PhD defence: Tiffany G. Williams

PLATO Early Stage Researcher Tiffany G. Williams defends her doctoral thesis Selling Normative Power Europe: Analyzing the unexpected outcomes of the European Union's normative power in the South Caucasus on 25 January 2022.

Tiffany G. Williams, PhD candidate at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) will defend her PhD thesis Selling Normative Power Europe: Analyzing the unexpected outcomes of the European Union's normative power in the South Caucasus at the University of Vienna on 25 January 2022.

Register for the digital defence via the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences.

Supervisors

  • Guido Tiemann, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna
  • Johannes Pollak, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna
  • Colin Hay, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po, Paris

Doctoral committee 

  • Patrick Müller, University of Vienna
  • Jozef Bátora, Comenius University
  • Christopher Lord, ARENA, University of Oslo
  • Johannes Pollak

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the European Union (EU)’s evolving strategy to transform the South Caucasus using its discursively constructed approach to Europeanization. Interpretations of this Europeanization as “Normative Power Europe” (NPE) conceptualize the EU as a civilian-oriented ‘normative’ power. They theorize that normative power combines two logics of action common in norms-based research, the Logic of Appropriateness and the Logic of Consequence. The cases I examined demonstrate that those logics do not adequately explain the breakdowns in the EU’s intended normative power structure. Instead, for the Eastern Partners in the South Caucasus, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, the driving force behind partnership development is the Logic of Attraction.

I show how the EU discursively adopted and promoted the NPE concept in its Europeanization strategy for deep and comprehensive regional transformation. This was based on the belief that countries will voluntarily comply with the EU’s normative conditions, thus acclimating to EU standards, if offered the right incentives. However, the voluntary nature of this exchange exposes that normative power is dependent on compliance, yet lacks enforcement measures.

Furthermore, I explain that the realities of sustainable regional transformation were underappreciated. The Eastern Partnership’s ambitions constitute the entwined de- and reterritorialization processes, which require stable, secure hegemony. My dissertation demonstrates that the EU does not uniformly possess or wield such power. Nevertheless, I show how following the Logic of Attraction can realize the mutual exchange and cooperation Eastern Partners prefer.

I examine Normative Power as Hegemony through a critical constructivist theory perspective that can best account for the examined partnerships’ actual power structures. Given the discursive strategies used to shape and justify power-seeking behavior, I treat discourse as a practice of power. In order to examine how the evolving power structures unfold in discourse, I employ a discourse-historical approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, also using process-tracing applications to distinguish and map patterns that expose persistent beliefs and explain behavior.

Published Jan. 23, 2022 3:26 PM - Last modified Jan. 23, 2022 10:13 PM