First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book focuses on the European Union as an important actor in international relations and international political economy. The EU negotiates international economic agreements, represents Europe in international organizations, and is a major trading bloc and currency area. To what extent and under what conditions the EU can use its considerable economic power to assert its interests in the international arena is a relevant question for students, researchers and practitioners alike. To explore this question, the textbook introduces the concept of “actorness” and presents an overview of the actorness debate and theories used to explain actorness. In addition, it includes three empirical chapters on trade, finance and climate policy that apply various concepts and theories to study European actorness in the respective policy areas.

This book examines how the European Union (EU) is perceived beyond its borders in the US; the Middle East: Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Iran; Russia; China; India; Brazil and South Africa. The book also analyses the main perceptions of the EU in some key international institutions, including the World Bank; World Trade Organization, United Nations, African Union; and transnational actors, including non-Western media such as Al Jazeera. It seeks to provide a thorough analysis of the implications that these perceptions might have for the global role of the EU. By taking this approach and by providing both conceptual and empirical arguments, the volume provides an innovative perspective on the analysis of the EU as a global actor. It also strengthens a research agenda on the EU external image: an underdeveloped area of investigation in which the editors and the main contributors to this volume have played a pioneering role in the past few years. It will be of strong interest to academics and students of international politics, European studies and development studies.

Is the European Union a unified actor in world politics? The world’s leading economic power is still struggling to find its role in shaping and maintaining global peace, free trade and commerce. How successful is the EU ́s Common Foreign and Security Policy and its institutions really?

This book examines a largely unexplored dimension of the European agencies, namely their role in EU external relations and on the international plane. International cooperation has become a salient feature of EU agencies triggering important legal questions regarding the scope and limits of their international dimension, the nature and effects of their international cooperation instruments, their status within the EU and on the global level, and leading potentially to tensions between EU law and international law. This book fills the existing knowledge gap by scrutinizing the international cooperation legal framework and practice of EU agencies, including their mandate, tasks and instruments, together with their legal status as actors with a global dimension. It sets out a general legal-analytical framework which combines legal parameters from EU and international law to assess EU agencies as global actors, and examines in detail three case studies on carefully selected agencies to shed light on the complexities of EU agencies’ daily international cooperation.

While the EU has championed "effective multilateralism" and experienced a dramatic internal reform process to improve its performance in external relations, broader multilateral processes have also undergone dramatic change. This handbook addresses the increasingly contested issue of profound political importance: Europe’s presence in multilateral institutions. It assesses both the evolving role of Europe in international institutions, and the transformations in international institutions themselves. Acknowledging that the category of international institutions comprises a highly diverse field of multilateral engagements this handbook presents a state of the art approach that analyzes both what we have learned about the EU and international institutions as well as identifying promising avenues for further research. The handbook is divided into six parts: Part I examines the EU’s diplomatic and legal personality in international relations that constitutes the internal foundation for the EU’s engagement with international institutions. Part II assesses how EU multilateralism intersects with other international institutions and provides a means to assess the performance of international institutions as well as the EU itself in multilateral processes. Part III focuses on the EU’s participation with key institutions within the general UN system, such as the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council as well as specific policy domains such as human rights across UN institutions. Part IV focuses on EU relations with wide range of international organizations in a variety of fields, from organizations in economic and security realms to environmental institutions and specialized agencies. Part V focuses on the EU’s engagement in a broad spectrum of issue-specific international agreements and international regimes, addressing issues such as non-proliferation of WMDs, climate change, information technology, and the emerging Gx-system (G7, G8, G20 etc). Part VI examines broader contextual factors that influence the relationship between the EU and international institutions, including the evolution of multilateralism, the trans-Atlantic relationship, global norms and the emergence of multipolarity. This comprehensive volume brings together scholars and practitioners to summarize and synthesize existing knowledge in the field. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of European politics, the EU’s external relations, international relations, international organizations and international political economy.

This book examines the perception of European Union’s identity by the main actors in international relations. Analysing issues related to public discourse in third countries as demonstrated by, amongst others, their political elites, civil society, and think-tanks, the book highlights a ‘normative gap’ with regards to the European Union's self-definition/perception and its perception in the international environment. It also shows that the European Union’s perception of normative power in international relations is not shared consistently by the main principal actor yet is differentiated relative to geographical area and scope of activities undertaken by the EU. It demonstrates that the perception of the EU’s normative identity is a source of the crisis of the European Union as an effective and significant player in the international arena. This book will be of key interest to scholar and students of European Union politics, European politics/studies, European integration, identity politics, and international relations.

This timely book investigates the EU’s multi-faceted development as a global actor, unpacking its legal mission to be a ‘good’ actor as well as exploring the complexities of fulfilling this objective. It elicits critical reflections on the question of ‘goodness’ in EU external relations from descriptive, analytical and normative perspectives, and examines which metrics of actorness are useful in tackling this subject.

This book examines the actorness of the European Parliament (EP) and its roles in global health. In doing so, it appreciates to what extent this democratically elected entity can be considered as a global health actor. Applying an original analytical framework to measure actorness, the book assesses the EP’s capacity to act regarding five major global health issues including the pandemic response, access to essential medicines in developing countries, international trade and global health, medical research and development in the field of poverty-related and neglected diseases (PRNDs), and global health governance. It demonstrates that, despite many challenges, the EP has indeed displayed a polymorphic actorness and multiple roles towards most of these global health issues, especially by succeeding in mobilizing its main competences and instruments to deal with them, finalizing initiatives, and having a substantive influence on the way they were addressed. As such, the book reveals the salience of democratically elected institutions for global health governance. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of European studies, global and regional health, legislative studies, and International Relations, but also to parliamentarians and (non-) governmental actors engaged in global health.

Written by a leading expert in the field, this book analyses the complex relations between the European Union (EU) as a regional organization and the United Nations (UN) as an international, global governance institution. The book explores how collaboration between the EU and the UN has evolved and how the two entities collaborate both structurally and in day-to-day work. It shows how the EU acts within institutions such as the United Nations General Assembly and how UN agencies, funds and entities, such as UNHRC, UNICEF and UN Women, interact with the EU and its member states. Through its analysis, the book demonstrates how, despite recent criticism, patterns of multilateralism and cooperation between regional and international institutions can be central to stable patterns of rules-based regional and global governance.