ABSTRACT
The increasing engagement of the EU with multilateral organizations is a prominent and largely inevitable by-product of the ever-growing, deliberate or not, international presence of the EU. This volume focuses explicitly on the politics of the EU-IOs relationship. In that respect, it adds up to the existing literature with a similar research agenda (especially Jørgensen 2009; Laatikainen and Smith 2006; Elgström and Smith 2006). Although we articulate the research questions in a different way, our insights are largely complementary rather than contradictory. Before summarizing the main findings of the volume, let us first revisit the three sets of questions we have asked the authors to address in their contributions and which basically revolve around: (a) parameters conditioning the EU-IOs interaction, (b) cross-temporal evolution of the EU-IOs interaction, and (c) the effect of this interaction both on the EU and the IOs.
