Normative Power Europe and EU-Vietnam Relations: A Case Study of the EU’s Promotion of Sustainable Development in the EU-Vietnam FLEGT VPA

This thesis examines the EU’s normative power in the context of EU-Vietnam relations, specifically the EU’s promotion of sustainable development norms in trade negotiations, and the factors conditioning the outcome of this process. Ian Manners (2002) stated that the EU could be conceptualised as a normative power or a “changer of norms in the international system” (Manners, 2002, p. 252). Based on Manners’ (2002) claim and taking the relational aspect of norm diffusion into consideration, this thesis argues that the EU’s ability to change norms is affected by the external receptions of the EU’s norm promotion. Countries such as Vietnam are not simply passive recipients of EU norms or pressure. The responses of the EU’s partners to normative pressure include adoption, adaptation, resistance, and rejection as outlined by Björkdahl et al. (2015). The reception of EU norms is tested in this thesis through a case study of the EU-Vietnam Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Voluntary Partnership Agreement (FLEGT VPA), with a focus on the negotiation phases from 2010 to May 2017, to reveal the challenges the EU confronted in diffusing its norms to a non-passive norm recipient such as Vietnam. The EU’s use of normative power to change, and ideally improve, Vietnamese timber production and processing includes regulating imported timber’s legality and civil society participation, both of which are selected by the author as important aspects of the sustainable development norm promoted by the EU. The data for this study was collected based on document analysis and interviews with Vietnamese and EU elites who were involved in the FLEGT VPA negotiations.
This thesis finds that Vietnam rejected and then persistently resisted the EU’s promotion of civil society participation through this FLEGT VPA negotiations, which demonstrates the limits of normative power Europe. On the contrary, the EU effectively promoted its regulations on verifying the legality of imported timber, leading to Vietnam’s adaptation to the EU’s requirement between 2016 and December 2022 despite Vietnam’s initial rejection from 2010 to 2015. This illustrates the EU’s role as a normative power being able to change norms in international relations. EU-specific factors including the EU’s (in)coherence, (in)consistency, and the power asymmetry between the EU and Vietnam as well as location-specific factors comprising of Vietnam’s domestic context and interest are the key drivers behind these outcomes of the EU’s norm promotion.