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The show must go on: The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions since 2016

March 2023
JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies

DOI:10.1111/jcms.13466

Project: The Decline and Death of International Organisations (ERC)

Authors:

Leonard Schuette

Maastricht University

Hylke Dijkstra

Maastricht University

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 article therefore reviews to what extent and how the EU has actively sustained multilateral institutions since 2016. It identifies three types of mechanisms: the defence, reform and extension of multilateral institutions. Based on interviews with senior officials in the EU institutions and the member states, the article finds that the EU has proven to be rather successful in temporarily defending existing institutions. However, it largely failed to reform multilateral institutions and extend multilateral institutions to new areas. In doing so, the article contributes to our understanding of the EU as a foreign policy actor and the processes of the crisis of multilateralism.

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The show must go on: The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral

institutions since 2016

LEONARD SCHUETTE and HYLKE DIJKSTRA

Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands

Abstract

Multilateralism is in crisis. States increasingly contest, undermine and even withdraw from inter-

national organisations and other multilateral institutions. Challenges emanate not only from emerg-

ing powers but also from established Western states and civil society. No other actor but the EU is

more intimately entangled with multilateralism. This article therefore reviews to what extent and

how the EU has actively sustained multilateral institutions since 2016. It identiﬁes three types of

mechanisms: the defence, reform and extension of multilateral institutions. Based on interviews

with senior ofﬁcials in the EU institutions and the member states, the article ﬁnds that the EU

has proven to be rather successful in temporarily defending existing institutions. However, it

largely failed to reform multilateral institutions and extend multilateral institutions to new areas.

In doing so, the article contributes to our understanding of the EU as a foreign policy actor and

the processes of the crisis of multilateralism.

Keywords: crisis; European Union; international organisations; multilateralism; reform

Introduction

Multilateralism is in crisis (Lake et al. 2021). Russia’sattackonUkrainereﬂects not only a

ﬂagrant disregard for multilateral norms, such as the peaceful settlement of disputes, but it

has also intensiﬁed great power competition and undermined multilateral cooperation. Mean-

while, China continues to pursue mercantilist trade policies, while eroding human rights law

and building alternative institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. But

threats to the multilateralism also emanate from the West. Donald Trump’s America First ex-

empliﬁed unilateralism with severe consequences for speciﬁc multilateral institutions, in-

cluding NATO, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Paris Climate Agreement.

The United Kingdom left the European Union (EU) and Japan the International Whaling

Commission. Almost inevitably, multilateral institutions are increasingly ‘gridlocked’(Hale

et al. 2013), thus unable to produce adequate solutions to pressing global problems.

Multilateralism means that three or more states cooperate based on ‘generalised princi-

ples’that should apply to all states regardless of their particularistic interests (Ruggie 1992,

p. 571). In the long term, successful multilateralism should generate ‘diffuse reciprocity’

(Keohane 1986), whereby states mutually beneﬁt and more than had they engaged in ad

hoc bilateralism or hierarchical forms of coordination. The contemporary crisis of multilater-

alism pertains both to its substantive and procedural nature (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Barcelona Workshop on Global Governance (16–17 May 2022) and

the conferences of the European Union Studies Association (Miami, 19–21 May 2022), the ECPR Standing Group on the

European Union (Rome, 8–10 June 2022), and the Dutch Political Science Association (Nijmegen, 16–17 June 2022). We

thank all the participants for their great feedback.

JCMS 2023 pp. 1–19 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13466

Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

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Hofmann 2020). For one, states no longer agree on the generalised principles that should un-

dergird cooperation. Liberal principles, such as open trade, cooperative security and univer-

sal human rights, are heavily contested as a result of greater ideological diversity and power

shifts away from the West (Ikenberry 2020, 33ff; Voeten 2020). For another, amid growing

nationalist tendencies in many established democracies and great power competition,

rules-based cooperation across regions as such is in jeopardy.

The crisis of multilateralism is critical for the EU. As the most advanced multilateral

institution itself, the EU is the main beneﬁciary of the limited multilateral post-1945 order

and particularly the more extensive post-1989 multilateral order. Protected by the US se-

curity umbrella, the military feeble but economically liberal EU proﬁted from the growing

interconnectedness and legalisation of international relations based on the generalised

principles of open trade and cooperative security (Ikenberry 2020). The crisis of multilat-

eralism is therefore of critical consequence for the EU as its very existence is bound up

with the multilateral order. The EU has long recognised this in its various strategies in-

cluding the 2016 Global Strategy, the 2021 Joint Communication on multilateralism

and the 2022 Strategic Compass (e.g., Barbé and Morillas 2019; Biscop 2005;

Dijkstra 2016; Sus 2021; Tocci 2016). As the 2019 ﬁnal review of the EU Global Strategy

aptly notes ‘[f]or the EU the stakes are sky high […] our Union has a vital interest in

being the centre of gravity of the work to promote and protect multilateralism

globally’(2019, p. 15).

Preserving multilateralism therefore represents a key strategy for the EU to prosper and

survive, yet scholarly analyses of the EU and the crisis of multilateralism remain surpris-

ingly limited. Scholars have studied extensively how the EU routinely participates and

performs in multilateral institutions (Da Conceição-Heldt and Meunier 2014; Jørgensen

et al. 2011; Laatikainen and Smith 2006; Marx and Westerwinter 2022; Wessel and

Odermatt 2019) and how it projects its internal standards to the rest of the world

(Bradford 2020). Research has therefore focused on how the EU has carved out a multi-

lateral role for itself, but the present crisis requires the EU to change strategy and sustain

multilateralism and its institutions.

This article analyses empirically to what extent the EU has actively tried to sustain key

multilateral institutions since 2016. The focus is thus on the institutions that underpin

multilateralism rather than multilateral norms or principles more generally. Although in-

dividual member states’initiatives are touched upon, the article concentrates on the

EU’s collective actions, that is, the efforts initiated by or channelled through the EU insti-

tutions such as the European External Action Service. This follows the logic that the EU

as a multilateral institution not only has more potential to lose from the crisis of multilat-

eralism than individual member states but also that European initiatives are more likely to

be effective when undertaken collectively. The year 2016 offers a suitable starting point

because it marked an inﬂection point in global governance. Following the successful

adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement on Climate

Change and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran all in 2015, the

Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump in 2016 as well as China’s increasingly

visible assertive efforts to change the multilateral status quo hailed a new era. The article

relies on a review of the literature, publicly available sources, including ofﬁcial docu-

ments, complemented by 10 interviews with senior EU and member state ofﬁcials to trace

the EU’s perceptions of and responses to the crisis of multilateralism.

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra2

Ltd.

The article ﬁnds that although senior EU policymakers felt the need to proactively sus-

tain multilateral institutions, it nevertheless was not until the spring of 2019 that the EU

started adopting keynote strategies on multilateralism. Thenceforth, the EU was in ‘sur-

vival mode’(Interview #3) to defend existing multilateral institutions to maintain the in-

stitutional status quo. In doing so, the EU emancipated itself from previous constraints

and engaged in extraordinary behaviour compared with its usual routines in IOs, includ-

ing openly challenging its erstwhile patron the United States and partnering with a variety

of other states. The EU has been less active, however, in reforming multilateral institu-

tions and extending multilateral institutions to new areas. The EU entered a survival

mode, not a transformation mode. The article starts with the mechanisms of how the

EU can sustain multilateral institutions before discussing the empirical evidence and

reﬂecting upon the wider implications.

