ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) is a firm advocate of multilateralism. Hundreds of European speeches and policy documents stake Europe’s claim to be multilateralism’s most ardent supporter. Such commitments ritually lay claim to multilateralism as the guiding tenet of Europe’s world vision. But the EU’s rhetorical pledge to multilateralism is in itself relatively insignificant. Embodying such a principle in its own being, the EU could hardly not proclaim a commitment to multilateralism. Not many states would today profess in principle to be against deepening multilateral cooperation. Multilateralism is one of the most striking ‘motherhood-and-apple pie’ principles of contemporary international relations. It is no less important for this. But it does mean that the issue at stake is over what ‘effective multilateralism’ means in practice to its different adherents. And here European policies are less than entirely progressive, benign and
principled. The EU is the biggest funder of the United Nations (UN), but the amounts it channels to multilateral bodies are a fraction of national defence budgets, for example. At the most concrete level, European contributions to many UN political initiatives and peacekeeping missions have diminished. Its own regional initiatives often cut across efforts to widen international cooperation. The policies the EU has pursued under the guise of multilateralism are primarily about offsetting its own declining power with a broader set of alliances. Behind the rhetoric, the EU has not been an enthusiastic facilitator of a more democratized accountability over the international system. The democratic principles it advocates at the nation-state level it steadfastly denies at the multilateral level. Even after the jolt of the financial crisis has glaringly revealed the inadequacies of the prevailing international system, European views remain grudging on the need to temper abiding imbalances. The way in which the EU seeks to mobilize multilateral tenets mixes realism in at least equal measure with liberal internationalism. Its approach is about statecraft as much as values. European support for multilateralism is enormously important. A degree of
statecraft is entirely warranted, and can itself help generate trust and socialization effects across different regions. However, for all its claims to be at the forefront of bringing into being a reconfigured international system, Europe is
behind the curve. Much analytical work on the EU at the United Nations has focused on the issue of whether European member states are coordinating their national positions more in New York. Despite the divergence over Iraq, this focus generally produces optimistic conclusions that the EU is ‘becoming an actor’ at the United Nations. This downplays the rather more important substantive question of whether such long-awaited ‘actorness’ is in tune with the world around it. Here, less satisfaction is warranted. The way European governments understand multilateralism fails adequately to embrace the implications of emerging powers’ rise. Europe’s bilateral relations with such powers are in reality used as a substitute for, rather than a step towards, ‘effective multilateralism’. The EU’s multilateralism is a finger in the bursting dam of the changing world order.
