character of that power. The vast majority of the resulting scholarship fails to empirically test the arguments set forth. While rich in theoretical insights, the lack of empirical support renders the debate unsatisfying. This study tests the arguments about the nature of European power in the international context using the cases of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and Europe's energy policies. Chapter One introduces the Normative Power Europe concept and describes my methodology. Chapter Two delineates the existing debates on the power of the EU. Chapters Three and Four test European power using the cases of the ENP and Europe's energy policies (respectively). In addition, Chapter Four offers some concluding remarks. This study finds that the EU consistently behaves as a normative power from the basic premise of virtue ethics, but inconsistently in terms of deontological and teleological ethics.

La Cour européenne des droits de l'homme a, en 1968, dès son cinquième arrêt au principal, établi que des droits civils et politiques pouvaient générer des obligations d'action à la charge des États. Cette affirmation venait remettre en cause la définition traditionnelle de ces droits. En effet, ils étaient classiquement considérés comme mettant à la charge des États uniquement des obligations négatives. En revanche, les droits économiques sociaux et culturels étaient présentés comme imposant seulement des obligations positives. Le juge européen a, depuis lors, mis au jour un nombre croissant d'obligations positives prétoriennes. Plusieurs techniques ont été développées pour ce faire. Cette étude vise à analyser ce que nous avons dénommé la technique des obligations positives, c'est-à-dire l'usage par la Cour des termes « obligations positives » ou « mesures positives ». Cette technique permet non seulement au juge européen de dégager des obligations d'action à la charge des États, mais également de reconnaître sa compétence pour contrôler l'exécution de ses propres arrêts, de conférer un effet horizontal à la Convention ou encore d'étendre la notion de juridiction au sens de l'article 1 CEDH. Elle est également un moyen de moduler son contrôle en permettant tantôt d'accorder une large marge nationale d'appréciation, tantôt de la réduire à néant. Cette diversification croissante de l'usage de la technique dans la jurisprudence européenne est toutefois source d'incohérences.La thèse défendue vise à démontrer que la technique des obligations positives est un outil d'adaptation de la norme juridique conventionnelle à l'évolution des États démocratiques et libéraux européens. / As early as 1968, the fifth merits judgment of the European Court of Human Rights established that civil and political rights could generate action obligations on the European States. This judgment was challenging the usual definition of those rights, which were traditionally considered as charging the public authorities with only negative obligations. In contrast, economic, social and cultural rights were positioned as imposing positive obligations on the public authorities. The European Court of Human Rights has since created an increasing number of positive obligations and several techniques were developed for this purpose. This study aims to explore the “positive obligations technique”, that is to say, the Court's use of the terms “positive obligations” or “positive measures”. This technique not only allows the Court judge to impose action obligations on the European States, also recognizes the Court judge's competence to monitor the implementation by the public authorities of its own decisions, to give a horizontal effect to the Convention and to extend the concept of "jurisdiction" within the meaning of Article 1 ECHR. This technique also permits to modulate the Court's control over the European States, granting a wide margin of appreciation or reducing it to nothing. The increasing diversification of the use of this technique in European case law is however a source of discrepancy.. This thesis aims to demonstrate that the technique of positive obligations is a tool for adaptation of the conventional norma to the changes of the democratic and liberal European States.

La dimension complexe de la motivation recèle, pour le chercheur, des zones d’exploration inépuisables. En matière pénale, la motivation intéresse tant le législateur que le juge. En multipliant à foison les obligations légales de motivation, le législateur invite les magistrats du siège et du parquet à fournir systématiquement les raisons de fait et de droit qui commandent leurs décisions. Par l’instauration de telles obligations, ce dernier ambitionne de confiner, si ce n’est réduire au plus haut point la marge de manœuvre du juge pénal chargé d’appliquer les règles de droit en vigueur. Le législateur veut croire, à l’aune d’un droit en réseau, qu’il est seul détenteur du pouvoir normatif. Cette attitude témoigne d’une volonté de monopoliser autour d’une seule entité le processus d’engendrement du droit. L’intention, aussi louable soit-elle d’un point de vue institutionnel, manque toutefois de réalisme, le législateur s’éloignant des contraintes d’efficacité et de qualité auxquelles le juge pénal est tenu. Parce que la motivation relève ancestralement et en premier lieu de la pratique, le juge pénal s’est facilement accommodé de ses multiples obligations de motivation. Bénéficiaire d’un instrument privilégié de communication, il a instauré des pratiques de motivation brèves et péremptoires, l’amenant de ce fait au mécanisme de création, épisodiquement de destruction du droit. Si la coopération du juge pénal au processus d’engendrement du droit constitue un enrichissement de la qualité du droit, il demeure que son absence de légitimité l’oblige à réfléchir sur une stratégie communicationnelle de persuasion et non plus seulement d’affirmation. / For the researcher’s perspective, the complex dimension of motivation offers almost unlimited scope for investigation. In criminal matters, the question of motivation is an issue of concern for both the legislator and the judge. By constantly adding legal requirements regarding the motivation, the legislator urges judges and prosecutors to systematically provide the legal and factual reasons that are the basis of their decisions. The legislator enacts such obligations in order to confine, or even strongly reduce, the margin of discretion of the criminal judge who is in charge of normative power, even in the context of interconnected lawmaking processes. This attitude reveals a desire to monopolize the lawmaking process. However praiseworthy the intention may be from an institutional point of view, it lacks realism. The legislator is moving away from the efficiency and quality constraints that the criminal judge is subjected to. As the motivation historically and firstly derives from practice, the criminal judge easily adapted to his numerous obligations regarding this matter. Benefiting from a key communication tool, he launched his brief and peremptory practices which led him to take part to the mechanism of creation, and often, destruction of law. If the judge’s participation in the production of the law enhances its quality, the judge’s lack of democratic legitimacy remains and forces him to look for a communication strategy based on persuation instead of a purely assertive approach.