Sustaining multilateral institutions: Three mechanisms

The crisis of multilateralism is an expression of the broader crisis of liberal international or-

der, which is intensely debated by scholars. Although there is disagreement on how deep this

crisis runs (e.g., Ferguson and Zakaria 2017;Ikenberry2018;Mearsheimer2019;

Rose 2017), even the optimist Ikenberry (2018) notes that ‘[t]hese are not happy times for lib-

eral internationalists’(abstract). In a special issue of the journal International Organization,

Lake et al. (2021) similarly write that although the liberal international order ‘has proven re-

silient in the past …this time might be different’(p. 225). For them, internal threats, resulting

from domestic actors contesting the authority of international institutions, and external

threats, such as the rise of China and other authoritarian states, ‘come together in a major chal-

lenge to the principle of multilateralism and to core multilateral institutions’(p. 243). Al-

though the scholarship on the crisis of the liberal international order is impressive, it pays lim-

ited attention to the protagonists of multilateralism. By studying to what extent the EU has

actively tried to sustain key multilateral institutions, this article therefore contributes to this

much larger debate in International Relations.

So what can the EU do to sustain multilateral institutions? There is no shortage of lit-

erature on how the EU and its member states coordinate and perform within multilateral

institutions. As the EU gradually developed its external relations proﬁle, scholars have fo-

cused on ‘intersecting multilateralism’(Laatikainen and Smith 2006) where the EU inter-

acts with and participates in multilateral institutions (e.g., Da Conceição-Heldt and

Meunier 2014; Jørgensen et al. 2011; Marx and Westerwinter 2022; Wessel and

Odermatt 2019). Research is extensive, yet it largely concentrates on how the EU has tried

to progressively develop multilateralism as well as on its efforts and constraints to de-

velop into a foreign policy actor. Although the study of ‘actorness’is useful to understand

routine EU behaviour, the crisis of the multilateralism has forced the EU into an excep-

tional survival mode in which different logics apply. With notable exceptions of think

tank reports (e.g., Dworkin and Gowan 2019), scholars have not studied these efforts.

Combining recent advances in the literature on the resilience of international institutions

with our longer-standing knowledge about EU actorness in those institutions, this article

identiﬁes three mechanisms through which the EU may sustain multilateral institutions.

The ﬁrst mechanism for the EU is to defend existing multilateral institutions. This

mechanism builds on the understanding that multilateral institutions have a degree of

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 3

Ltd.

agency separate from their member states (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Hawkins

et al. 2006; Pollack 2003). As they are actors in their own right, multilateral institutions

can try to resist (or ignore) external pressures, particularly when they come under direct

contestation by a key member state(s) (e.g., Debre and Dijkstra 2021; Hirschmann 2021;

Schuette 2021a; Dijkstra et al. 2022). Multilateral institutions are not alone when trying to

resist such challenges (Dijkstra 2017): They can rely on like-minded actors, including

other member states, NGOs and also the EU. The EU, as a key stakeholder, can support

other multilateral institutions in fending off such pressures. Manifestations include plug-

ging budgetary gaps, establishing provisional arrangements to overcome momentary

blockades, resisting attempts to capture the institution, using coercive means to deter or

sanction violations of key multilateral norms, making side payments to dissatisﬁed mem-

bers and launching a public diplomacy campaign to defend the institution. Defending

multilateral institutions, for the EU, thus implies a short-term, tangible response to main-

tain the institutional status quo.

The second mechanism for the EU is to help reform existing multilateral institutions to

adapt them to a changing environment. This builds on a general insight in organisational the-

ory that organisations ultimately need to adjust to survive, as they draw upon their environ-

ment for essential resources (Aldrich 1999, p. 194). Compared with defending institutions,

reforming them is a more complex and longer-term undertaking (e.g., Nielson and

Tierney 2003; Barnett and Coleman 2005; Lipscy 2017). Reform may help multilateral insti-

tutions overcome gridlock and become more effective. It may also be a way to strategically

coopt emerging powers (Kruck and Zangl 2020) and satisfy challengers (Hirschmann 2021)

resulting in the survival of multilateral institutions. Although reform initiatives can come

from multilateral institutions themselves, the EU, once again as a key stakeholder, has the

ability to spearhead and support multilateral reform efforts (cf. Brooks and Wohlforth 2009,

on the US support for reform efforts of multilateral institutions in a previous decade). To drive

reform efforts, the EU can provide support to the leadership of key multilateral institutions,

build coalitions with new partners, support appointees from underrepresented parts of the

world, engage in public diplomacy to make the case for institutional reforms or provide nec-

essary resources to replace a former key member state. However, such efforts place the EU in

a reform dilemma. On the one hand, the EU cannot risk that challenger states become perma-

nently alienated and engage in counter-institutionalisation or systematic non-compliance. On

the other, the EU disproportionally beneﬁts from the institutional status quo. Reforms are

likely to entail concessions of previously enjoyed privileges and also risk incentivising others

to challenge multilateral institutions (see Jurado et al., 2022).

Third, the EU can also help to extend multilateral institutions to previously ungoverned

areas. Part of the crisis concerns the general perception that the multilateral institutions are

not keeping up with growing global problems (Hale et al. 2013), which fuels calls to re-

sort to unilateralism or strategic bilateralism instead. Given the emergence of a plethora of

new global governance challenges—such as pandemic responses and vaccine distribu-

tion, digital taxation, regulation of AI, digital currencies and cyber security or the

prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons—providing effective multilateral answers

can therefore reinforce the principles of multilateralism (e.g., Haner and Garcia 2019;

Cihon et al., 2020; Wenham et al. 2022). Indeed, states have to make key institutional

choices when new issues arrive on the international agenda (Jupille et al. 2013). This in-

cludes expanding the mandate and scope of existing multilateral institutions (Hall 2016;

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra4

Ltd.

Hooghe et al. 2019; Koremenos et al. 2001) and establishing new institutions. Stagnation

in light of new challenges effectively implies a decline of multilateral institutions (Debre

and Dijkstra 2022). The EU has an intrinsic interest in showcasing the beneﬁts of multi-

lateral institutions to counteract trends towards competitive multipolarity at the expense

of principled cooperation. Manifestations of extending multilateral institutions

spearheaded by the EU include launching new initiatives to close governance gaps within

or outside existing institutions and building new coalitions with states or non-state actors.

It also involves providing diplomatic capital and public diplomacy to make such new gov-

ernance arrangements realities.

