EU as a Normative Power on Development? The EU, China and Turkey at the G20

It is a known fact that the EU has difficulties promoting its values at various fora created for the global governance of a constantly increasing number of issues. Most of the time, this situation can be briefly described as ‘challenges to European values in global governance’. This paper will focus on one specific forum among many of those, and one particular issue to present a very detailed analysis of the values and priorities of a few selected partners: It will focus on how the EU and its non-European partners in the G20 approach issues of development. It will take the last three presidencies of the G20, which were led by Turkey, China and Germany, and analyse how issues regarding poverty, human security and prescriptions for development have been handled during these three very diverse presidencies. The research for this purpose will be based on different types of documents prepared during each Presidency, and will use a discourse analysis method. The paper will present a comparison of these Presidency documents with the EU documents on each of these subjects. This comparison will display the differences in the approach adopted by each of these partners (Turkey and China) on these issues. Such an analysis will enable us to map the differences in the value-systems of these actors as well as their priorities between the issues concerned. Such a detailed analysis of issue-specific and content-based documents produced within the G20 will help explain, in a solid example, the difference in the value systems that challenge European positions in global governance.