EU UN Gowan and Brantner

Published In: Knud Erik Jorgensen (ed.) (2009) The European Union and International Organizations, pp. 37-60 Complex Engagement: the EU and the UN system Franziska Brantner and Richard Gowan INTRODUCTION The European Union has developed a strong public commitment to the UN, encapsulated in the European Security Strategy’s statement that ‘strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to fulfill its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority’.1 But EU-UN relations are complicated by a history of crises – including the loss of European faith in the UN in the Western Balkans during the 1990s and the EU’s split over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – and the unresolved puzzle of whether the Union can ever be a coherent actor in an institutional framework based on state sovereignty. Indeed, the structure of the UN contains a number of in-built obstacles to the emergence of a cohesive EU identity. Firstly, it institutionalizes a division between the two European permanent members of the Security Council (Britain and France) and the other EU members. Secondly, while the EU is a recognized grouping within the UN system, frequently making common statements and proposing resolutions as a bloc, this comes at the price of constant intra-EU negotiation (involving 1,000 meetings a year in New York alone). As Jørgensen and Laatikainen note, the need to coordinate at the UN highlights the EU’s ‘split personality’ as ‘both actor in its own right and an arena for the expression of member-state interests.’ (Jørgensen and Laatikainen 2006: 10).2 Yet the study of EU-UN linkages is further complicated by the fact that the UN itself is also a combination of ‘arena’ and ‘actor’. More precisely, the UN includes multiple political arenas – including the Security Council, General Assembly, 1 Human Rights Council and Economic and Social Council– but also engages in a huge array of operational activities, including conflict prevention, humanitarian aid and peacekeeping. To complicate matters further, the system also includes funds and agencies, such as the UN Development Programme and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), overseen by stand-alone inter-governmental boards. The EU’s interaction with the UN system cannot, therefore, be reduced to its behavior as an intermittently cohesive bloc within UN political forums, as it also involves significant operational (and financial) cooperation at the field level. An easily visible example of this operational EU-UN relationship in recent years has been the deployment of ESDP missions to support UN peacekeeping in Africa. While a growing body of academic literature has attempted to define the EU’s degree of ‘actorness’ (Hill 1996) at the UN, this is challenged by the diffusion of the debates and activities involved. European decision-making on UN issues is very frequently decentralized. European ambassadors to the UN institutions in New York, Geneva and Vienna can in theory refer difficult issues to second pillar committees in Brussels (such as the European Council’s Working Party on Human Rights, COHOM, and that on the UN, CONUN) but the pace of UN negotiations often means that they do not do so in practice. The level of ‘Brusselization’ in European UN policy is thus low. Moreover, the European relationship with the UN system also includes participation in specialized (and often drawn-out) negotiation processes – such as those that led to the approval of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Kyoto Protocol – that involve quite different sorts of diplomacy to the regular business carried on in New York and Geneva. In this context, there is little value in attempting to study the interaction between the EU and UN as if they were relatively coherent actors, or even relatively cohesive institutions. The degree of common European ambition at the United Nations varies over time and by issue area, and the coordination that we observe on any one topic or in any one forum may differ markedly from that we perceive elsewhere. We will 2 see, for example, that EU coordination in the Security Council has lagged behind that in other forums. In our next section, we lay out a number of theoretical frameworks for analysing EU-UN linkages, but we do not wish to argue that any one of these is consistently superior. Instead, it seems probable that different theoretical models explain the EU’s engagement with different theoretical elements of the UN: Realism still has an important part to play in explaining the security dimension of EU-UN relations, for example, whereas its approach to human rights is better explained through reference to the EU’s natural attachment to international law. To expand this argument, the remaining sections of the chapter describe the complex legal status of the EU at the UN; the multi-faceted histories of EU-UN cooperation since the end of the Cold War; current practicalities of EU cooperation in UN forums; and resistance to EU positions by other states and blocs. We conclude with a summary of recent European involvement in efforts to reform the UN – this encapsulates many difficulties we identify for European policy in the chapter as a whole. Yet in spite the many obstacles to defining an EU identity at the UN, this chapter also shows that there is considerable evidence that one has begun to emerge. At the political level, European cohesion in UN forums such as the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council has grown markedly if unevenly. While the highest level of coherence is around rights issues rather than hard security questions such as disarmament, EU members linked security and rights in lobbying for the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, endorsed at the World Summit marking the sixtieth anniversary of the UN Charter in 2005. This can be related not only to a high level of European support for UN operational activities in countries affected by conflict, but also its commitment to developing international law through the UN, which was demonstrated through its support for the ICC and the Kyoto Protocol. The European preference for basing security in international law has also been seen in its strategy towards Iran’s nuclear ambitions, by which the EU has worked very closely with the IAEA in spite US doubts. 3 If this emphasis on linking legality and rights to security appears to represent a common thread in EU behavior at the UN it has significant political limitations. Although promoting international law in principle, EU members are often wary of being bound by it in practice through the UN: France and Britain have been accused of taking an ‘instrumental’ approach to the authority of the Security Council (Malone 2006), while almost all EU states appear to see themselves as immune to censure by the Human Rights Council, thereby alienating other states. The ostensible European emphasis on legality can thus be interpreted as evidence both of a progressive desire for a rules-based world order and of a conservative goal of preserving power through the structures of the UN at a time of international change. In the closing section of this chapter, we contrast essentially Liberal, norms-based explanations of European behavior at the UN with more Realist interpretations that highlight the extent to which the EU’s behavior is motivated by a desire to maintain its own influence – and how, in a period when increasingly assertive global players such as China and India are inclined to exert their own influence, Europe’s ability to get the results it wants is in decline. Recent efforts to reform the UN system provide case-studies of these dynamics. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS Although we wish to highlight the variability of EU-UN relations, two unifying questions can be applied across the board. First, what factors affect the degree of EU coordination at the UN: when and why do member states decide to act together, and what role emerges for the European Commission? Second, what factors decide the degree of EU willingness to work through and with the UN system? Why does the EU choose to prioritize action through United Nations institutions in some cases, but not in others? It should be noted that a high degree of European unity does not necessarily equate to a desire to prioritize UN action: the EU is relatively 4 united at the Economic and Social Council, for example, but most European diplomats dismiss it as almost totally irrelevant, at least in private conversation. A range of theoretical perspectives can be used to explain the degree of EU coherence in UN bodies. Authors inclined towards a realist reading of international relations would argue that EU member states coordinate their policies at the United Nations when it allows them to defend their interests better than going alone (Walt 1987, Allen 1998). EU positions defended at the United Nations hence largely reflect the compromises found (or not) among its member states based on their exogenously defined preferences. Institutionalists and constructivists alike see the virtue of this case, but argue that the likelihood of such compromises might be higher within the EU than in other, looser, coalitions of states because of underlying political tendencies within the EU to search for common positions and institutionalized mechanisms for coordination (Carlsnaes et al. 2004, Smith, K. 2006a). The precise dynamics that lead to greater integration are unsurprisingly heavily- developed sources of reflection. Neo-functionalist and institutionalists highlight the engrenage effect of EU integration. Neo-functionalists highlight spill-over from one domain of integration into another, requiring further integration in ever more policy fields – so that EU cooperation at the UN may actually be a spill-over from other foreign policy fields. Similarly institutionalists argue that institutionalized coordination constrains and refines member states’ preferences.

Load more