Defending, reforming and extending multilateral institutions are therefore three mech-

anisms. Although logically distinct, the EU can use them in parallel, for instance, by fram-

ing reforms as necessary to ‘save’a multilateral institution. The EU and its member states

possess, in this respect, important levers to pursue these mechanisms in support of multi-

lateral institutions including through the collective EU institutions in Brussels and EU

delegations. Europeans have long been central actors in the multilateral institutions and

occupy central positions in an array of IOs, including the UN Security Council or the

IMF (see Wessel and Odermatt 2019, for an overview). Member state diplomatic services

tend to be well resourced and connected in the world, whereas the EEAS has strong net-

works in IOs and has increased the coherence of EU foreign policy writ large (see

Blockmans and Wessels 2021; Spence and Bátora 2015). The EU and its member states

are also pivotal funders of IOs’regular budgets and extra-budgetary activities (see below),

which grants them outsized inﬂuence. And the size of the EU’s internal market and the

concomitant market power gives the EU enormous leverage in shaping global regulatory

governance and foreign policies of dependent states (Bradford 2020; Velluti 2020).

At the same time, however, internal and external factors can constrain the EU’s strate-

gic capacity to sustain multilateral institutions. Internally, the EU needs to forge an inter-

nal consensus on most external actions not only among heterogeneous member states, in

which EU external action is increasingly politicised (Biedenkopf et al., 2021), but also

among the array of EU institutions involved in foreign policymaking. Doing so requires

effective leadership either by senior institutional actors in the Commission or EEAS or

key member states (Amadio Viceré et al. 2020; Helwig and Siddi 2020; Koops and

Tercovich 2020). Especially in crises, when normal constraints are likely to be relaxed,

such informal activities should be crucial. Nonetheless, the EU still needs a legal basis

to act. Although the Union enjoys exclusive competences on trade policy, it shares com-

petences with the member states on relevant foreign policy issues such as energy policy or

humanitarian aid, and its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is subject to spe-

cial, intergovernmental decision-making procedures (Gstöhl and Schunz 2022;

Keukeleire and Delreux 2022). In addition, the EU needs to have access to adequate re-

sources to fund its external activities. The EU’s 7-year budget from 2014 to 2020 in-

cluded 66 billion EUR for ‘Global Europe’activities.

Externally, the EU’s ability to sustain multilateral institutions is shaped by the extent to

which it can attract followers among other inﬂuential actors and its varying legal statuses

within multilateral institutions (Torney 2019). The EU is no hegemon, and it relies on

support from other stakeholders. The constellation of preferences among other powers

thus shapes the EU’s ability to build necessary coalitions. Furthermore, the EU’s ability

to exercise formal and informal inﬂuence over decision-making within institutions varies.

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 5

Ltd.

Because the EU is not a state but, de jure, an IO itself, its status within IOs is often am-

biguous (see De Baere 2018). Although it possesses full membership in some IOs like the

WTO, it only enjoys enhanced permanent observer status at the UN General Assembly

and most specialised agencies, and it has no formal status at the UN Security Council.

The EU’s efforts to sustain multilateral institutions since 2016

This section analyses the extent to which the EU has actively tried to sustain key multi-

lateral institutions since 2016. As the purpose is to better understand which of the mech-

anisms the EU has used and how, this article focuses on key examples of EU actions in

support of multilateral institutions. This is also in line with the empirical strategy where

we rely on publicly available documents and interviews. EU documents, such as the

2021 Joint Communication, are a starting point in identifying instances of the EU trying

to sustain multilateral institutions. These documents highlight areas where the EU and its

member states have been particularly active. This information is triangulated with 10 in-

terviews with senior ofﬁcials, who have recounted their experiences and perceptions of

the crisis of multilateralism. We have spoken to senior civil servants familiar with the

thinking of key EU ofﬁcials such as European Council President Donald Tusk, Commis-

sion President Jean-Claude Juncker and High Representative Federica Mogherini. We

have also spoken to interviewees with ﬁrst-hand knowledge of Council policy-making

and those based in major multilateral institutions and powerful states. All interviewees

were selected on the basis of their formal positions in their organisations, and we had a

high response rate (71%). All interviews were largely unstructured allowing interviewees

to recall instances they thought were most important for the EU’s effort of sustaining mul-

tilateral institutions.

We have veriﬁed all the ofﬁcial EU documents and the interview data with the exten-

sive public sources and secondary literature. For many individual multilateral institutions,

there is a wealth of publicly available sources, and our task was to trace how the EU

responded to the variety of challenges to individual institutions. This research strategy

does risk creating a bias to EU action as opposed to multilateral challenges to which

the EU did not respond. Nevertheless, by comparing the different available mechanisms

that the EU has used, variation across different multilateral institutions, the degree of suc-

cess across domains and considering cases of non-action, it is possible to draw meaning-

ful conclusions about the EU’s approach in general. This empirical section of the article

starts by analysing the crisis of multilateralism as perceived by the EU before zooming

in on each of the mechanisms.

Perceptions of crisis at the top: Better late than never

With hindsight, 2016 was a turning point for multilateralism. It was the year of the

Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump and that the EEAS adopted for the ﬁrst

time a strategic document on China reﬂecting its troublesome rise. Senior EU ofﬁcials,

however, only partially recognised its momentous nature, and it took at least until 2019

for the EU to develop an overall strategic response to sustain multilateral institutions.

EU ofﬁcials immediately understood the twin shock of Brexit and Trump, but it was

mostly considered a challenge of populism rather than a challenge for multilateral

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra6

Ltd.

institutions. The response to the Brexit referendum was swift. Fearing a domino effect

with further member states leaving, the Commission responded decisively to forge unity

among the member states and to protect the EU polity (see Schuette 2021a). The election

of President Trump, on the other hand, stunned European policymakers into initial

ostrichism. They convinced themselves that Trump’s rhetoric would not match his action

and that the ‘adults in the room’would sufﬁciently constrain him on foreign policy.

French President Macron tried to court Trump, and UK Prime Minister May sought to re-

vive the special relationship. At the EU level, too, senior ofﬁcials initially hoped that they

could merely ‘wait out’Trump (Interviews #7 and #9).

Evidence to the contrary mounted quickly throughout Trump’sﬁrst year in ofﬁce. In

line with his ﬁerce criticism of the Alliance, Trump refused to explicitly endorse NATO’s

Article 5 collective defence clause at the summit in May. In June 2017, he announced that

the United States would cease participation in the Paris Climate Agreement. In October

2017, he declared that the United States would exit from UNESCO and decided not to re-

certify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA (he abrogated the deal in May 2018). In

December 2017, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in a rupture with long-term

US policy and international law. And the Trump Administration reduced, or even halted,

funding of several UN agencies and the UN’s operating and peacekeeping budget.

Many EU ofﬁcials continued to harbour hopes of the return of traditional US leader-

ship. One EU interviewee describes how it required ‘a big psychological shift’(Interview

#7) to stop denying the new reality that the United States had gone rogue. According to

another ofﬁcial, the ‘awareness set in to do things differently’(Interview #9) only in

the second half of 2018 after Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in

May and the UN Human Rights Council in June, refused to sign the G7 summit

communique in June (‘the’rules-based international order was changed into ‘a’

rules-based international order), and came to the verge of announcing US withdrawal

from NATO in July (Schuette 2021b).

