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<p>This article investigates how European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discursively reconciles the European Union’s (EU) self-proclaimed identity as a “normative power” with its adoption of the securitized “de-risking” strategy towards China. Employing Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) framework of practical argumentation, this study analyzes nine key speeches delivered by von der Leyen between 2023 and 2025. The analysis reconstructs the argumentative structure underpinning the de-risking narrative and identifies its core circumstantial, value, and goal-mean premises. This reveals a manipulated discursive mechanism that navigates the tension between normative ideals and geopolitical imperatives. Specifically, the research demonstrates how von der Leyen’s rhetoric strategically modulates threat narratives, reconfigures EU values as conditional preconditions for cooperation, and recasts defensive security measures as necessary instruments for upholding a rules-based international order. This article argues that the EU’s de-risking discourse cannot be simply regarded as a retreat from the EU’s normative identity, but rather a strategic reconstruction of its normative identity for geopolitical imperatives, which is packaged as the so-called “strategic-normative power.</p>

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Reconciling normativity and geopolitics: analyzing von der Leyen’s de-risking discourse from a practical argumentation perspective

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月12日

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  • Jinsong Fu,
  • Min Yang

摘要

This article investigates how European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discursively reconciles the European Union’s (EU) self-proclaimed identity as a “normative power” with its adoption of the securitized “de-risking” strategy towards China. Employing Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) framework of practical argumentation, this study analyzes nine key speeches delivered by von der Leyen between 2023 and 2025. The analysis reconstructs the argumentative structure underpinning the de-risking narrative and identifies its core circumstantial, value, and goal-mean premises. This reveals a manipulated discursive mechanism that navigates the tension between normative ideals and geopolitical imperatives. Specifically, the research demonstrates how von der Leyen’s rhetoric strategically modulates threat narratives, reconfigures EU values as conditional preconditions for cooperation, and recasts defensive security measures as necessary instruments for upholding a rules-based international order. This article argues that the EU’s de-risking discourse cannot be simply regarded as a retreat from the EU’s normative identity, but rather a strategic reconstruction of its normative identity for geopolitical imperatives, which is packaged as the so-called “strategic-normative power.