Preaching norms, perverting law, and trading arms: Palestine as a litmus test for “normative power Europe”
Abstract
“Europe lost its soul in Gaza,” Josep Borrell remarked, capturing a profound moral and normative crisis in the EU’s self-image as “Normative Power Europe”. This article argues that Gaza operates as a revealer: it exposes the collision between the EU’s proclaimed commitments to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, and its external practices that sustain a partner implicated in mass atrocities. Focusing on arms transfers and EU —Israel economic relations, the article demonstrates how legal obligations— triggered by the International Court of Justice’s 2024 finding of a plausible and imminent risk of genocide in Gaza and its advisory opinion declaring Israel’s presence in the OPT a violation of peremptory norms, particularly the right to self-determination—are not merely ignored. Rather, they are narrowed, reinterpreted, and redeployed through discursive and institutional practices that reproduce what Imseis terms “legal subalternity”: Palestinians are formally recognized as rights-holders while structurally denied the protections those rights entail. This widening gap between norms and action erodes EU credibility, particularly across the Global South/Global majority, and reframes the EU from a toothless bystander into a complicit actor.
Received: 19 January 2026
Accepted: 9 February 2026
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