The Trump Presidency clearly was not the only challenge. China had equally started to

actively undermine the principles of multilateralism. And it took the EU, once again,

some time to understand this challenge. Notwithstanding evidence of China’s intensiﬁed

mercantilist approach to international trade and attempts to reinterpret the UN charter

(Foot 2020), the EU still considered China a crucial partner as late as 2015 (Interview

#6). For some ofﬁcials, China’s refusal to recognise the ruling of the Permanent Court

of Arbitration on the territorial dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea was

‘a game changer’(Interview #6). The EEAS pushed for, and eventually adopted, a new

joint strategic document on China (European Commission 2016). However, the EEAS

strategy never enjoyed signiﬁcant political ownership in the Commission and capitals (In-

terview #6; Biscop 2021). It was only in 2018 that views in the upper echelons in Brussels

on China tangibly changed (Interview #9). This followed two failed EU–China summits,

the deteriorating human rights situation in Xinjang, and intensiﬁed Chinese attempts to

capture key UN agencies.

Thus, the EU belatedly woke up to the profound challenge of multilateralism. But in

2019, it produced three major policy documents. In March, the Commission and EEAS

published the EU–China Strategic Outlook, in which they deﬁned China no longer only

as a ‘cooperation partner’and ‘economic competitor’, but crucially also as a ‘systemic ri-

val promoting alternative models of governance’(European Commission 2019). Unlike

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 7

Ltd.

in 2016, the initiative came from the top from Commission President Juncker and

Secretary-General Selmayr (Interview #6). In June, the Council set out concrete conclu-

sions to strengthen multilateralism by ‘upholding international norms and agreement’,

‘extending multilateralism to new global realities’and ‘making multilateral organisations

ﬁt for purpose’(Council of the European Union 2019). Also in June, the EEAS published

the third annual review of the EUGS, in which it dedicated much attention to how to ‘pre-

serve, promote, and strengthen multilateralism’(EEAS 2019). A key change involved

what one interviewee (Interview #1) called ‘strategic partnering’, that is, to go beyond

partnerships with traditional allies and reach out to other actors to build new,

issue-speciﬁc cooperation. The centrality of the EU institutions in all of this was also clear

compared with the limited response of the individual member states. Germany and France

notably spearheaded efforts to create an Alliance for Multilateralism, launched in September

2019, to uphold and adapt multilateral principles. But it quickly became apparent that the

Alliance was largely symbolic (Interviews #4 and 5).

Together, the three EU documents signalled strategic change. The EU at last

recognised the return of power politics and profound danger for the multilateral institu-

tions. According to one interviewee, the EU ﬁnally entered ‘survival mode’(Interview

#3). Strategies adopted by the EU since 2019 have further consolidated this new mindset.

The 2021 Joint Communication on strengthening the EU’s contribution to rules-based

multilateralism provides an overall strategy document, and the 2021 Trade Policy Review

called for an ‘An Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy’(emphasis added). The

2022 Strategic Compass notes that multilateralism ‘has come under strong questioning’

(p. 7), and an internal document on China in 2022 urged member states to be even tougher

on China (Financial Times 2022). The next section examines the extent to which this

change in strategic discourse ushered in concrete policy changes to sustain the multilateral

institutions.

Defending multilateral institutions

When multilateral institutions come under direct contestation, for instance, by Trump or

China, the EU can provide support in helping those institutions in maintaining the status

quo. Since 2016, the EU has regularly resorted to defending multilateral institutions, and

this section provides three key examples: the WTO, UN and Paris Agreement. To start

with an area where the EU has some of the strongest powers (trade), the WTO and its Ap-

pellate Body faced considerable contestation. Although the United States’s growing frus-

tration with the WTO’s dispute settlement system was longer-standing, the Trump Ad-

ministration started blocking appointments of judges to the Appellate Body in mid-

2017, thus rendering it defunct by December 2019 (Zaccaria 2022). For the open and

deeply interconnected EU economy, the impending collapse of the WTO’s dispute settle-

ment mechanism—the ‘crown jewel of the multilateral trading system’(Hopewell 2021,

p. 1026)—presented a grave challenge. When compromise negotiations with the United

States failed in late 2018, the EU took the initiative and started building coalitions to de-

vise an alternative dispute settlement mechanism (Multi-Party Interim Arbitration Ar-

rangement, MPIA). By December 2020, most major economies bar the United States

had agreed to participate in the MPIA.

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra8

Ltd.

The MPIA is a remarkable case in point of the EU’s attempts to sustain multilateral

trading amidst US contestation. The EU not only exhibited strong leadership in the

WTO. It also protected its core interests by building followership beyond its natural part-

ners, including China, and openly acting against the declared interests of the Trump Ad-

ministration. The success in setting up this backstop institution was enabled by a combi-

nation of internal and external factors. The EU managed to speak with one voice because

it had exclusive competences on trade and its member states, despite some qualms about

divergence from the United States, shared the fundamental interest in protecting the mul-

tilateral trading system. Moreover, the EU enjoyed credibility among WTO members and

its proactive initiative resonated with the interests of most other members (Hopewell 2021,

pp. 1036–1040). At the same time, the MPIA was considered a short-term interim and sta-

tus quo solution to sit out Trump, yet President Biden has hitherto refused to rejuvenate

the Appellate Body. This backstop, which was initiated by the EU to keep the WTO dis-

pute settlement mechanism alive, has therefore not yet resulted in profound WTO

reforms.

President Trump, however, not only took aim at the WTO. The UN also drew his ire.

The US administration exerted pressure via rhetorical attacks on these institutions as well

as cutting funding and, in the case of the Human Rights Council (HRC) and the World

Health Organization (WHO), withdrawing membership altogether. Although the totality

of funding increased over Trump’s tenure largely due to budgetary decisions taken by

Congress (CFR 2022), the contributions to peacekeeping and selected agencies decreased,

in part drastically. Indeed, the United States defunded the UN Relief and Works Agency

for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 2018 and 2019, leading the agency

to the brink of collapse and the substantially reduced contributions to the WHO for 2020–

2021. The Trump administration also withdrew funding for the UN Population Fund in

2017. Finally, the United States lowered its contributions to the UN peacekeeping budget

by almost USD 1bn. For the EU, together with its member states, the budgetary pressure

on key UN agencies and peacekeeping operations was thus a litmus test for its ability to

defend multilateral institutions. Its response was to unilaterally plug some of the gravest

funding gaps where feasible (Interview #1). The EU increased its overall contributions to

the UN, UNRWA, WHO and UNFPA. However, because the EU is not a UN member and

therefore does not fund UN peacekeeping operations, it was more constrained in this area

and rather had to rely on its member states (Interviews #1, #2 and #4). The EU and its

member states stepping up by making additional budgetary resources available was none-

theless a clear manifestation of the defence mechanism outlined in the conceptual section

above.

