This book studies the role of the EU in peace and security as a regional actor with global aspirations, in the context of challenged and changing multilateralism. Multilateralism, governance and security are three concepts that have attracted a great deal of attention in the past decade and attempts to redefine them have produced lively conceptual debates. More recently, different strands of the literature have found common ground in the investigation of the EU’s role in what has been labelled ‘multilateral security governance’. Despite being frequently used, the term is yet to be fully clarified, and empirically explored. To contribute further our understanding of it, this book presents a conceptual and empirical exploration of ‘multilateral security governance’ and the EU’s role in it. Expert contributors in the field analyze both traditional and non-traditional security areas, to investigate if and how multilateral security governance functions, and how the EU contributes (or fails to contribute) to the functioning of multilateral governance. The EU and Multilateral Security Governance will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of EU politics, security studies and governance.

This volume focuses on multilateralism in the 21st century and examines how, and how effectively, the EU delivers on its commitment to effective multilateralism. Presenting results generated by MERCURY, an EU research programme into multilateralism, this book addresses a central research question: does the EU deliver on its commitment to effective multilateralism? Globalisation has created powerful new incentives for states to cooperate and has generated renewed interest in multilateralism. While a large body of work exists on multilateralism as a concept, it continues to be ill-defined and poorly understood. This book sheds new light on 21st century multilateralism by exploring conceptual approaches as well as generating innovative, empirical knowledge on its practice. Research on EU external relations has increasingly focused on the concept of ‘effective multilateralism’. Yet, the application of this concept as a guiding principle of EU foreign policy in non-security policy areas has rarely been examined. This book explores whether the EU is pursuing effective multilateralism in specific policy areas, including trade, climate change and conflict resolution, and distinct geographical and institutional settings, both internal to the EU and in specified regions, international organisations (IOs) and bilateral partnerships. This book offers evidence-based, actionable policy lessons from Europe’s experience in promoting multilateralism. The European Union and Multilateralism in the 21st Century will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, international organizations, and European Union politics and foreign policy.

This book focuses on the problems of, and prospects for, strengthening the global system of security governance in a manner consistent with the aspirations and practices of the EU. The EU approach to security governance has been successful in its immediate neighbourhood: it has successfully exported its preferred norms and principles to applicant countries, thereby 'pacifying' its immediate neighbourhood and making all of Europe more secure. The EU governance orientation ultimately seeks to enlarge the European security community and expand the geopolitical area within which armed conflicts are inconceivable, and where state and private actors converge around a set of norms and rules of behaviour and engagement. The EU's success along its immediate boundaries has not yet been replicated on a global scale; it remains an open question whether the EU system of governance can be exported globally, owing to different normative structures (for example, a tolerance of armed conflict or non-democratic governance internally), great-power competition (such as US--China), or ongoing processes of securitization that has made it difficult to find a commonly accepted definition of security. Moreover, the EU system of security governance clashes with the continuing unwillingness of other major powers to cede or pool sovereignty as well as varying preferences for unilateral as opposed to multilateral forms of statecraft. This edited volume addresses both the practical and political aspects of security governance and the barriers to the globalization of the EU system of security governance, particularly in the multipolar post-Cold War era. This book will be of great interest to students of security governance, EU politics, European Security and IR in general. James Sperling is Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA. Jan Hallenberg is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Security and Strategic Studies, Swedish National Defence College. Charlotte Wagnsson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Strategic and Security Studies at the Swedish National Defence College.

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of the EU in UN human rights and environmental governance which addresses the legal and political science dimensions. With contributions from academics and policy-makers, this volume is a comprehensive analysis of how the challenges it faces impact on the EU's position in UN fora.

EU security governance assesses the effectiveness of the EU as a security actor. The book has two distinct features. Firstly, it is the first systematic study of the different economic, political and military instruments employed by the EU in the performance of four different security functions. The book demonstrates that the EU has emerged as an important security actor, not only in the non-traditional areas of security, but increasingly as an entity with force projection capabilities. Secondly, the book represents an important step towards redressing conceptual gaps in the study of security governance, particularly as it pertains to the European Union. The book links the challenges of governing Europe’s security to the changing nature of the state, the evolutionary expansion of the security agenda, and the growing obsolescence of the traditional forms and concepts of security cooperation.

For years the European Union has been looked on as a potential model for cosmopolitan governance, and enjoyed considerable influence on the global stage. The EU has a uniquely strong and legally binding mission statement to pursue international relations on a multilateral basis, founded on the progressive development of international law. The political vision was for the EU to export its values of the rule of law and sophisticated governance mechanisms to the international sphere. Globalization and the financial crisis have starkly illustrated the limits of this vision, and the EU's dependence on global forces partially beyond the control of traditional provinces of law. This book takes stock of the EU's role in global governance. It asks: to what extent can and does the EU shape and influence the on-going re-ordering of legal processes, principles, and institutions of global governance, in line with its optimistic mission statement? With this ambitious remit it covers the legal-institutional and substantive aspects of global security, trade, environmental, financial, and social governance. Across these topics 23 contributors have taken the central question of the extent of the EU's influence on global governance, providing a broad view across the key areas as well as a detailed analysis of each. Through comparison and direct engagement with each other, the different chapters provide a distinctive contribution to legal scholarship on global governance, from a European perspective.

This volume offers a coherent analysis of the European Union’s security strategies within a comparative framework. If the EU is to survive and prosper as an effective security actor, it requires that greater attention be devoted to taking a cohesive and common position on the relationship between EU foreign policy means and goals. The major claim of this edited collection is that there is a European grand security strategy that disciplines member state security strategies. That grand strategy has two distinct substantive goals: (1) the preservation and expansion of the EU system of security governance; and (2) the implementation of specific strategies to meet internal and external threats and sources of insecurity. The EU has sought to develop a grand security strategy that not only accounts for the proliferation of threats possessing a military or non-military character and differentiates between core and peripheral regions of interest, but also addresses the requirements to bridge the increasingly blurred boundary between internal and external security threats and the necessary reconciliation of the competing security preferences of its member states. The empirical contributions to this volume examine the EU security strategies for specific issue areas and regional threat complexes. These case studies assess whether and how those strategies have consolidated or expanded the EU system of security governance, as well as their successes and limitations in meeting the security threats confronting the EU and its member-states. This volume will be of great interest to students of EU policy, foreign policy, security studies and IR.