Leonard Schuette

Maastricht University | UM · Department of Political Science

While international organizations (IOs) have played a central role in global governance in the post-Cold War period, during the last decade many have struggled. Due to the rise of populism, the Trump Presidency, and the renewed assertiveness of the emerging powers, various IOs have been challenged in ways that put their ability to perform core func...

Various international organizations have recently faced legitimacy crises, but many have demonstrated resilience and relegitimated their rule. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is an exception. It is clearly an organization in decline and is on the brink of irrelevance. The closure of its Special Monitoring Mission to U...

Multilateralism is in crisis. States increasingly contest, undermine and even withdraw from international organisations and other multilateral institutions. Challenges emanate not only from emerging powers but also from established Western states and civil society. No other actor but the EU is more intimately entangled with multilateralism. This ar...

Debates about different visions for the future international order are often abstract and theoretical. By invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the clash of competing visions a brutal and deathly reality. The Munich Security Report 2023 explores intensifying authoritarian revisionism and the growing contest between different v...

The Trump administration posed an unprecedented challenge to many international organisations (IOs). This article analyses the ability of IOs to respond and explains variation in the survival strategies pursued by their institutional actors. It argues that leadership, organisational structure, competences and external networks affect whether instit...

This article analyses how and when institutional actors can shape overlap with other international organisations. Growing overlap either poses the threat of marginalisation to the incumbent organisation or offers opportunities for cooperation. Institutional actors should therefore be expected to try shape the relations with the overlapping organisa...

The election of Donald Trump posed an existential challenge to NATO. At the end of his tenure, however, the US president had neither withdrawn membership nor substantially undermined the alliance from within. This article helps explain the puzzle of why NATO survived Trump's presidency. Extant explanations emphasize domestic factors such as the US...

This article explains why the European Union has remained strikingly cohesive during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations by focussing on the role played by its negotiator: the European Commission'’s Task Force 50. The analysis demonstrates that the Task Force 50 set out to forge unity among the EU27 by exercising both subtle instrumental and direct...

Although European integration has become an increasingly salient and controversial topic in domestic politics, the consequences of this politicisation of the European Union for the integration process have not received adequate scholarly attention. To fill this lacuna, this article devises five hypotheses on the effects of politicisation for the in...

The European Union is undergoing a metamorphosis. The founding member states consciously designed the predecessor of the EU as a technocratic body. After the calamities of the Second World War, postwar leaders were convinced that the only way to forge compromise and dovetail their economies was to do so out of the sight of national politics. Follow...

Embedded within the wider normalization–continuity debate about the nature of Germany’s actorness, this article assesses the impact of collective memory on German foreign policy during the European refugee crisis. The Federal Republic’s open-door policy in autumn 2015 bewildered many observers who saw it as a self-harming act of charity. Based on a...