The Trump Administration and especially China also increasingly sought to redeﬁne

essential principles of the UN Charter. The United States wanted to revise UN language

on gender inclusivity and also violated international law by recognising Jerusalem

as Israel’s capital. China, in turn, intensiﬁed its efforts to undermine the normative founda-

tion of the UN by championing a hierarchical, sovereigntist view, whereby notions of peace

and security as well as economic development enjoyed priority over human rights

(Foot 2020; Interviews #2 and #6). These efforts were manifested in Chinese discourse

in the various committees, its attempts to defund UN programmes and agencies that focus

on human rights, and its active efforts to introduce Chinese language such as the ‘a commu-

nity with a shared future for mankind’and references to the Belt and Road Initiative into

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 9

Ltd.

ofﬁcial UN documents (Interview #10). To advance its vision of the UN, China also began

to adopt a more strategic approach to elect Chinese nationals to senior positions within the

UN agencies. By 2020, 4 out of the 15 UN agencies were led by Chinese nationals, and

China campaigned for its ﬁfth position with a candidate for Director-General of the World

Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

These normative challenges to the UN met a twofold EU response. First, the EU

stepped up its strategic communication efforts. One ofﬁcial conceded that in the past,

EU communication on multilateralism had been ‘a sleeping domain’(Interview #7) where

the tacit assumption prevailed that the beneﬁts of the multilateral order were self-evident.

Driven by the EEAS’s Strategic Communications division, the EU began a public diplo-

macy #MultilateralismMatters campaign to showcase its achievements (Interview #7). At

the same time, the EU also started to actively push back against United States and partic-

ularly Chinese discursive challenges in the various UN committees (Interview #6). One

ofﬁcial described how the EU delegation at the UN is ‘ﬁghting battles with China on lan-

guage every day’(Interview #8). This also entailed calling out violations of international

law more forcefully, even when committed by the United States, as for instance in the

case of the recognition of Jerusalem (Interview #5). Second, the EU eventually started

pushing back against Chinese strategic candidatures. The Chinese efforts to take over se-

nior leadership positions had initially remained beneath the radar (Interviews #6, #7 and

#8). A lack of coordination between the United States and the EU had further meant that

as late as 2019, the Chinese candidate became head of the Food and Agriculture Organi-

zation (Interview #4). During the elections of the next head for the increasingly politicised

WIPO, the United States and EU coordinated their efforts to prevent a Chinese national

from winning the contest (Interview #4). A more strategic EU approach to diplomacy

to maintain the status quo in multilateral institutions was thus apparent.

Climate change mitigation has also been a central objective for EU external action.

Trump’s decision in June 2017 to exit from the Paris Agreement was therefore another

critical challenge to the multilateral order and the EU’s core interests. And it was not

without precedent; President Bush had withdrawn the United States from the 1998 Kyoto

Protocol and thereby unleashed a domino effect of declining participation and commit-

ment by key emitters. The EU’s aim was thus to prevent another Kyoto. But the EU is

no hegemonic power on environmental politics, and its decreasing share of global carbon

emissions nominally reduces its inﬂuence. Declaring that the EU was ‘ready to lead the

ﬁght’(Sefcovic cited in Toplenksy 2017) to safeguard the Paris Agreement and prevent

an exodus of other states, the EU therefore resorted to what Oberthür and Dupont (2021)

call exemplary and diplomatic leadership to help the Paris Agreement survive.

To gain credibility and diffuse ambitious environmental policies, the EU set out to lead

by example. The European Green Deal, agreed in 2019, enshrined new emissions reduc-

tion targets of 55% by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050 and launched a set of policy initiatives

on a variety of environmental legislation. The EU also sought to engage other key actors

to comply with Paris and ratchet up their commitments. For instance, it includes in its

trade negotiations the condition to comply with the Paris Agreement. The EU and its

member states are with 23.3 billion EUR in 2020 also the largest climate ﬁnance contrib-

utors to developing countries (EC 2022). The EU launched a diplomatic offensive to keep

especially China in the Agreement (e.g., Keating 2018). The EU also circumvented the

White House to engage with sub-state actors such as the State of California. On the

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra10

Ltd.

rhetorical level, too, the EU engaged in containment of the US contestation of multilateral

climate policy (Petri and Biedenkopf 2020). The EU’s initial response to the US

withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has thus been largely successful. No domino

effect of other leading emitters exiting ensued, and states have continuously, if

insufﬁciently, ratcheted up their carbon reduction targets (Dijkstra et al. 2022). The

EU’s defence of the Paris Agreement drew on the mobilisation of enormous domestic

resources and widespread support among other states. Despite energy and climate being

mixed competences, the EU has largely acted as a uniﬁed actor in international climate

policy.

Reforming multilateral institutions

The EU has thus set up backstop institutions to address the crisis at the WTO, provided

additional funds to UN agencies, fought back against Chinese inﬂuence at the UN and

dealt with non-state actors to keep the Paris Agreement alive—all with the purpose of

defending multilateral institutions. In turn, this section analyses the most prominent at-

tempts by the EU to reform IOs under contestation. Reforming challenged multilateral in-

stitutions is normally a longer-term process than defending the status quo. The focus is on

the UN system, the WHO and the IMF. As the linchpin of the multilateral system, the UN

is regularly subject to demands for reform. Where many developed states criticise the

UN’sinefﬁciencies and overspending and prefer greater executive power of the Secretary-

General, developing states often press for greater development spending and further em-

powerment of the General Assembly (e.g., Baumann 2018). Moreover, non-permanent

members of the Security Council have long sought to reform and enlarge the highest

decision-making body to better reﬂect the power distribution of the 21st century (e.g.,

Binder and Heupel 2020). Upon his appointment in 2017, UN Secretary-General

Guterres set out to address some of those criticisms via a comprehensive reform of the de-

velopment system, management of the organisation, and the peace and security architecture

(see Mueller 2021).

The EU has reﬂexively supported Guterres’s reform agenda across the three pillars.

There is widespread consensus among ofﬁcials that the EU has even been the ‘most con-

sistent’driver of reforms among the key members (Interviews #1, #2 and #7). One ofﬁcial

also emphasised that, unlike the United States, for the EU, it was not only about increas-

ing efﬁciency and cutting costs but also about a better integration of development policy

into overall political direction of the UN and enhancing accountability (Interview #7).

The EU has therefore been a key supporter of a more central role for the UN resident co-

ordinators in the implementation of UN programmes across the world. Previously, ofﬁ-

cials of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) coordinated the work of the other

UN agencies. Since 2019, the resident coordinators report directly to the UN Secretary-

General, and they lead the UN country teams thereby providing much more political di-

rection with a view of implementing the SDGs. The EU has not just supported this major

administrative overhaul but has also provided ﬁnancial support to the newly empowered

resident coordinators through the Joint Fund for the 2030 Agenda.

The EU has missed no chances to publicly declare its support for Guterres (Interview

#7). This has also been true for the most recent initiative ‘Our Common Agenda’launched

by the Secretary-General in 2021, which represents an ambitious agenda on the ‘future of

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 11

Ltd.

global cooperation through an inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism’

(Guterres 2021) and will result in a UN Summit of the Future in September 2024.

