ABSTRACT

Nowadays multilateralism comes with adjectives attached. While the Bush administration talks about ‘selective’ or ‘à la carte’ multilateralism (Nye 2002: 154), the European Union (EU) has opted for the notion of ‘effective’ multilateralism. The concept entered the official vocabulary in A Secure Europe (2003), and the objective of supporting multilateralism has been described in more detail in documents such as The European Union and the United Nations: the Choice of Multilateralism (2003) and The Enlarging European Union at the United Nations: Making Multilateralism Matter (2004). No matter which adjective these powers prefer, the adjectives suggest that multilateralism is in a profound defensive position. Seemingly, multilateralism has been given a bad name and not everything is like it used to be. ‘The present situation has a different feel about it’ . . . ‘this crisis of multilateralism is different’, declares John Ruggie (2003). This is significant, because he has traditionally been among the first to downplay crises of multilateralism.