‘Normative power Europe’ meets economic liberalism: Complicating cosmopolitanism inside/outside the EU

Introduction: normative power Europe as ‘characterisation’ and ‘approach’

The concept of normative power Europe (NPE) is an enigmatic and elusive one, which, since Ian Manners (2002) introduced it to re-consider EU foreign policy, has been deployed in a variety of ways and garnered numerous followers and critics alike. We argue in this article that, broadly speaking, NPE has been used for two distinct purposes. First, it offers a particular characterisation of the EU in contrast to preceding characterisations of the EU as a power in international affairs. Thus, especially in his early work on the concept, Manners’s aim is to move the debate beyond the state-centric Cold War international relations thinking inherent in both Bull’s calls for a ‘military power’ Europe and Duchêne’s depiction of Europe as a ‘civilian power’ (Bull, 1982; Duchêne, 1972, 1973). ¹ As Manners (2002: 239) says, ‘[o]ne of the problems with the notions of civilian and military power is their unhealthy concentration on how much like a state the EU looks’. Moreover, they stand accused of privileging ‘physical power in the form of actual empirical capabilities’ (2002: 238). Manners, conversely, argues that the EU’s role in the world is not as state-like as these positions claim. He argues that the EU has promoted ideas and norms effectively outside the EU – explicitly in its foreign policy and implicitly through serving as a ‘model’ ² – even in the absence of economic and military material capabilities. It has been able to do this because it represents a hybrid, post-Westphalian entity which has inside – among its own member states – assured a sustainable peace. In short, it is the EU’s own cosmopolitan features that render it a normative power in world politics and that make its own norms attractive from an external perspective, and this is something to be celebrated. As Manners says, ‘the EU should act to extend its norms into the international system’, and ‘[t]he ethics of the EU’s normative power are located in the ability to normalize a more just, cosmopolitical world’ (Manners, 2008: 67).

Second, in certain representations NPE appears as paradigmatic. In other words, it is presented as an approach to the study of Europe, and the norms that it projects in its external policies, that draws on a combination of a critical social theory and reflexive normative international theory. Indeed, Manners (2011, 2007) recently claimed that NPE has facilitated an engagement with such theory in mainstream EU studies, describing it as ‘a transdisciplinary approach to European Studies’ (Manners, 2009). Here NPE serves as an appeal to a largely positivist mainstream EU studies to recognise the normative bias that is inherent in any particular approach to social studies, including an ostensibly ‘scientific’ approach. Following from this – and in apparent tension with the first characterisation of NPE – it also serves as a plea, it would seem, to be more circumspect with respect to celebrating the positive normative reality of the EU. As Manners says,

[a] normative power approach rejects …. temptations to unreflective and uncritical analysis. Instead it aims to contribute to a better understanding of what principles the EU promotes, how the EU acts, and what impact the EU has by attempting both to analyse and to judge the EU’s normative power in world politics.

Or elsewhere,

[b]y invoking the idea of EU normative power, I have attempted… to argue that being ‘normative’ in world politics involves constantly asking what do we mean by claims of being ‘normative’? Whose political community is served by such claims? And how might we be critical of such claims of normativity?

In this role, NPE is not straightforwardly a virtuous object to be celebrated, but rather an approach to be deployed within and to guide a critical analysis of the EU.

In short, in these two senses NPE has encompassed both a celebration of the EU as ontological reality and a critical ontology, which recognises that the realities and norms propagated and promoted by the EU are plural and contingent social constructions. Hereafter, for shorthand, these positions are referred to as NPE ontological reality (NPE-OR) and NPE critical ontology (NPE-CO), respectively. ³ Temporally, it seems that Manners, the critical international relations scholar (NPE-CO), has launched a valuable critique of the deleterious effects of militarist sovereign practices, deploying and celebrating a post-Westphalian, cosmopolitan normative power EU (NPE-OR) as an exemplary case. But later – perhaps as a consequence of certain orientations in EU foreign policy and generous engagement with critics of NPE-OR – that same critical scholar has shown more explicit circumspection with respect to the emancipatory potential of the EU in world politics and has perhaps returned to an NPE-CO position. These two ontological positions mirror opposing positions in a broader critical international relations theory literature between those promoting a liberal cosmopolitan order in the confrontation with sovereignty, on the one hand, and a range of broadly constructivist and post-structural positions which adopt a deconstructive approach to the question of sovereignty, and also to those liberal cosmopolitan positions that are recommended in its place, on the other. At one level, we set out to show in this article how these positions might work together in practice, even though they are incommensurate in theory. This involves adopting the NPE-CO approach while acknowledging the NPE-OR position as a contingent intervention in a political debate, aimed at performatively privileging those features of the EU which might challenge the violence of prevailing sovereignist norms.

