Depoliticising the people: post-normative power Europe in the women-led protests in Belarus

ABSTRACT On the ninth of August, 2020, mass protests broke out across Belarus following the undemocratic election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Lukashenka responded swiftly to the protests with extreme violence and repression, and as the protest movement, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, called for the EU to intervene, the EU’s response was notably restrained. In the context of the EU’s values-centred articulation of its subjectivity, as a normative power that has a responsibility to the world beyond its own borders, this discrepancy between articulation and praxis raises questions about the current state of normative power in EU foreign policy discourses. This article will draw on Ernesto Laclau, Aletta Norval, and Jenny Edkins to investigate the discursive structures that construct the EU’s subjectivity as a foreign policy actor in the crisis in Belarus, discuss the meaning of articulating the crisis as a ‘women’s movement’, and explore how the EU justifies its chosen response in relation to the severity of the crisis.