Eu’s normative power in its dialogue with China: free trade norm in shifting global economic order.

This paper explores Eu’s engagement toward China in a context of a shifting global economic order. It seeks to explain the resilience of Eu-China strategic partnership despite growing salience of a systemic rivalry between both actors. The framing of China as a systemic rival to EU tends to be considered as a shift of paradigms in EU policy. Such a standpoint offer poor explanatory force for the remaining dialogue dynamics and its late outcomes such as Comprehensive Agreement on Investment and coordination in battling Covid-19. This paper aims to reach an explanation by considering Eu-China socialization process. It relies on desk research and a diachronic discourse analysis of the socialization process; data collection encompasses EU policy paper and EU-China Annual Summit (EC-AS) joint statements. Findings of the analysis permit to consider systemic rivalry and strategic partnership as similar outputs of the same socialization framework. Furthermore, this research delivers a new analytical framework to comprehend systemic rivalry and its impact in a post-pandemic context. This paper opens the floor for a research agenda focusing on normative power, instead of great power relations, to understand EU's foreign policy. Finally, it emphasizes that socialization processes precede material realities in the building of foreign policy.