The European Union Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Impossible Mission of Peace Building
- Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate the European Union peace-building mission
towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. It follows Manners (2002) conceptualisation of
the Union as a normative power and its ability to shape international standards,
diffuse universal norms and values, change other’s behaviour patterns and attitude. As
a counterbalance, the paper shall make use of the structural realist critique to the
concept of normative power Europe. The paper analyses the EU’s involvement and
instrument deployment in the conflict using Tocci’s (2008) three-dimensional
framework of normative foreign actor in order to determine the normative aspects of
the EU foreign and security policy in respect to the conflict. The results of this
research show that the Union is inconsistent in pursuing its normative goals in the
conflict. Furthermore, despite the Union’s normative basis and norms promotion, it it can hardly be considered as a normative foreign actor.