We examine how the EU can act as a great power in its own right even in the absence of military capability and how its institutional structure conditions this ability. We first theorize EU great power politics. Based on theories of corporate action, the EU constitutes a strong market power in its own right and a weak security power. While it is institutionally ill‐equipped to purposefully mobilize its market power to pursue high‐politics goals, its communitarized external relations may inadvertently challenge important security interests of other great powers. Second, we show that the EU acted as an inadvertent great power vis‐à‐vis Russia in its Ukraine policy which was primarily driven by the supranational decision‐making apparatus and low‐politics considerations, but engendered a bipolar power struggle with Russia over Ukraine. The risks inherent in EU inadvertent great power politics are deeply engrained in the EU's institutional structure and therefore difficult to mitigate.

No abstract

This article introduces an innovative theoretical conception of the corporate agency of international organizations (IOs). Existing rationalist and constructivist accounts attribute IO agency to the influence of intra-organizational agents. Drawing on general conceptions of corporate agency in International Relations, sociology, and philosophy, we elucidate how IOs can develop corporate agency, even if the member states prepare and adopt all organizational decisions themselves. In line with recent studies on international political authority, we replace the IO-as-bureaucracy model with the more comprehensive concept of IOs-as-governors. To establish the micro-foundations of IO agency, we adopt a bottom-up perspective and outline how, and under which conditions, IO agency arises from the interaction of constituent actors. Irrespective of any specific institutional design, IOs become actors in their own right whenever they gain action capability and autonomy. They acquire action capability whenever their members pool governance resources like the right to regulate certain activities or to manage common funds and authorize IOs to deploy these resources. IOs gain autonomy whenever they affect organizational decisions. Both dimensions of IO agency are variable and open to empirical enquiry. To illustrate our argument, we refer to the United Nations Security Council and other IOs with member-driven decision processes.

No abstract

The notion of actorness] is an extraordinary creation that manages to combine a noun of dubious pedigree [i.e. 'actor'] with a suffix (-ness), which, elsewhere in the English language, is only applied to adjectives and participles, producing a result that is both quite impenetrable and slightly childish. (.. .) [I]t is used (.. .) in an attempt to express the concept of 'the quality of being an actor'. The association between this word and the EU is so strong that, at the time of writing, if we google say 'US actorness', we still get a list of entries concerning the EU.