The European Union is one of the most significant international actors whose institutional character and specific conduct of foreign policy make it an interesting object of study. It creates robust policies and programmes to frame relations with both the Member States, as well as with neighbouring countries. The European Neighbourhood Policy, and the Eastern Partnership specifically, is one such example. Even though the ENP was formally designed as a policy of non - membership, the communication of the EU's stance tends to refrain from framing it that way. Consequently, this creates a situation in which the neighbouring state continues to aspire to become a member of the EU, despite lack of reform progress, in hope of a "membership delay". The thesis addresses this discrepancy on the example of the relationship between the EU and the Republic of Moldova after the signature of the Association Agreement by interpreting its development and by assessing how the EU uses its normative power to Europeanize Moldova. Keywords Normative power, Europeanization, EU-enlargement, the European Union, the Republic of Moldova

This thesis aims to interconnect a theory of normative power Europe with the activities of the EU and its affect on the Western Balkans. The theoretical concept of normative power is based on the assumption of the EU as a normative actor who is able through its norms, values and principles to become a major civilian actor in international relations, especially in the area of conflict management. The theoretical part of the paper therefore focuses on the concept of normative power EU (NPE) as it is presented by Ian Manners, and how its normative character is reflected in the common security and defense policy. It is analysed how the NPE is diffused in selected countries of the Western Balkans through four chosen transfer mechanisms by Manners that comprise the operationalization of the thesis at the same time. Therefore the aim of this work is to contribute to the further broadening the debate over the EU's role in the international system, but also to find out how the norms and values are transmitted in selected countries of the near neighborhood - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo. All of this with regard to democracy, human and minority rights, peaceful settlement of disputes, good governance etc., which encompass the basic values of the EU. The selected operationalization has allowed...

This thesis measures the extent of the impact of the EU’s management of its migration flow in the aftermath of the ‘Summer of Migration’ on its legitimacy and normative power towards external actors.  Although historically funded and legitimated by its commitment to Human Rights values, the EU has failed to manage effectively and ethically the migration crisis indenpently. Building upon Buchanan’s constructivist approach of the strategies of legitimation used by IOs in IR, this thesis argues that this failure, by shedding light on the union’s weaknesses and pressuring it into to unethical external deals, deteriorates its image towards external actors and provides delegitimating tools to competitors of the EU in a global context of post-US hegemony, feeding power struggles in a shifting polarized world. By creating a theoretical bridge between EU internal policies and their external consequences, this thesis investigates interconnexions and causality effects between the structural flaws of the CEAS, the 2016 EU/Turkey deal and the loss of legitimacy of the EU. The arguments defended by this thesis are supported by an empirical research based on the critical discourse analysis of the evolutions of Turkish leaders’ speeches given at the UN General Assembly debates between 2009 and 2019. Using methods deriving from Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA), the analysis of the speeches pinpoints the role of the EU’s management of the migration crisis in the shift from positive to negative discourses of Turkish leaders towards the union. Finally, the study considers that the normative arguments related to the non-commitment of the EU to its upheld HR values has become a semantic tool of delegitimation for Turkey against the EU, and to promote itself as a new leader of IR.