Nevertheless, at the current juncture in European and global politics, we believe that it may be particularly important, in adopting an NPE-CO approach, to expose to critique the supposed normative value of a post-Westphalian EU. From an international relations perspective, critics of cosmopolitanism in general and NPE-OR in particular have highlighted the EU’s proximity to or its tendency to reinvent aspects of the juridical sovereign rationalities that an NPE-OR claims that it has overcome. They have emphasised the ways in which a post-Westphalian ‘legal cosmopolitanism’ ironically reproduces certain Westphalian features in its enactment. More concretely, it is claimed that the ostensibly universal legal cosmopolitan values promoted by the EU in fact originated in the particular context of the European sovereign nation-state, which is now simply reproduced beyond itself. ⁴ In short, these positions tend to adopt an NPE-CO position to question the post-Westphalian virtues of NPE-OR by highlighting its close proximity with a statist rationality of government.

We attempt to take this critique further by highlighting a somewhat surprising blind-spot in the understanding of the EU’s constitutional characteristics within NPE-OR. In particular, drawing on a critical political economy perspective, we argue that both NPE-OR and many NPE-CO positions overlook, or at least underemphasise, the constitutive importance of economic liberalism – what is termed here ‘market cosmopolitanism’ – and the impact of this inside/outside the EU. Thus, we attempt to contribute to the NPE-CO position by introducing into this debate the idea that economic liberalism is a central constitutive norm which has given the EU its post-Westphalian character.

We are not, of course, the first to identify the importance of economic or market principles inside/outside the EU. Most classic theories of integration, of both functionalist and intergovernmental orientation, have in common an emphasis on the importance of an economic liberal rationalist ontology in driving integration and, indeed, in constituting interdependencies in international relations more generally (see, for instance, Haas, 1958; Moravcsik, 1998, 1997). More recently, theorists have explicitly traced the importance of different strands of economic liberalism in the genesis and ongoing constitution of the EU (see, for instance, Gill, 2003; Maes, 2002). ⁵ And Damro (2012) has emphasised the way in which the importance of economic liberalism inside is reflected in its external policies outside. The novelty in the argument lies, however, in its identification of the normative, ideological or ostensibly ethical dimension of an economic liberalism. We coin the term ‘market cosmopolitan’ to emphasise the import of an economic liberalism in cosmopolitan theory and practice more generally. In highlighting the normativity or ideological content inherent in an ostensibly rationalist liberal theory, we also implicitly problematise a common distinction between the strategic/material and the normative/ideational, which has been so central to discussions of foreign policy in both international relations in general and in relation to the EU (for a similar critique, which focuses on Moravcsik’s liberal theory of international relations, see Jahn, 2009).

Drawing in particular on Foucault’s work on economic liberalism (Foucault, 2008), we seek to complicate the image of a cosmopolitan EU presented by NPE-OR, describing and demonstrating the ambiguous relationship between a legal and a market cosmopolitan EU, both inside and outside. In identifying an ‘ambiguous cosmopolitics’, we wish to both contribute to the body of literature on NPE-CO and offer a subtly different perspective on the ethical worth of the EU inside or outside (see also, Parker, 2012a, 2012b). We argue that, to the extent that NPE is ethically valuable, it is not because of its post-national or post-Westphalian status per se. Rather, it is to the extent that it continues to embody an ontologically plural reality, never entirely defined, that NPE may be of ethico-political value. In other words, it is to the extent that it is a space where NPE-CO is always already possible that the EU might be celebrated.

The argument proceeds in three sections. In a first step we briefly enunciate the core liberal characteristics that constitute, for Manners, an NPE-OR describing some of the critiques of these characteristics which adopt, broadly speaking, the aforementioned NPE-CO approach. Such critiques emphasise the ways in which the ostensibly post-Westphalian characteristics of NPE-OR can in practice reproduce the distinctly Westphalian characteristics that they profess to overcome. In a second step we argue that both NPE-OR and NPE-CO critiques of it neglect to engage with the constitutive significance of economic liberalism to cosmopolitan theory and, in particular, the constitutive importance of a market cosmopolitanism in the establishment of the post-Westphalian reality celebrated by Manners. In a third step we enunciate the normative basis of a market cosmopolitanism and describe its connection with Manners’s core liberal characteristics of NPE-OR. We argue that from an NPE-CO perspective we ought to be cautious in celebrating NPE-OR as a post-Westphalian reality to the extent that it is rooted in a market cosmopolitics. We conclude by elucidating and tentatively celebrating the aforementioned ‘ambiguous cosmopolitics’.

