Catching Up in Times of Crisis? - Understanding the discourses of Normative Power in the European Commission’s 2022 Standardisation Strategy

Abstract: Historically being a success to the European Union and its integration processes, technical standardisation has been a dormant policy area low down on the European Commission’s agenda priority list – until now. The increasing international competition has arguably spurred the Commission to push for speedy developments in standardisation to establish the EU once again in a leading position, thus effectively hindering other actors and regions from exerting too much influence over Europe through their development of standards. Seeking to deepen the understanding of how the Commission aims to make changes in the area of standardisation and how European integration could be driven by crises, this thesis adopts a Normative Power perspective when analysing the latest large policy document issued in the area: the 2022 Standardisation Strategy. The Normative Power approach is applied because of the policy area previously not having been examined through this lens to a large degree in the literature. The thesis operationalises the nine norms from the Normative Power Europe framework through definitions and expressions provided by the United Nations, in order to analyse and explain the Strategy from a Normative Power standpoint with a global perspective. Working with a sequential mixed methods approach, the analysis begins with a two-step content analysis for data collection moving onto a discourse analysis analysing this data. The analysis found that the Standardisation Strategy communicates discourses belonging to the norms of good governance and sustainable development to a significantly higher degree than the other seven norms from the framework. However interestingly, norms such as democracy and human rights are also referred to even though the policy area is economic in nature, largely focusing on the industry and its stakeholders.