ABSTRACT
The 2003 European Security Strategy expresses a strong commitment to the United Nations (UN), highlighting that ‘strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to fulfil its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority’ (European Council 2003). Diplomats from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) meet about a 1,000 times a year in New York alone, and the EU presidencies issue approximately 200 statements on the Union’s behalf during their six-month tenure. In addition, the EU Commission is now an important financial partner of the UN operational system on the ground. Although EU unity has not yet been fully achieved at the UN Security Council – suffice it to think of the divisions over the war in Iraq in 2003 – the EU increasingly speaks with one voice inside the UN assembly across a wide range of issue areas (Luif 2003; Smith 2006a; Laatikainen and Smith 2006; Young and Rees 2005; Wouters et al. 2006). For instance, the EU has rarely split on votes at the Human Rights Council since its creation in 2006 (Brantner and Gowan 2008). This chapter studies whether such unity is reflected in perceptions of the EU at the UN. It focuses specifically on whether the EU is perceived as a unitary actor, with a selection of documents and interviews conducted in the UN hallways, UN Secretariat members and representatives of non-EU countries in New York. First of all, it should be recognized that the EU has a ‘split personality’ at the UN as ‘both an actor in its own right and an arena for the expression of memberstate interests’ (Jørgensen and Laatikainen 2006: 10). In this respect, the Security Council, with the two permanent members France and the United Kingdom, represents a regular test of the EU’s ‘actorness’ (Hill 1996). On the whole, the collective ‘presence’ of the EU in the international arena has been achieved ‘through cumbersome consultative procedures and partially effective diplomatic, economic and military instruments’ (Hill and Wallace 1996: 13). Third countries are hence still left ‘to cope with relations with the European Community (through the Commission) alongside bilateral relations with the Member States’ (Hill and Wallace 1996: 13). The UN is also a forum and an actor at the same time. This creates a complicated net of interactions, which is likely to affect the
way in which UN Secretariat staff and other UN state representatives perceive the EU and its member states. Two main questions will guide this analysis: (a) do UN officials and other UN members’ delegates perceive the EU institutions – the Presidency and the Commission – or rather EU member states individually, as the key interlocutors? (b) what kind of actor do they think the EU is? The structure of this chapter includes a preliminary part describing the cooperation framework between the EU and the UN system and the methodological approach. The central parts present the results of the study and are followed by an analysis of the potential factors influencing the perceptions of the EU at the UN.