Cosmopolitan EU and its critics

The characterisation of Europe as a normative power in international affairs represented in part an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which norms and ideas have themselves embodied the ‘power’ of the EU in international affairs. That is to say, these norms and ideas have not relied, for their uptake by various outside others, on the ‘physical power’ of a military or an economic variety. The EU, Manners argues, has been peculiarly predisposed to shape conceptions of ‘the normal’ in international affairs in a non-coercive fashion as a consequence of its own status as post-Westphalian or post-sovereign peace project. Crudely, the EU and its antecedents have gradually overcome the security dilemmas that plagued Europe from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century via the adoption of certain core values or characteristics which have, in turn, led to peace among its member states. Thereafter those values have been projected by the EU – as an actor in international affairs or passively as a distinctive model for post-Cold-War international affairs (Bickerton, 2011: 26–27; Manners, 2008: 45) – and taken up because of their inherent irenic value. In other words, relations among states within the EU have been ‘domesticated’ and therefore the EU might be in a unique position to domesticate international relations more generally. Manners, it should be noted, does not claim that strategic, material or physical aspects of EU power are non-existent; rather he seeks to demonstrate how alternative, normative and ideational aspects of EU power have been relevant and generally understated.

What are these irenic constitutional principles that predispose the EU to act as a normative power both within and beyond itself? In his 2002 article, Manners pointed to the EU treaty base and its emphasis on liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. More recently, Manners (2008) has specified nine substantive normative principles at the heart of EU foreign policy: ‘sustainable peace’, ‘social freedom’, ‘consensual democracy’, ‘associative human rights’, ‘supranational rule of law’, ‘inclusive equality’, ‘social solidarity’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘good governance’. These can be characterised as liberal principles, rendered cosmopolitan to the extent that they increasingly trump any specific concerns of sovereign states that may conflict with them and are, in theory at least, increasingly advocated and upheld in transnational and European jurisdictional spaces. Manners, for instance, emphasises the commitment in the Treaty on European Union to the European Convention of Human Rights and the United Nations Charter. The EU is thus predisposed towards forms of multilateralism that uphold these liberal values within and beyond the EU. Certainly, as Manners argues, the EU has sought to integrate its concerns with these issues into its foreign policies and has been bound in this by its own constitutional basis. Thus, NPE comes into focus as what we term a legal liberal ontological reality writ cosmopolitan: a legal cosmopolitanism. As Eriksen (2006: 253) has said, ‘it is only by subjecting its actions to a higher ranking law – to human rights and criteria of justice – that the EU can qualify in normative terms’.

Of course, even as NPE-OR comes into focus as incorporating, embodying and projecting the above principles, the debate over what these principles mean and their prioritisation is far from concluded. In other words, even as we equate NPE-OR with a cosmopolitan EU, there is a significant margin for debate over what a cosmopolitan EU is and should be. As Manners (2007) has highlighted, there is a lively debate within EU studies – mirrored in debates in what he terms a ‘classical political theory’ – over the extent to which a cosmopolitan EU is primarily about rights, plural inclusion, deliberation and so forth, and the relationships among these various concepts. Indeed, given the slipperiness of the terms ‘normative’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, it is hardly surprising that such a debate has ensued. That said, notwithstanding these important debates, the notion that the EU could or should be viewed as normative/cosmopolitan has garnered a significant degree of support within and beyond academia. Such popularity ought to be viewed in context. As Bickerton has noted, this argument chimed with many post-Cold-War analyses in international relations that sought to challenge a delimited realism with reference to the claimed realities of globalisation and the supposed emergence of a ‘global civil society’. This perhaps also explains the uptake of NPE in the rhetoric of European policy makers and institutions (Bickerton, 2011: 27; Mayer, 2008; Scheipers and Sicurelli, 2007). From this perspective, Manners’s presentation of NPE-OR can be understood as an attempt to draw on the image of a post-Westphalian, post-national, sui generis EU in support of the performative enactment of foreign policy as more than a set of delimited sovereign interests. Manners has acknowledged this intent in his work: ‘[w]hen I say “normative”, I mean that I want to change things – human conduct and international practice – I do not accept either the way world politics is, or theories that seek to maintain the status quo’ (Manners, 2007: 118).

Nevertheless, as a number of critics of NPE-OR have highlighted, even if we accept the legal cosmopolitan ontological basis put forward by Manners, it is difficult to sustain the claim that this is unambiguously virtuous. For one thing, any such conclusion would permit an uncritical complacency – at odds with NPE-CO – with respect to the subjectifying effects of the ‘normal’ that are propagated through these universalising characteristics. It detracts our attention from the concrete effects of an ostensibly normative foreign policy (Diez, 2005). For instance, deploying Foucault, Merlingen has argued that the norms associated with a virtuous liberal EU are very much ‘Janus faced’. Using Foucault’s terminology, this is not to say that NPE is ‘bad’, but NPE, like everything else, is ‘dangerous’ (Merlingen, 2007: 449). More concretely, while the promotion of universal human rights may well empower certain local individuals and groups, close examination of particular cases reveals for Merlingen that its concrete enactment has often delimited the agency of such groups to the extent that the policies enacted have failed to respect particular circumstances. From this perspective, power and government – terms that are virtually synonymous for Foucault – inevitably designate a ‘normal’ that is to the exclusion of a range of ‘abnormal’ others. This is even the case for an ostensibly pluralist, deliberative, inclusive liberal cosmopolitanism as soon as it becomes a policy or governmental programme.

