Conditional Multilateralism in Times of Crisis: Comparing the EU, the US and China | Prof. M. Smith

Описание: Professor Michael H. Smith is Professor in European Politics at Warwick University. He was previously Professor of European Politics at Loughborough 1994-2015, and was Head of Department from 1999-2002; previously he was a Professor and Dean at Coventry University. From 2005-2013 he was co-director of the Centre for the Study of International Governance at Loughborough, and a member of the University Research Performance Monitoring Committee; he was also the coordinator of the Department of Politics, History and International Relations submission to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. He has been the Chair of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and the Standing Committee of Heads of European Studies, and in 2010 was honoured by UACES with their award for Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary European Studies. He was also Chair of the European Studies sub-panel in the UK national Research Assessment Exercise for 2008, and is involved widely in research assessment and research networks in Europe and beyond. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading international journals, including the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, Perspectives on European Politics and Society and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations; he is also on the advisory boards of two book series dealing with the European Union and its external action, published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. He holds visiting Professorships at Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok) and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

Abstract

What does it mean to be a ‘multilateralist’ in the current global arena? This lecture explores the engagement of the European Union, China and the United States with the institutions of global governance and the global multilateral system. The first part of the lecture identifies and explores key components of multilateral governance, and suggests that there is a crisis of contemporary multilateralism. The lecture goes on to contrast images of the EU as a ‘compulsive multilateralist’, China as an ‘experimental multilateralist’ and the USA as a ‘selective multilateralist’ in this context, but argues that in fact each of them has become a ‘conditional multilateralist’, with significant implications for the future of global governance.