Guterres, however, has shied away from Charter reforms and addressing some of the holy

cows of the UN system such as the Security Council or the functioning of the General As-

sembly. The EU’s attempt to allow the UN Secretary-General greater budgetary discretion

has hitherto also failed to garner sufﬁcient support (Interview #7; Mueller 2021). In light

of internal divisions, however, over Security Council reforms (Interview #1), the EU

never even tried advocating for ‘a top to bottom recast of the multilateral blueprint’at

the UN (Interview #2). Due to its limited role in peacekeeping, the EU could also not play

an active role on peace and security reforms (Interview #1). As a result, the EU’s role in

driving UN reforms has been constrained.

Another UN agency that has faced heavy criticism and demands for change is the

World Health Organization (WHO). Not only the United States but also countries from

across the world lamented the performance of the organisation especially in the early

stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in January and February 2020. Prior to the pandemic,

the EU was not a major player in the WHO despite being a major funder; as merely an

observer, the EU cannot fully participate in governing body meetings, and global health

was low on the agenda in Brussels despite blatant failures of the WHO during the Ebola

outbreak in 2014 (Svendsen 2021). However, the WHO’s impotence in face of Chinese

suppression of vital information about the virus and its subservient behaviour vis-à-vis

the Chinese government, the US withdrawal from the organisation, and the initially na-

tional scrambles to secure Personal Protective Equipment highlighted the need for sub-

stantial WHO reforms (Interview #2).

The EU has been at the forefront of such efforts. In response to Trump suspending US

funding for the organisation, the EU and its member states pledged more than 50% of the

emergency funding to combat Covid-19 as part of the WHO’s Strategic Preparedness Plan

in 2020, with the EU accounting for 20% of it (WHO 2020). The Council Conclusions of

October 2020 also spelled out several reform proposals, including ‘a revision of the alert sys-

tem for declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern’, the creation of

‘an independent epidemiological assessment on-site in high-risk zones’and ‘increased trans-

parency’mechanisms (Council of the European Union 2020). With the Biden Administra-

tion’s decision to return to the WHO, the EU has since allied with the United States to push

for these changes, but it has hitherto faced strong opposition from China and Russia in par-

ticular, and no WHO reforms, such as reducing the heavy reliance on voluntary contribu-

tions, have yet materialised. The EU has also led efforts to start negotiating a new pandemic

treaty or related instrument to complement or succeed the 2005 International Health Regu-

lations. European Council President Charles Michel called for such as an international pan-

demic treaty in November 2020 that was followed by a G7 endorsement in February 2021

and a joint statement of many EU leaders, partner countries ranging from Kenya to South

Korea and Indonesia, and the WHO Director-General in March 2021 (European Council

n.d.), prior to the start of negotiations in 2022.

In contrast to the EU’s attempts to propel some reforms of the UN system and WHO,

key economic and ﬁnancial multilateral institutions have received less attention. The IMF

continues to be deﬁned by institutionalised inequality in terms of its voting structure that

heavily favours the West. The 14th Quota Review, based on economic indicators in 2008,

was only implemented in 2016, at which point the high growth rates among emerging

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra12

Ltd.

powers and stalling growth among European states meant the new quotas remained de-

tached from economic realities. In turn, the 15th review concluded in 2019 without

changes. As a result, the EU’s (including the United Kingdom) current quota share of

30% is almost twice as high as its share of global GDP (Mohan 2020). The EU appears

satisﬁed with the status quo; compounding matters, it continued to insist on its monopoly

over the IMF’s top job when it ensured that Bulgarian Kristalina Georgieva would be

appointed as managing director in 2019. One former ofﬁcial conceded that the ‘EU is do-

ing little to act on’awareness that emerging countries, particularly China, be better repre-

sented in IOs like the IMF (Interview #3).

In sum, the EU’s impact on reforms of multilateral institutions has been signiﬁcantly

lower than on their defence. Although the Union made some attempts at reforming the

UN system and the WHO, the results were limited at best. As demonstrated by the example

of the IMF or UN Security Council, the EU member states have also been unwilling to con-

cede historical privileges to address the central underlying grievances of emerging powers

with the result that the legitimacy crisis of many multilateral institutions has become exac-

erbated. For the EU, there is a clear reform dilemma between the status quo that it favours

and changes required for multilateral institutions to adapt to a changing environment.

Extending multilateral institutions

The crisis of multilateralism stems not only from dissatisfaction with the performance of

existing institutions on day-to-day issues but also from a general perception that

multilateral institutions insufﬁciently addresses pressing collective action problems. Tech-

nological developments and external shocks reveal governance gaps. As the reﬂexive sup-

porter of multilateralism, the EU is thus expected to propel new multilateral initiatives.

This ﬁnal section provides three brief examples on attempts to establish new multilateral

institutions in the areas of migration, vaccines and cyber security. Although the logic of ex-

tending multilateral institutions sometimes overlaps with reforming multilateral institu-

tions, the focus here is on new multilateral institutions as opposed to already existing ones.

One of the lessons of the European refugee crisis of 2015 was the need for an in-

ternational framework on migration, highlighting a clear gap in global governance.

Although it began as a UN process in 2016, the EU was the primary driver throughout

the negotiation and drafting process of the UN Global Compact for Migration (GCM),

a non-binding framework to better manage migration from the local to the global level

(Badell 2020). However, the initial EU unity began to crumble after President Trump

pulled the United States out of the agreement in late 2017. Hungary soon followed

suit. Although the EU found an innovative way to maintain a common EU-minus-

Hungary negotiation position by appointing Austria as speaker (Interview #1), Austria

itself and other increasingly sovereigntists member states joined the chorus of critical

voices in the autumn of 2018. In the end, only 18 EU member states signed the

GCM. What had started as an EU-supported initiative to extend multilateralism ended

as a disaster for the EU’s credibility (Interviews #2, #4 and #8). Although the GCM is

likely to be considered legally relevant over time (Interview #1), the increasing internal

divisions prevented the EU from effectively extending multilateral institutions.

The second major new multilateral initiative, during the study period 2016–2021, was

the Covax Facility to ensure equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccinations to developing

The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions 13

Ltd.

countries. Launched in 2020 by the WHO, Gavi and the Coalition for Epidemic Prepared-

ness Innovations, Covax pursued the declared ambition of delivering two billion vaccina-

tions by the end of 2021 to combat the pandemic. Here, too, the EU was a major diplomatic

player and central donor. Although the United States and China quickly descended into a bi-

lateral conﬂict, the EU spearheaded diplomatic negotiations to ﬁnd a multilateral response

rather than relying on bilateral donations (Interview #8). One observer notes that ‘nobody

else was doing anything’on vaccine distributions (Interview #4). The EU institutions have

also pledged in 1 billion USD in funding with the individual EU member states adding an-

other 2.5 billion USD (European Council 2022). At the same time, the EU’sleadershipsuf-

fered from what was widely perceived as vaccine nationalism by especially the wealthy

member states, who bought up and hoarded a disproportional number of vaccines (e.g.,

Watkins 2021). Germany furthermore spoke out against a Covid-19 vaccine patent waiver

at the WTO. A so-called TRIPS waiver was ultimately agreed in the WTO, but only in June

2022, almost 2 years after the proposal had been suggested by India and South Africa and

therefore essentially after much of the world had already been vaccinated.

