‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. This provocative statement by Albert Einstein informs this survey of the innovative and increasingly popular field of European Union (EU) external perceptions. In this chapter we argue that both systematic accounts and a nuanced awareness of how the EU is perceived by its external counterparts advance the scholarship of EU foreign policy and international identity. The focus on EU perceptions accentuates the role of international receivers in foreign-policy outreach adding to the conceptualisation of EU international influence and impact in a changing, multipolar world. We argue that a new field of EU external perceptions has emerged bridging studies of the EU’s actions and capabilities in the field of foreign policy (Smith 2002a) and the EU’s international and foreign-policy identity (Cederman 2001; Smith 2002b; Elgström and Smith 2006; Lucarelli 2006; Lucarelli and Manners 2006). The latter cluster has been strongly influenced by Manners’s Normative Power Europe (NPE)(Manners 2002). Defined as the peaceful power of ideas and values distinctly different from the power of economic or military coercion, this interpretation of the EU had a powerful appeal for practitioners and scholars of European integration. Characteristic of the NPE approach is its intense focus on the sender of the normative messages. The focus on the recipients who reacted towards the norms remains a peripheral concern. This oversight is of particular interest because it has attracted attention, in a general way, to the cultural filters amongst the EU’s international interlocutors. These filters can lead to various reactions towards the EU, from acceptance of its normative messages to rejection. The concept of the cultural filter was for Manners ‘based on the interplay between the construction of knowledge and the creation of social and political identity by the subjects of norm diffusion’(2002: 245).