This relates to a point made by Diez that the very representation of NPE-OR establishes a moral hierarchy drawn in geopolitical terms. The representation itself does important work and is part and parcel of its power. If Merlingen’s critique is exemplified with reference to particular cases at the micro level, Diez’s critique also functions at the macro level. As he says, NPE-OR ‘constructs an identity of the EU against an image of others in the “outside world”’ (Diez, 2005). It casts the EU as morally superior vis-à-vis a variety of ‘others’, particularly a strategic, militarist USA, but also an array of actors that fail to operate in accord with the constitutional features enunciated above. This relates to Merlingen’s central point inasmuch as it ‘has important implications for the way EU policies treat those others, and for the degree to which its adherence to its own norms is scrutinised within the EU’ (Diez, 2005: 614). As Merlingen notes, EU agents may at times promote ostensibly ‘European’ norms and values at the expense of local norms and customs even where those European norms are not settled or unambiguously upheld within the EU space (Merlingen, 2007: 446–449). In short, the complacency of NPE-OR could in both theory and practice permit a degree of hubris with respect to the conceptualisation of ‘best practice’ to be pursued outside and its palpable flaws and inconsistencies inside (for similar arguments, see Bickerton, 2011; Hyde-Price, 2006; Sjursen, 2006). From this perspective, the differences between NPE-OR and a civilian power or ‘civilising’ – even ‘orientalising’ (see Fisher Onar and Nicolaidis, 2013) – EU are perhaps not as great as Manners claims or, indeed, would like. In theoretical terms, popular distinctions between cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches in international relations similarly begin to break down (Brown, 1992; Cochran, 1999; Manners, 2007).

Characterising these critiques, we might say that they embody an NPE-CO perspective that focuses on the potentially exclusionary side of these characteristics, which encapsulate NPE-OR at both micro and macro levels. Such critiques mirror post-structural critiques of cosmopolitan theory within international relations more generally: the accusation that cosmopolitan theory might be culpable in the reinvention of sovereign-imperialist rationalities of government even as it seeks to tackle nation-state sovereignty (Brassett and Bulley, 2007). Indeed, there is an important irony in the presentation of NPE-OR as a celebration of a ‘post-Westphalian’ reality. The features celebrated by NPE-OR can be conceived as originating within the political theoretical imaginary of nation-state citizenship. Thus, consider the four core features identified by Manners (2002): (1) liberty, (2) the rule of law and (3) human rights can be conceived as having been established via a ‘social contract’ between ‘citizens’ and ‘government’ which is constitutive of and constituted by (4) democracy. Freedom in this conceptualisation is freedom guaranteed by government. To deploy Foucault’s (2008) terminology, we can say that a ‘subject of right’ – a post-national citizen – is promoted beyond borders. In practice, of course, Europe has sought to transnationalise citizenship within EU-ropean space, and, in theory, cosmopolitan theorists have, citing the emancipatory potential of this ‘constitutionally patriotic’ subjectivity, called for the further spatial expansion of its reach (see, for instance, Linklater, 1996).

The important point for present purposes is that a cosmopolitan EU and sovereign-statist EU – in other words, a post-Westphalian and Westphalian EU – are not easily separated; the former often slides into the latter and vice versa. More generally, it is not uncommon for scholars of different persuasions from different sub-field starting points to argue that the proper accomplishment of post-Westphalian status for the EU involves, as of necessity, the emergence and enhancement of Westphalian attributes such as a authoritative centre, institutionalised government/opposition politics, a governable economic space and some form of fiscal/welfare bargain (see, inter alia, Bartolini, 2005; Hix, 2008; Rosamond, 2012; Weale, 2005; Wincott, 2006). This irony is captured in the way in which NPE-OR claims to ‘normalise’ or ‘domesticate’ an ‘extraordinary’ or ‘exceptional’ international domain: the way in which it, ironically, renders the international state-like. As a range of post-structural and post-colonial critiques have argued in the face of such cosmopolitan ambitions, the global citizen-subject is always, inevitably, produced at the expense of a host of ‘others’. While, as enunciated below, we do not wish to reject the potential contingent importance of the promotion of this cosmopolitan citizen subject, these critiques are certainly important and effective in highlighting the tensions in that very subjectivity. This is a tension, at root, between the universal and the particular.

Economic liberalism and the constitution of a post-Westphalian EU

While, as noted above, many NPE-CO critiques of NPE-OR tend to, with reference to a range of empirical cases, point to a potentially exclusionary side of the cosmopolitan ontology identified by Manners – in short, its propensity to re-invent certain sovereign violences and promote an exclusionary citizenship – they do less in terms of highlighting an alternative ‘normative’ basis for an extant NPE-OR. But, if we take seriously the blurring of the lines between normative and other characteristics, then we can take the critique of NPE-OR further by drawing attention to the limits that it places on ‘the normative’. In particular, attention is drawn to the fact that a central aspect of the EU’s liberal character – its economic liberal character – has been relatively neglected in this literature. This is surprising inasmuch as the regulation of a transnational market is such a (if not the) central facet of the EU inside or outside. Perhaps more significantly for present purposes, it is surprising to the extent that an economic liberalism has been central in the constitution of the EU as the post-Westphalian, post-national or cosmopolitan entity that is NPE-OR.

