European Union small member states in the United Nations Security Council: a case of Europeanization of foreign policy

Abstract

Representation on the international arena has always been important for the European Union (EU), especially when it comes to international organizations as they are the main field for global decision-making. Particularly interesting has been EU representation in the United Nations (UN) and more specifically in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where only nation-states can be formal members. The restrictive for the EU legal set-up of the UNSC has left only one possibility for the EU voice to be heard – through its Member States (MSs). However, the questions remain: what MS is more likely to informally represent the EU positions, what causes it and to what level the MS will do it. Using the institutional-constructivist approach to the phenomenon of socialization. This thesis seeks to explain the difference in levels of informal representation of the EU positions aiming to find out what role the state size has on the level of socialization that leads to the informal representation of the EU positions. The study draws on original data from 10 interviews with the representatives of the selected EU MSs delegations (Portugal 2011-2012, Germany 2011-2012, Germany 2019-2020, and Estonia 2020-2021) to the UNSC to, first, establish the level of socialization for each of them and understand what differences (if any) there are between them. Second, it seeks to establish what scope of interest each of the selected countries had prior to joining the UNSC and build a link between the level of socialization and the respective state size. Then, the research aims to find out what level of informal representation of the EU positions each of the EU MS in the focus of this research had. This study arrives at two key findings. First, the results show that the state size does not have effect on the level of socialization of the EU MS. Second, the level of informal representation of the EU positions does not depend on the level of socialization that the EU MSs had prior to representing their national positions. It is apparent that the level of representation of the EU positions is largely defined by the importance that the EU MS attributes to representing the EU. Therefore, this thesis opens prospects for further studies of the topic.