The European Union, viewing itself as a normative actor, employs various means to disseminate its normative power within its member states, candidate countries, and the global context. The ERASMUS+ program comprises one of the tools designed to enhance the EU's international presence by facilitating cross-cultural interactions among participants and fostering group affiliations. This study aims to explore this impact on ERASMUS+ participants from EU candidate countries like Albania, employing constructivist concepts. By conducting interviews with both mobile and non-mobile Albanian exchange students, leading a comparative analysis, this research seeks to offer deeper insights into the extent to which the normative power of the EU influences these participants and their European identity formation. The guiding hypothesis, that participating in an ERASMUS+ program successfully shifts the identities of the students towards a more pro-European stance, has been verified through the discourse analysis of the interviewees answers. Hence, the normative power of the European Union is present and strengthened through this tool in the candidate countries.

After 12 years of isolation, the relations between Brussels and Minsk have been thawing starting in the last year. One of the components of the policy of re-engagement is the new initiative adopted by the EU called Eastern Partnership (EaP). This thesis sought to answer following question: what were the main reasons for the change in the EU policy towards Belarus after 2008? In order to answer the research question I formulated two hypotheses. The first hypothesis argues that while the EU has acted according to the normative power expectations up until 2008, after that date a more pragmatic approach in the foreign policy has been at work. The second hypothesis explains this change by the increasing influence of Eastern European countries in realm of decision-making processes within the EU, which resulted in a reformed EU foreign policy towards Belarus.These hypotheses are tested in a qualitative case study of the launching of the Eastern Partnership initiative, seen as the most important instrument that defines the new policy of EU. I will focus on the process of decision–making in regards to the adoption of the new initiative towards the Eastern European countries, using the rational actor model and the theory of formal leadership. The results of the paper point out that the main reason for changing the EU foreign policy towards Belarus were connected to pragmatic interests in the economic and energy areas, which weakened the EU normative claims. However, EU values are still counted as political conditionality has recently re-entered the agenda. Thus, the current foreign policy is two-fold: based on rational model of acting and normative power. Moreover, the EaP is the result of the strengthened position of Eastern European countries in terms of the power hierarchy among EU members, with Poland, and the Baltic States playing an increasingly larger role.

Cette thèse examine les dynamiques derrière le développement vif de l’intégration régionale en Asie de l’Est depuis l’année 1997. Commencer par le constat du dépassement du système westphalien, cette thèse est motivée par une volonté postmoderne, dans le sens où on ouvre la possibilité de toute construction de l’espace politique et on insiste sur la construction sociale des phénomènes dans l’intégration régionale. Ainsi on comprend le développement régional est-asiatique en deux sens : l’intégration régionale de facto qui révèle une superposition des espaces en Asie de l’Est, et l’intégration régionale de jure qui manifeste une juxtaposition des normes dans la région est-asiatique. La première s’est surtout formée par les réseaux commerciale, ethnique, culturelle historiquement établis dans la région. Du développement plus récent, on fait spécialement valoir l’intégration dans l’industrie de l’électronique afin de montrer des chaînes de production transnationales mises en place par des firmes multinationales. La dernière constitue notre objet d’analyse principal en formulant l’hypothèse que l’intégration régionale de jure en Asie de l’Est se réalise par la concurrence normative entre les grands acteurs mondiaux, à savoir les États-Unis, l’Union européenne, le Japon et la Chine. Ceci nous amène à une conceptualisation normative dans les Relations internationales. L’enjeu de concurrence aujourd’hui est la poursuite de puissance normative qui comprend une détermination de l’espace politique et des codes de conduite au sein d’un tel espace. En utilisant des indicateurs empiriques économique et politique, on prétend anticiper une orientation de l’intégration régionale est-asiatique vers le projet d’Asie-Pacifique mené par les États-Unis. / This thesis examines the dynamics behind the vigorous development of regional integration in East Asia since 1997. Beginning with the observation of the Westphalian system overtaken by transnational activities, this thesis is motivated by a postmodern will in the sense that it opens up the possibility of any construction of political space and emphasizes the social construction of phenomena in regional integration. Thus we understand the East Asian regional development in two ways: the regional integration de facto which reveals a superposition of spaces in East Asia, and the regional integration de jure that exhibits a juxtaposition of norms in the East Asian region. The first is mainly formed by the commercial, ethnic, cultural networks historically established in the region. For the more recent development, the integration in the electronics industry is especially emphasized in order to show transnational production chains implemented by multinational corporations. The latter, as our main subject of analysis, is carried out by making the assumption that the regional integration de jure in East Asia is conducted by the competition of normative power between the major actors in the world, namely the United States, the European Union, Japan and China. This brings us to a normative conceptualization in International Relations. The issue of competition today is the pursuit of normative power which includes a determination of political space and the codes of conduct within such a space. Using empirical economic and political indicators, we claim for an orientation of regional integration in East Asia to be an Asia-Pacific project led by the United States.