Legal and economic liberalism are, as Foucault (2008) has suggested, rooted in ‘two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one [discussed in the previous section] based on the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed.’ Consequently they require and promote heterogeneous ideal subjects: a ‘subject or right’ and a ‘subject of interest’ (Foucault, 2008: 42). We want to argue that an economic liberalism, rooted in a conception of freedom and based on the independence of the governed, has been just as significant (if not more so) in the constitution of a cosmopolitan EU – and the features enunciated as consistent with NPE-OR – as a legal liberalism rooted in the imaginary of social contract of the sort discussed in the previous section. As the first President of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein (1972), stated, ‘[t]he basic law of the European Economic Community is liberal. Its guiding principle is to establish undistorted competition in an undivided market.’ Indeed, there are strong grounds to argue that the EU represents one of the most sustained projects of market making in the present period and that its dominant governance modus operandi involves, as a priority, the provision of conditions for a functioning market order.

As the consolidated treaties make clear, the primary areas of (exclusive) EU competence are the provision of competition rules for an internal market, the latter premised on the existence of a customs union (Art 3, 1 (a) (b)). ⁶ From an economic liberal standpoint, a valid single market can only operate with two key components in place: a common external tariff and an active competition policy. The former guarantees that no single member-state can acquire competitive advantage by applying differential tariffs to extra-EU imports at the national border, whereas the latter exists to prevent the distortion of competition and the emergence of monopolistic behaviour amongst firms within the EU. Indeed, four of the five exclusive competences assigned to the EU by the treaties are consistent with economic liberal constitutive principles (the others, in addition to the management of the customs union and the provision of competition rules for the internal market, are the operation of a common commercial (trade) policy and monetary policy for those member states using the euro as a common currency). That these policy competences are encased within the broader set of (legal) liberal constitutive principles identified by Manners is not, we concede, insignificant. For one thing, economic liberal precepts are not central to the framing communicative sections of the treaties, which seek to articulate the purposes of European integration. Yet economic liberal tools are evidently seen as the primary means by which these broad (liberal) aims are to be achieved. And that, we further suggest, is not insignificant. Indeed, we argue that this produces a tension that is integral to what we term the EU’s ‘ambiguous cosmopolitics’ (Parker, 2012a, 2012b).

The dominance of market liberal principles/methods in the Treaties, the consolidated acquis and the operation of the single market has recently led Damro (2012) to develop an argument on behalf of an alternative/complementary mode of power – ‘market power Europe’ – that can be seen as a direct rival to the interpretation of the EU as a normative power. Indeed, it might be argued, and this is Damro’s point, that ‘market power’ – the externalisation of internal market policies – is the EU’s dominant method of external action and is premised on core features of the EU’s identity (a large regulated market (see also, Majone, 1996)). Damro’s argument is also significant because he finds evidence of the externalisation of the EU’s market/regulatory regime being imposed coercively; the normative status of these regimes is not necessarily recognised in many cases. The counter-argument to this move to consider market power would, as suggested, probably consist of the argument that it infringes the basic definition of what is ‘normative power’. Economic considerations are associated with civilian power and a strategic rationality. They would seem to take us beyond the domain of what Manners identifies as NPE. In that sense, a market cosmopolitanism might be regarded as yet another ‘other’ of NPE-OR as conceived by Manners. Indeed, he alludes to this distinction in passing when he says that, ‘[a] cosmopolitan emphasis on promoting universal values runs the risk of entangling itself in the neoliberal culture of capitalism’ (Manners, 2011: 245). However, it is far from easy to sustain distinctions between strategic (including ‘capitalist’) and normative motivations in either theory or practice. Drawing variously on Robert Cox (his now ubiquitous ‘theory is always for someone…’ (1981)) and Molly Cochran (1999), Manners has himself, from an NPE-CO perspective, highlighted the always already normative element contained in any social scientific theory or associated political position (Manners, 2007: 116). Concurring with this approach, we want here to specifically emphasise that the entanglement of cosmopolitan universal values and a ‘neoliberal culture’ is always already present in the EU’s ambiguous cosmopolitics.

