Publication

This paper examines the institutional set-up of the EU policy-making process and the extent to which the Union acts as an international, rather than intergovernmental, actor through two case studies: the ICC and the Kyoto climate change negotiations. The authors propose several established explanatory frameworks on the EU's international role, including rational choice and sociological institutionalist perspectives, and argue that despite the distinctively intergovernmental nature of the policy-making process the EU uses a high degree of "international actorness". They conclude that the EU has played an important role in both the case studies examined and that the two aforementioned frameworks have considerable power in explaining the EU's capacity to act as an international actor.