European Union strategy in international intergovernmental organisations and inter-regional relations: acquis and bottlenecks
Abstract
Engaging with international intergovernmental organisations (hereinafter — IGOs) and resorting to interregional relations potential constitute a central foreign policy priority of the European Union (hereinafter — EU, the Union), aimed at leveraging external resources to advance the Union's strategic autonomy goals. Pursuing this objective, the EU strives to exert influence on the international regulatory regimes generated by international organisations to be further implemented into the national legal systems of states. The more deeply the EU legal norms and standards are integrated into these international regulatory regimes, the easier it becomes for the Union to extend its economic and political outreach beyond its jurisdiction under favourable conditions. However, the EU's hybrid legal status and its secondary, derived from member-states, international legal personality breed a persistent legal inconsistency with the statutory provisions of most IGOs. This often restricts meaningful participation only to sovereign states. International relations are increasingly eroded by the great powers’ rivalry undermining international law and the global interstate interaction mechanisms. Erstwhile the lynchpins of world-wide production and technological chains, asymmetric global interdependencies, are now recalibrated into tools for "disconnecting" rivals from global system networking. Prompted to limit further degradation of existing mechanisms, all the parties and the global expert communities are in search for reserves within the international legal system to maintain collective security in a functional mode and avert a disruptive normative restructuring. Given the new trade and economic, environmental and technological barriers facing the EU and the dissonance-hit NATO, an in-depth interdisciplinary political and formal legal research into the positive aspects EU pragmatic approach to interregional ties as a life-line is adding weight to major international integration initiatives involving Russia and its closest allies (EAEU, CIS, SCO, BRICS+).
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