This article examines Ian Manners’ idea of a ‘normative power Europe’. While discussing moral and political forms of normative power, it calls particular attention to a sociological approach based on Weberian ideas about status and social closure. The article then compares the present-day ‘normative power’ of the EU with the earlier European ‘standard of civilization’, and argues that the contemporary EU’s normative power rests on a more individualist and credentialist form of social closure. This may make it less vulnerable to criticisms of imperialism, but may also make it harder for the EU to retain its relatively privileged position in the generation of international norms and a coherent sense of its own identity.