Indeed, in the European context the making of markets can be regarded as a central constitutive feature of the cosmopolitan, post-Westphalian NPE-OR identified by Manners, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged. As we have said, whereas a legal cosmopolitan NPE (rooted in a legal liberalism) ironically risks returning us by stealth to a Westphalian reality, a market cosmopolitan NPE (rooted in an economic liberalism) is perhaps that which has constituted and continues to constitute its post-Westphalian character. Whereas a legal and economic liberalism (and various shades of both) have fought it out in the history of integration, an economic liberalism has been central to the constitution of the EU as post-Westphalian in the sense that such a rationality has been a key driver of processes – ‘Europeanisation’, ‘globalisation’ – through which governance transcends traditional nation-state jurisdictional boundaries. In particular, a German post-war ‘neo-’ or ‘ordoliberalism’ – broadly promoted by key figures such as Hallstein – played an important role in the negotiation and subsequent interpretation (by, inter alia, the European Court of Justice) of the Treaty of Rome, and such ideas continue to be central to the negotiation of the relationship between government and markets in the European Union (including in the context of ongoing debates over monetary politics) (Berghahn and Young, 2012; Dullien and Guérot, 2012; Gerber, 1994; Maes, 2002). What Foucault (2008) calls the post-war German ordoliberal ‘reversal’ in the relationship between the market and state – whereby the state was increasingly placed under the supervision of the market rather than the converse – has been particularly significant in the ongoing constitution of a post-Westphalian European reality. It has allowed markets to be discursively and statistically produced as unbounded, post-national and, in particular, ‘European’ (Rosamond, 2002, 2012). Thereafter, states have handed market governance functions (and sovereignty in certain areas) to transnational and (in the case of the EU) supranational authorities (Parker, 2012b).

To be clear, this does not mean the absence of government or even limited government. As Foucault notes, ‘[g]overnment must accompany the market economy from start to finish’. The market economy does not take something away from government. Rather, it indicates, it constitutes the general index in which one must place the rule for defining all government action. ‘One must govern for the market rather than because of the market’ (Foucault, 2008: 121). In contemporary Europe, such government can be visualised spatially as a multilevel governance patchwork of layered and overlapping jurisdictions (Hooghe and Marks, 2003) or even as a ‘neomedieval’ empire (Zielonka, 2006). For current purposes, the key argument is that a market cosmopolitan rationality cannot be easily divorced from the post-Westphalian reality celebrated by Manners or a range of international relations scholars seeking to come to grips with a post-Cold-War world.

An ambiguous cosmopolitics in/for Europe

It is important to emphasise that the ordoliberal reversal was not itself without an important normative impulse. The ordoliberals were concerned with the question of how to use the concept of economic freedom and competitive free markets as the very foundation for a post-war German state. Foucault argues that in post-war Germany there was a political expediency to the deployment of an economic rationality; the German state required a uniting idea, in addressing both its own people and its political partners, that was not rooted in any traditionalist statist conception, which had proved so damaging in the guise of National Socialism (Foucault, 2008). Arguably, a similar logic played out at a European level. Indeed, this link between the establishment of markets and the preservation of order and peace was acknowledged and promoted in the 1950s by the founding fathers of the European Communities, whose promotion of a common market was part of a broader process of promoting prosperity and a sustainable peace among previously warring nations (Duchêne, 1996; Monnet, 1976; Schuman, 1950). Whereas certain ‘founding fathers’, such as Monnet and Schuman, appeared to foresee something like a gradual ‘spillover’ from an economic liberal to a social contractarian or legal liberal logic at the supranational level (even a European federal state), from an ordoliberal perspective the reinvention of a Westphalian reality – the reinvention of social contractarian values beyond the nation-state – was something to be approached with caution. Contemporary (neo)liberal theorists in European studies would seem to implicitly support such a normative agenda in their rejection of the arguments of those who cry ‘democratic deficit’ and their defence of a largely technocratic regulatory politics at European level (see, for instance, Majone, 1998; Moravcsik, 2002). This is to go further than Damro (2012), who sustains the distinction between NPE and ‘market power Europe’ – and an associated distinction between the ideational and material – emphasising the importance of the latter relative to the former. We argue here that the promotion of market principles can be regarded as very much part of a normative agenda, in which ‘the normative’ refers to criteria for ethical judgement.

Moreover, a market cosmopolitan Europe is not simply the condition of possibility for the NPE-OR characteristics specified in Manners’s 2002 piece. It can also be regarded as the very basis of such characteristics. Thus, these are considered in turn, but now from the perspective of an economic liberalism: (1) such a rationality certainly requires and promotes a form of liberty, as freedom from government and particularly from the state, which, according to such a rationality ought not to intervene in the market or in the lives of individuals qua market actors; (2) it is consistent with and requires certain human rights. In particular, economic competition is often underpinned by rules of non-discrimination (on all grounds other than economic, including national). Moreover, a market rationality can support a wide range of civil and political rights to the extent that these ensure autonomy from government in economic affairs – an ostensibly ‘open’ society; (3) it may be consistent with a pluralist or deliberative vision of democracy to the extent that the state is emasculated and civil (and market) society is promoted. This may be a distinctly non-majoritarian or Madisonian form of democracy, which promotes the delegation of authority to independent economic and social regulatory authorities as a means of guaranteeing competitive markets in the face of the potentially deleterious effects of political factionalism (Majone, 1996); and (4) as the ordoliberals explicitly recognised, the economic game itself clearly rests on the rule of law (an ‘economic constitution’), particularly in terms of guaranteeing private property rights and regulating market competition (and, in particular, preventing tendencies towards market concentration that might, if left unchecked, undermine the very normative basis of the free market). This is not so much law-as-contract between state and ‘subject of right’/citizen as it is a law that restrains the state from interfering with ‘subject of interest’ as market actor. Indeed, according to this view of a market liberal cosmopolitanism – traceable through certain tendencies of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant – the characteristics identified as central to NPE-OR can be regarded as both for the market and the consequence of the market.

