European Union: a Conditioned Normative Power , the campaign against death penalty in China and the Philippines

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to demonstrate that the European Union s power variation, both in terms of nature puissance- and in terms of power exercised pouvoir, is the variable that best explains the EU s success or failure in a specific area of its human rights policy: the campaign against the death penalty. This analysis will lead to the definition of the European Union as a Conditioned Normative Power (CNP) in the global system, a revisitation of the classic concept of Normative Power Europe elaborated by Manners (2002). After and extensive literature review on the concept of power and on the EU's forms of power, this work focuses on two Asian countries China and the Philippines, chosen because the most dissimilar cases form many reasons including the entity of their bilateral relations with the European Union, the proportion of the use of death penalty, and the current position toward capital punishment (abolition/maintaining). The two empirical cases studied are compared to identify the independent variables that drive two different outcomes (abolition/maintaining) in relation to the dependent variable. i.e. the European Union s normative power.