The EU as an Orchestrator in Support of Multilateralism: Tradeoffs and Dilemmas

In pursuit of multilateral policies in and across organizations on the global level, unsurprisingly, the EU does not always get what it wants. If it does not forego multilateralism and goes it alone, it needs to engage more comprehensively with possible partners. As an orchestrator, the EU can bring together other stakeholders and instigate and coordinate support for multilateral solutions. In this paper, we tackle the question of what kind of relationships the EU engages with and what challenges it faces. By examining how the EU interacts with international bureaucracies, third-party states, experts, and non-state actors across different issue areas, we develop a typology of orchestration relationships that we call aides, accomplices, collaborators and soulmates. With empirical illustrations from different issue areas, we show how mobilizing support of multilateralism may lead to different orchestration dilemmas in which the EU has to tradeoff between legitimacy and effectiveness.