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Review of:

Values and Principles in European Union Foreign Policy edited by S. Lucarelli, I. Manners
Routledge, Abingdon, 2006
Pages: xvi+254. £65.00

Reviewed By: John O'Brennan
Reviewed in: Journal of Common Market Studies
Date accepted online: 02/11/2007
Published in print: Volume 45, Issue 2, Pages 515-533
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Book Reviews

In recent years, studies of European Union foreign policy activities have increasingly highlighted the importance of the normative dimension of the European integration process. This multidisciplinary volume contributes to that literature by focusing on Pillar I and Pillar II policies and on how the process of identity construction within the EU has been shaped just as much by external policy as by purely internal politics. Specifically the volume analyses the values, principles and images (VIPs) which help constitute the EU as an international actor; in doing so, it draws on the growing literature that frames the EU as (variously) a 'civilian', 'ethical', 'gentle' or 'normative' power in the world of international politics. Thus unsurprisingly the core values the book highlights include human rights and freedom of expression, democratic and representative government and the centrality of the rule of law. The core image of the world that helps transform values into principles is the liberal internationalist image of a Kantian actor - liberal, peaceable and committed to Groatian principles of regulation and international law.

Setting out the volume's overarching theoretical frame of the EU as a contemporary integrative space and polity, Ian Manners examines the constitutive nature of the values, images and principles which inform how the EU behaves in the international arena. The VIPs which manifest themselves in those behavioural patterns are not just rhetorical or symbolic (and thus hollow); neither are they an expression of purely material attachments or ambitions. The EU really is different, as constructivist scholars of the integration process assert and really is pre-disposed to act in a normative way in its international activity. This is largely because it has evolved in a way which has facilitated the embedding of these core values, images and principles in its own self-representation and consequently in its foreign policy 'output'. And even if, as Knud Erik Jorgensen points out in his chapter, the VIPs identified in the volume are frequently contested and contestable (both in real world political activity and in scholarship), such VIPs constitute the primary cognitive repository which EU actors drawn on in contemplating what the EU is and should do in the world of international politics. In broadening the focus of EU external action and delivering a coherent and organically linked collection of chapters, the volume makes a valuable dual contribution to contemporary understandings of the European Union.