The Eu's International Norms And Ways Of Communication

In the current world with great interdependence, the EU has taken an active rolein promoting its international norms. Based on a careful study on the EU’s eastwardenlargement, this thesis tried to explore what kind of norms the EU approved andwhat mechanisms the EU used in the norms’ regional diffusion.After a brief historic review on the EU’s recent enlargements, we concluded that,the EU’s norms regarded eternal peace as its core idea and believed to realize thatultimate goal by three ways, i.e., forming common security through sovereign transfer;establishing civil societies through legal and democratic institutions; building maturemarket economy. Following that, we focused on the EU’ three transmit mechanisms tospread the EU’s norms above. Specifically, the EU succeeded in rational calculationmechanism by offering rewards and triggering peer competitions among candidatestates. Secondly, under role restriction mechanism, according to candidates’ identityof “EU member-to-be”, the EU was entitled to apply union legislations to them and totrigger social influence and peer pressures to make target courtiers adapt to newnorms. Thirdly, the EU also made full use of framing, contacting and teachingmethods in the persuasive constitution mechanism, so as to realize cognitive changefrom a logic of consequences to a logic of appropriateness.Though the EU did a good job in norms internalization in Central and EasternEurope, it still faced serious problems in spreading norms, especially when the EUwanted to promote them worldwide. From the value perspective, the EU believed inEuropean egotism, discriminated against non-European civilizations and furtherdeveloped strong expectation in a universal European model. In practice, the EUnorms were value-oriented rather than problem-oriented. And it did not pay enoughattention to target countries’ local conditions and dynamic responses. In all, there wasmuch room for the EU to improve its efficiency to spread the EU norms.