Date: 2011
Type: Article
Realist-normative power Europe? : explaining EU policies toward Lebanon from an IR perspective
Comparative European politics, 2011, Vol. 9, No. 4-5, pp. 562-580
RUFFA, Chiara, Realist-normative power Europe? : explaining EU policies toward Lebanon from an IR perspective, Comparative European politics, 2011, Vol. 9, No. 4-5, pp. 562-580
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/40200
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
This article seeks to explain the relationship between the European Union (EU) and one of its Middle Eastern neighbors: Lebanon. By conducting an in-depth empirical single case study and engaging in competitive theory testing, this article shows that the EU in Lebanon behaves at the same time as a normative and a realist power. This article challenges both the scholarship on the EU that sees the EU as a normative power as well as scholarship that focuses on structural neorealism to explain the EU's role in its neighborhood. This article adopts an approach that is different from the mainstream approaches in two ways. First, it focuses on the entire set of policies that the EU has implemented or not in Lebanon. Second, it provides an in-depth case study centered on the interaction between the EU and Lebanon, while also looking at the regional dynamics and at the domestic tensions within Lebanon. By doing so, it shows that the EU is a ‘realist-normative’ power in the specific case of Lebanon. Thus, these two frameworks are a false dichotomy and the argument shall be tested on other cases to make it generalizable. This suggests that the constructivist-realist divide coexists in practice.
Additional information:
Published online: 11 July 2011
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/40200
Full-text via DOI: 10.1057/cep.2011.17
ISSN: 1472-4790; 1740-388X
Files associated with this item
Files | Size | Format | View |
---|---|---|---|
There are no files associated with this item. |