The international norm–practice relationship, contested states, and the EU’s territorial (un)differentiation toward Palestine and Western Sahara

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship—and incongruences—between international norms and practices in EU foreign policy with a particular focus on the EU’s dealing with situations of contested statehood resulting from foreign occupation. To this purpose, we revisit the literature on the international norm–practice nexus, dynamics, and mismatches—including debates on hypocrisy—and we conceptualize territorial (un)differentiation from the perspective of both norms and practices. We then examine the extent to which and how normative change and practical change have taken place, and mutually interacted, in the EU’s territorial (un)differentiation toward Israel–Palestine and Morocco–Western Sahara. We draw on the scholarship on the international norm life cycle, which we also replicate as an analytical framework to empirically track the processes of emergence, cascade, and internalization of practices. Based on our case studies, we argue that, while emerging EU territorial differentiation toward Israel–Palestine has resulted from a process in which normative change and practical change have become entangled in a feedback loop, and the norm–practice gap has tended to be closed, in the case of Morocco–Western Sahara there has been substantial normative change but practices have remained unaltered, which has led such gap—and the perception of EU hypocrisy—to widen.