Although the EU recently committed to extend multilateral institutions to ﬁelds such as AI

or biodiversity (European Commission 2021, p. 8) and initiated a treaty on pandemic preven-

tion, these initiatives are yetto bear fruit. The samegoes for several other initiatives to extend

global governance, for instance, over lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) or cyber

warfare in the context of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and the

Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG). Here, the EU faces a combination of internal divi-

sions, a primacy of member states (such as France and Germany) in negotiation forums

and a few opportunities to provide leadership (e.g., Badell and Schmitt 2022;Douzet

et al. 2022). Covax and GCM therefore constitute the most notable EU attempts since

2016. In both cases, the EU initially drove negotiations but internal factors—vaccine nation-

alism and anti-migration sentiments respectively—undermined the EU’s multilateral efforts.

Conclusion

This article has analysed the extent to which the EU has actively tried to sustain key multi-

lateral institutions since 2016. The EU has long punched below its weight in multilateral af-

fairs. But the episode from mid-2018 onward marks both an awakening to the existential cri-

sis and an emancipation from previous modus operandi. Upon belatedly realising the

existential crisis to multilateralism, survival instincts kicked in, and the EU entered ‘survival

mode’(Interview #3) by setting out to defend critical institutions under pressure. In doing

so, the EU not only acted with unprecedented urgency but also pursued hitherto unthinkable

strategies. The EU made common cause with China against the United States to establish the

MPIA as a temporary remedy for the blockade of the WTO’s Appellate Body; it plugged

signiﬁcant funding gaps of UN institutions and engaged in strategic communications efforts

to confront both American and Chinese normative challenges to the UN system, and it pro-

vided diplomatic leadership to keep the Paris Climate Agreement intact.

The relatively successful attempts to defend speciﬁc institutions under pressure is only

one side of the coin, however. The other is that the EU has proven less willing and able to

reform or extend multilateral institutions. The EU made some attempts at reforming the

UN system and the WHO and produced limited results as the emerging schisms between

the United States and China, and also democracies and autocracies generally, have

Leonard Schuette and Hylke Dijkstra14

Ltd.

hardened fronts and rendered compromises on signiﬁcant reforms very difﬁcult. Internal

factors, however, also carry responsibilities. The EU’s unwillingness to concede what es-

pecially developing states consider unjustiﬁed institutional privileges has exacerbated re-

sentments in the Global South and undermined the EU’s credibility as a defender of mul-

tilateral institutions. Compounding matters, the parochialism demonstrated by member

states in questions of vaccine distributions and the GCM prevented more effective multi-

lateral solutions to new problems.

To understand how the EU has tried to sustain multilateral institutions, this article

has empirically discussed a large number of EU efforts across different institutions. Given

the space constraints, further research on the details of each case is warranted. Neverthe-

less, from this overview of efforts, a clear picture emerges: The period from 2016 to 2021

was one of the EU survival politics of ‘saving the savable’(Interview #3) rather than a

reinvention of multilateralism. The EU did prevent the collapse of the multilateral order,

but many of the profound challenges besetting the order remain. Preventing regression

from the status quo has thus proven easier than forging a positive change thereof. To sus-

tain multilateralism in the long term, the EU will have to shift from survival mode to

transformation mode. With the arrival of the Biden Administration, the EU once again

has a key ally in launching new multilateral initiatives such as on global corporate tax

or on climate ﬁnancing. In the past, the EU had complacently relied on US leadership.

But in light of the domestic turbulences in the United States, this is not a viable strategy

going forward. Although the EU cannot replace the US hegemony, it will have to assume

greater multilateral leadership responsibilities and also intensify its efforts to build part-

nerships beyond the G7 by working with the likes of Mexico, South Africa or the African

Union. Indeed, the EU will have to recognise that without conceding of some of its insti-

tutional privileges, reforms of key IOs will be impossible, which is likely to fuel outright

opposition towards to the very multilateral order by dissatisﬁed states.

Acknowledgements

We are also thankful to the editors and anonymous reviewers of JCMS. This article is part

of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under

the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agree-

ment no. 802568).

Correspondence:

Hylke Dijkstra, Maastricht University, Department of Political Science, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD

Maastricht, The Netherlands.

email: h.dijkstra@maastrichtuniversity.nl

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Oxford Principles Of European Union Law: The European Union Legal Order: Volume I

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2018

The ‘unity dogma’ has long characterised European law discourse. In many of its landmark judgments, the European Court of Justice had recourse to the ‘unity argument’ – such as in Costa vs. E.N.E.L., where the Court rightly stated that ‘the executive force of Community law cannot vary from one state to another … without jeopardising the attainment of the objectives of the Treaty.’ Unilateral national deviations could not be tolerated without the common rules ‘being deprived of their character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question.’ Other expressions of the ‘unity dogma’ include the principle of non-discrimination or the uniform composition of EU institutions. This contribution demonstrates that the asymmetric non-participation of some Member States in selected policy areas can be embedded into the supranational legal order. The main danger seems to be a structural weakening of the political legitimacy of the European project. In order to explore the constitutional implications, it is useful to highlight the plurality of visions about the future of Europe, which have characterised the political debate over differentiated integration from the beginning. Against this background, we can recognise the pragmatic orientation of the existing Treaty provisions on supranational differentiation within the EU framework (II.). Over the past two decades, the practice of differentiated integration proceeded smoothly in the fields of justice and home affairs, defence policy, monetary union and the generic mechanism for enhanced cooperation (III.). At the same time, the pertinence and visibility of differentiated integration as a result of the euro crisis highlighted the principal constitutional risk: whereas differentiation may stabilise the rule of law by accommodating internal tensions, it may undermine the legitimatory infrastructure (IV.).

An ever more entangled Union? The European Union’s interactions with global governance institutions

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022
J Eur Integrat

Contemporary global governance is characterized by a diversity of institutions. The European Union (EU) interacts with these institutions in multiple ways. Despite their importance, the interactions of the EU with different types of global governance institutions have remained underexplored in EU scholarship. The papers in this special issue address this research gap. They map the EU’s interactions with different types of global governance institutions. They also explore the factors that explain patterns of interactions. In this introduction, we develop a common analytical lens that unites the contributions to the special issue and identify our main research questions. We map different types of global governance institutions and discuss the ways in which the EU interacts with them. We also bring together the main insights from the individual contributions and discuss avenues for future research. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The Politics of Competence in Global Health: The European Commission's Global Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021
Eur Foreign Aff Rev

Øyvind Svendsen

What was the European Commission's (EC) global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how did it use the crisis to claim competence in the area of global health? This article explores the EC's global coronavirus response. In so doing, it suggests studying the crisis response in terms of how the EC struggled to be recognized as a competent player in the international community of states and institutions. In particular, the article shows how the EC utilized the crisis unleashed by the pandemic to engage in geopolitical positioning in relation to World Health Organization (WHO) funding and the vaccine race, and by using its financial clout to struggle for mastery as a global health actor. The article responds to the challenge of understanding differentiation in the broader field of European foreign, security and defence policies. By treating informal practices by the EC on the world stage in and of themselves, the article shows how the constant struggle for competence plays into the politics of European integration and considers its potential for being instantiated in formal transfers of competence in the area of global health. (This article is an output of the EUFLEX project, which has been funded by the Research Council of Norway (project number 287131).