In this sense, the ‘entanglement’ of cosmopolitanism and capitalism referred to by Manners may be always already present within the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism itself. The characteristic features of NPE-OR can and have been recruited in the cause of both market and legal cosmopolitan rationalities of government. For current purposes, it is important to emphasise that these characteristics of NPE-OR can be conceived as the consequence of economic liberal rationalities rooted in a conception of freedom as ‘freedom from government’. It is no coincidence in this respect that ‘capitalists’ or ‘bourgeois liberals’ have been frequent champions of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Consider, for instance, the contemporary significance of George Soros’s ‘Open Society Institute’ in the enlarged EU (for a thoughtful critique of Soros’s activities, see Clark, 2 June 2003). More generally, consider the emergence of so-called ‘global civil society’, which was heralded in the era of post-Cold-War ‘end-of-history’ triumphalism but is arguably a central aspect of a contemporary neoliberal governance regime (Lipschutz, 2005). In short, there may be, as many 18th-century liberals emphasised, a co-constitutive character to market society and a civil society of citizens (Ferguson and Oz-Salzberger, 1995).

However, while there are clearly significant overlaps in the substantive values and associated policy orientations promoted through legal and market cosmopolitan rationalities of government, Manners is not entirely incorrect to allude to a tension between a legal cosmopolitan vision of NPE-OR and a ‘culture of neoliberal capitalism’ (herein a market cosmopolitanism). This is rooted in the ontological tension referred to above: the notion that these rationalities are based on and promote quite distinct notions of freedom and commensurate subjectivities. As such, each of these governmental rationalities will contingently promote human rights and ostensibly democratic structures to the extent that they serve to promote their commensurate subjectivities. For instance, a market cosmopolitan government constituted by and constitutive of ‘subjects of interest’, while not permitting various sorts of discrimination, may rely upon discrimination along economic lines – the generation of economic inequality – in the sense that economic differences underpin a system of economic competition (Donzelot, 2008). A legal cosmopolitan government, constituted by and constitutive of a ‘subject of right’, may sometimes view such inequality as detrimental to a solidarist or socially cohesive citizenry and seek to ameliorate it through various redistributive policies – in rights discourse, through the enactment of various social and economic rights. Moreover, a market cosmopolitan government does not unambiguously support fundamental freedoms. It may oppose those freedoms to the extent that they are understood to facilitate resistance to a market rationality itself: to the extent that fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, association, assembly and so forth are deployed (for instance, by trade unions or, in recent times, the ‘occupy’ movement) for the purpose of championing a redistributive politics or even posing difficult questions with respect to the institution of private property. A legal cosmopolitan government may oppose such rights to the extent that they are deployed in ways which are understood as undermining a solidarist citizenry. It may, for instance, at times conceive of the equality of solidarist citizenship as ‘sameness’ and therefore be more predisposed than under conditions of a market rationality to tolerate or even be complicit in discrimination on grounds of minority identity; in rights discourse, it may contingently infringe upon minority rights because a social contractarian and sovereign-securitising logic may be mutually supportive (Foucault, 2003).

Legal and economic liberalisms variously overlap and conflict in extant cosmopolitan governmental agendas. Each is a condition of (im)possibility of the other. As Foucault (2008) has noted, a legal and market liberal rationality – and associated civil and market society – exist in an inherently ambiguous relationship:

[T]he bond of economic interest occupies an ambiguous position in relation to these bonds of disinterested interests [in civil society] which take the form of local units and different levels… Formally…civil society serves as the medium of the economic bond… [But], while it brings individuals together through the spontaneous convergence of interests, it is also a principle of dissociation… with regard to the active bonds of compassion, benevolence, love for one’s fellows, and a sense of community, inasmuch as it constantly tends to undo what the spontaneous bond of civil society has joined together by picking out the egoist interest of individuals, emphasising it.

