Positioning as Normative Actors:China and the EU in Climate Change Negotiations

Abstract

This article focuses on the communication tools employed by the EU and the People's Republic of China to project themselves as normative actors and their construction of specific role conceptions in the context of global climate change negotiations. The empirical spine of the article consists of a discourse analysis of 134 documents released by the EU and China on the issue of climate change and climate change negotiations between the 2008 Copenhagen and the 2015 Paris climate summits. The findings are that both the EU and China go to great lengths to position themselves as responsible global citizens, employing relatively consistent framing devices. Not only are the findings interesting when it comes to EU and China identity-building as foreign policy actors; they also hint at more generic parameters along which the role of normative actor is constructed.