The futility of the pandemic treaty: caught between globalism and statism

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022

In November 2021, the World Health Assembly (WHA) is hosting a special session to discuss the proposed plans for a pandemic treaty. Despite the fact that there are scant details concerning the treaty, the proposal has gained considerable support in both the academic community, and at the international level. While we agree that in the wake of the numerous governance failures during COVID-19, we need to develop appropriate global solutions to be able to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from future global health crises—and that such mechanisms should be rooted in global equity—we disagree, however, that this pandemic treaty, currently, is the most appropriate way in which to achieve this. Indeed, notions of global community, solidarity, fairness are far removed from the reality that we have seen unfolding in the actions of states responding to the pandemic. This is the crux of the tension with the proposed treaty: the balance between the ideal cosmopolitan worldview held by those in power in global health, and the practice of national security decision-making witnessed in the last 18 months. Indeed, we do not believe that a pandemic treaty will deliver what is being extolled by its proponents, and it will not solve the multiple problems of global cooperation in global health that supporters believe it will.

You’re Fired! International Courts, Re‐contracting, and the WTO Appellate Body during the Trump Presidency

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022

Giuseppe Zaccaria

A long‐standing debate amongst international relations scholars has surrounded the question of whether international institutions with judicial authority enjoy more autonomy and discretion than other global institutions. This is mainly because international courts are established as impartial third‐party actors tasked with performing adjudicative functions for conflicting parties. As such, the delegation contracts of international institutions with judicial authority are expected to minimize control by states, even in cases where the members of a court engage in judicial overreach. This article contributes to that debate by examining the case of the crisis of the WTO Appellate Body. The article analyzes the Trump administration's successful efforts at rendering dysfunctional one of the most powerful courts in the international system. The findings showcase how powerful states are capable and willing to take advantage of the available control mechanisms and the institutional opportunity structures inherent in the design of international courts. The article speaks to the scholarship on the contestation of international institutions. The analysis relies on original data obtained through 22 interviews with WTO officials, state representatives, and experts.

International organizations' responses to member state contestation: from inertia to resilience

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2021

Gisela Hirschmann

International organizations (IOs) play a key role in promoting multilateral cooperation on critical transnational issues. Yet, their authority has increasingly been contested by member states that cut financial contributions or even withdraw their membership. How do IOs respond to such contestation? While the existing literature has mostly focused on reactions by other member states, I argue in this article that our understanding of IOs' responses to contestation remains incomplete without an analysis of IO bureaucracies. I propose a conceptual framework to analyse three types of bureaucratic responses: inertia, i.e. no immediate response; adaptation, i.e. institutional changes to maintain the support of the challenging member state(s); and resilience-building, i.e. developing organizational capacities to limit contestation. I argue that each of these responses is shaped by specific bureaucratic mechanisms, namely hunkering, negotiation, framing, coalition-building, shaming and professionalization. Based on a comparative within-case study analysing the reactions of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to budget cuts by the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations, I further theorize that the organization's threat perception, the position of other member states and bureaucratic leadership are relevant factors that need to be considered to explain the variation in IO responses to contestation.

Why NATO survived Trump: the neglected role of Secretary-General Stoltenberg

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2021

Leonard Schuette

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 foreign policy machinery and entrenched liberal ideology, structural reasons and Trump's idiosyncratic personality. While these accounts possess some explanatory value, they remain incomplete as they omit one central factor: NATO's leadership. Drawing on more than twenty original interviews with senior officials, the article demonstrates that particularly Secretary-General Stoltenberg's strategic responses were a necessary factor in changing Trump's stance on burden-sharing and helped maintain a robust deterrence policy toward Russia. These findings carry important implications both for theoretical debates on international organizations' agency in fending off contestation and policy debates on which actors shape NATO by emphasising the hitherto understated role of the secretary-general.

Brexit Dilemmas: Shaping Postwithdrawal Relations with a Leaving State

Article

Oct 2021

How do voters want their governments to respond when another country unilaterally withdraws from an international institution? We distinguish between negotiation approaches that vary in the degree to which they accommodate the withdrawing state's demands and argue that negotiation preferences are shaped by two issues. The first is voters’ exposure to the costs and benefits of accommodation. This exposure varies across issues, and we argue that citizens will generally prefer non-accommodation on zero-sum issues, but support more accommodation on cooperation issues, where non-accommodation puts existing cooperation gains at risk. Second, withdrawal negotiations create precedents, and citizens should therefore be less willing to accommodate the more they are concerned about the ripple effects of accommodation on the institution's stability. These concerns also confront citizens with two types of dilemmas depending on how favorably they view the institution themselves. To test our argument, we use survey evidence and a conjoint experiment conducted in Germany and Spain during the Brexit negotiations. We find that respondents overall are more willing to accommodate the UK on cooperation issues than on zero-sum issues, but also find evidence that Euroskeptics and Europhiles confront different issue-specific dilemmas. Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics surrounding the challenges to multilateralism that have proliferated in recent years.

The EEAS at Ten: Reason for a Celebration?

Article

Feb 2021
Eur Foreign Aff Rev

The tenth anniversary of the creation of the European External Action Service provides an opportune moment to take stock of the role which the Service has played in forging a more coherent, visible and effective EU foreign and security policy. At the same time, it offers a chance to field ideas on how the Union’s foreign policy actors might chart a course to guide the European External Action Service (EEAS) to what could be tumultuous teenage years. This article contextualizes the contributions to this first European Foreign Affairs Review (EFAR) Issue of 2021, which is devoted entirely to an assessment of where the EEAS’ strengths and opportunities lie, and which weaknesses need to be addressed to fit the Service for future purpose. European External Action Service, Common Foreign and Security Policy, esprit de corps, European Commission, Foreign Affairs Council, representation, EU Global Strategy

Contested views? Tracing European positions on lethal autonomous weapon systems

Article

Dec 2021
Eur Secur

The article explores the evolving positions and negotiation strategies of the EU and its member states regarding lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). Specifically, it traces the proceedings around the UN disarmament forum Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) from 2013 to 2020. Embedded in the norm contestation literature, the empirical section draws upon semi-structured interviews as well as document analysis. We find that, despite the absence of a CFSP position on the matter, the EU and key member states have been instrumental in shaping the discussions. However, the role of the EU is constrained due to double contestation. First, at the level of member states contestation persists on what is the appropriate regulatory framework (hard or soft law). Second, contestation is also exerted towards the EU by some member states who contest the EEAS’s involvement. Some are conscious that presenting an “EU position” might constrain their ability to build global coalitions. Others do not want the EU to interfere with their national sovereignty on such a critical security issue. While these two elements work against a common EU position, we also observe a window of opportunity for the EU. Notably, the EU can strengthen the CCW by funding the forum structures and secretariat, which could become an important body in the implementation of foreseeable agreements.

The show must go on: The EU’s quest to sustain multilateral institutions since 2016

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