It is such an ambiguity that allows Brown to claim that ‘while liberal democracy encodes, reflects, and legitimates capitalist social relations, it simultaneously resists, counters, and tempers them’ (Brown, 2003). The point, as we have noted, is that the principles of liberal democracy can contingently champion two distinct notions of freedom and associated subjectivities: freedom from government and a subject of interest, which animates market or capitalist social relations and freedom guaranteed by government, and a subject of right, which may resist and temper those relations. These two subjects might seem to converge at certain moments in time, but, to the extent that they rest on fundamentally different and incommensurate ontologies, such convergence is always better visualised as an eclipse, whereby one conceals and excludes the other. Considering liberalism in this holistic way encourages a critical sensitivity to any partial eclipse: a sensitivity to the tendency of either a legal or an economic liberal logic to universalise or totalise those identities that it identifies and promotes. More concretely, in assessing any ostensibly liberal normative policy pursued by the EU inside or outside, it is important from an NPE-CO perspective to assess the particular conception of freedom – and associated conception of the subject – that is prioritised or favoured. Given that both a legal and a market cosmopolitan government are at play at any given time, this will be a matter for contingent ethico-political negotiation and judgement (Parker, 2012a: 172–182).

Remaining cognisant of the constitutive role of economic (neo)liberalism in the EU – in the context of the NPE debate, introducing a critical political economy to what is essentially a critical international relations debate – may certainly impact on the nature of such a judgement. As we have said, Manners’s NPE-OR responds primarily to the exclusionary effects of sovereignty by rejecting attempts to conceive of EU in statist terms and celebrates the post-Westphalian features of the EU. While Manners certainly does not explicitly associate these features with an economic (neo)liberalism – indeed, he may, as his critics suggest, in fact reproduce certain Westphalian features – to the extent that a post-Westphalian reality has been sustained in Europe, this has, we have argued, been achieved via a market cosmopolitanism of the sort elucidated above. Evidently a preoccupation with the exclusionary effects of that very same economic (neo)liberalism will make for a very different ethico-political judgement. Indeed, it has led some to argue for the reinvention of the EU as a (solidarist, social contractarian, sovereign) nation-state (for such an argument see, for instance, Habermas, 2001). We would argue that contingently both of these market and legal cosmopolitan positions are important in/for Europe in terms of the critiques that they make of the other and in terms of the ethical judgements that they entail. But, we would maintain, of more fundamental normative importance is the juxtaposition of these positions’ underlying conceptions of freedom and an acknowledgement of their ambiguous relationship. Such a juxtaposition leads to the realisation that ‘today’s chains are often forged from hammers which struck off yesterday’s’, while an acknowledgement of their ambiguous relationship means that, crucially, ‘[these] chains might, with luck, get a little lighter and more breakable each time’ (Rorty, 2006: 57).

Conclusion

It has been suggested in this article that Manners’s notion of NPE has been used to two distinctive ends. First, it has been deployed to characterise an ethically or normative valuable EU and its role in world politics: it has been deployed to establish the EU as a virtuous legal cosmopolitan ontological reality (NPE-OR). This is particularly evident in Manners’s own early work on this concept, which confronted, in particular, the statist thinking of those seeking to identify the EU as a military or civilian (economic) power. Second, it has been deployed as a post-positivist approach to European studies that is cognisant of and sensitive to the always already normative aspect of any theory or policy and its potential ethical violence; this is NPE as critical ontology (NPE-CO). As we have noted, such an approach has been deployed by critics of NPE-OR, but it has also emerged in Manners’s later work. As he says, an NPE approach focuses on, ‘the origins of particular principles, their translation into actions and the impact and consequences of those actions’ (Manners, 2011: 244). This seems to describe precisely the methodology of those who have critiqued NPE-OR. They have highlighted the fact that the origins of those principles celebrated as NPE-OR may in fact lie within the very nation-state model that those principles are heralded as surpassing. In other words, they highlight the way in which a supposedly post-Westphalian or cosmopolitan reality is in fact in very close proximity to a Westphalian sovereignist rationality.

Developing from an NPE-CO perspective, our central contribution has been to highlight the importance of an economic liberalism which has been neglected by both proponents of NPE-OR and its critics. Such neglect is surprising because an economic liberalism has, in the form of what we have called a ‘market cosmopolitanism’, been so central in constituting the post-Westphalian reality celebrated by Manners. In making this claim, we have sought to complicate NPE-OR and thereby complicate the potential breadth of critique from NPE-CO. With reference to Foucault, we have demonstrated that the core characteristics of NPE-OR can be variously promoted and challenged in the cause of two distinct conceptions of liberty – freedom ‘guaranteed by’ and freedom ‘from’ government – and in the enactment of two distinct political subjectivities – subjects of ‘right’ and ‘interest’ – which correspond, respectively, to a legal and economic liberalism. We have pointed to an important ambiguity in liberalism and, by extension, in the liberal cosmopolitan EU, which is rooted in the relationship between these liberal rationalities. We have argued that, while each of these represents the condition of possibility of the other, they are at once the condition of impossibility. From this perspective, it is not the EU’s post-Westphalian identity per se that constitutes it as normative power; rather it is the presence and sustenance of this liberal cosmopolitan ambiguity that renders an NPE-CO in theory and practice always already present.