Abstract

The relationship between the European Union (EU) and United Nations (UN) has been the topic of copious quantities of public relations material from the two organizations, such as a joint campaign proclaiming their ‘partnership for a better world’, and a reasonable amount of serious analysis. ¹ Of the various strategic goals laid down in the 2003 European Security Strategy, the call for ‘effective multilateralism’ with the UN at its core has proved particularly resonant among academics and policy analysts. This is in part a matter of grand strategy. For the think-tankers of the EU Institute for Security Studies, ‘making multilateral structures more effective and more legitimate is both a matter of principle and a question of interest for the EU’ (de Vasconcelos, 2010: 4). For scholars attempting to measure the EU’s global impact, the relationship with the UN is also appealingly quantifiable. The EU pays two-fifths of the UN’s peacekeeping costs and covers even higher percentages of its humanitarian and development budgets, while European diplomats hold well over 1,000 coordination meetings in New York alone each year (Wouters, 2007: 4). In some quarters, the level of EU unity within forums such as the UN General Assembly, which has gradually improved since the end of the Cold War, has become a virtual fetish – although this number-crunching has been challenged by authors who note unity does not always convert into impact (see for example Kissack, 2007: Gowan and Brantner, 2008; and Smith, 2010).