Exporting Peace? The EU Mediator’s Normative Backpack

• Department of Law

The January Law Department faculty seminar will be a discussion of Professor Sarah Nouwen's paper.

At the occasion of the launch of the European Law Open, this article engages with two policy documents of the European Union on its ambitions in peace mediation to think about what it could mean for European Law to be open to the world. Reading these documents – ‘the Concepts’ - through the lens of the theme of this opening issue - ‘Europe in the world’ - one discerns an outward-looking EU, searching for a greater role on the international political and diplomatic stage. One also immediately sees instances of eurocentrism: a set of assumptions about the superiority of European (or ‘Western’) ways of knowing and doing. In these Concepts, the EU envisages sending EU mediators into the world – either to mediate themselves or to support mediation efforts by others.

The Concepts also contain increasingly long lists of EU values to be carried along and distributed during peace mediation. But the Concepts do not consider that in the countries where the EU mediator arrives, this backpack filled with normative baggage may come with other associations. Without more explicit recognition of this obstinate baggage, the EU is unlikely to be welcomed as a peace mediator. And without more reflexivity about its own assumptions about it role in the world, past and present, Europe, including its law, is unlikely to be truly open to the world.