Strategic Approach to the Role of Normative Power and its Instruments in Eu Foreign Policy in the Digital Age: 2010–2025

Abstract

The European Union is redefining its normative power identity in the digital age by integrating value-based foreign policy with strategic instruments. This article examines how the Union employs digital regulatory tools (General Data Protection Regulation, Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act) and external norm diffusion mechanisms to generate normative effectiveness in foreign policy during the 2010–2025 period, analyzing under which conditions and through what processes this occurs. The theoretical framework combines normative power approach with social constructivism and strategic autonomy concepts to analyze the production, transmission, and internalization processes of digital norms. The research employs qualitative document analysis method, examining strategy documents, regulations, and international declarations published by the European Commission, European Parliament, and European Council through thematic content analysis. Findings demonstrate that the Union has influenced digital legislation in approximately one hundred and fifty countries by utilizing market leverage, discursive legitimacy construction, and co-design mechanisms. The General Data Protection Regulation has played a determining role in recoding global data protection standards, while the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act have established a global reference framework for platform regulation and competition policies. However, the Union's normative impact varies depending on conditions such as third actors' market dependency, intra-Union institutional coherence, and the intensity of global power competition. China's digital authoritarianism model and the United States' technological dominance strategy emerge as external factors constraining the Union's normative power capacity. The study reveals that normative power has transformed into forms of epistemic control and infrastructural hegemony in the digital age, and that the Union's effort to develop strategic instruments while preserving its value-based identity creates a structural tension between normative consistency and strategic flexibility. The article proposes developing indicators for measuring normative effectiveness, examining comparative normative competition dynamics, and empirically investigating norm internalization processes in third countries.