The European Union’s external action is anchored in a multilateralist view of global order, with the United Nations system and the UN Charter at its core. Over decades of parallel institutional development, the EU has embedded the Charter’s foundational principles in its treaties and tied its diplomatic identity to the defence of rules-based multilateralism. Yet the political environment in which those commitments were formulated has changed profoundly, as states have become increasingly willing to act outside established institutional constraints in a world of power politics, exposing the limits of Europe’s normative defence of the rules-based order. The United Nations, meanwhile, faces mounting operational strain and financial pressures alongside growing questions about its ability to deliver on its mandate. As Europe navigates these changes, it must consider the future of a relationship it has spent decades building.
This growing tension was reflected in recent remarks by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a conference of EU ambassadors. She argued that Europe can no longer serve as the “custodian for the old-world order,” acknowledging a growing consensus among EU leaders that the Union must pursue a more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy, one that can “defend and uphold the rules-based system” while no longer relying on it “as the only way to defend our interests.” After decades of diplomatic efforts to strengthen the EU’s influence and representation within the United Nations, this marks a clear shift in tone and echoes a wider debate among Western leaders. What this shift means in practice, however, and how the EU can uphold the rules-based system while relying on it less, remain open questions.
The resulting ambiguity creates a strategic gap where the EU’s ideals and realities collide. Any new EU strategy must therefore recalibrate its approach through a ‘realist’ approach to multilateralism, one that can preserve the EU’s commitment to the UN Charter, while recognising the need for pragmatic partnerships and the changing limits of global multilateralism. Central to this shift should be a clearer assessment of the UN’s role in a changing international order, and a more deliberate European position on how institutional reform can sustain its relevance. With the 2026 General Assembly approaching, this article examines how the EU built its position within the UN, what the current geopolitical and financial rupture means for that relationship, and what a credible European strategy for multilateral renewal would require.
The EU and the UN
The United Nations Charter has long served as an important normative reference point for the European project, and the EU has gradually established a significant presence across the UN. The formal relationship between them dates to 1972, when the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC), was granted permanent observer status in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). In the decades that followed, the EU invested considerable diplomatic efforts to build structural ties and representative capacity within the UN system alongside the Union’s own institutional evolution. When the EU was founded through the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which entered into force in 1993, the treaty included a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), meant “to assert its identity on the international scene”. The principles of the UN Charter were explicitly anchored in this assertive, global EU. The United Nations became the main arena through which the EU’s ambitions could be pursued. 
A critical step in these ambitions was realized in 2007 through the Treaty of Lisbon, granting the EU a single legal personality and establishing the EU’s diplomatic service, the European External Action Service (EEAS). Before Lisbon, EU representation in the UN was a combined effort between the Commission’s delegation and the rotating presidency of the European Council, which temporarily assumed responsibility to speak on behalf of member states in the UN. Establishing the EEAS allowed the EU to become a more capable diplomatic actor by merging these capacities in a single, permanent delegation. In 2011, the EU obtained the unique ‘Enhanced Observer’ status in the UNGA, granting it enhanced rights to participate in the work of the General Assembly. Regular coordination among EU member states through the Council has furthermore enabled the Union to operate as a highly cohesive voting group within the General Assembly. These factors allowed the EU to play a prominent role in shaping policy initiatives in areas such as human rights, humanitarian assistance, and sustainable development, allowing the EU to leverage the UN as a global platform and become a normative leader.
The decades of partnership-building have also resulted in deep operational and financial engagement of the EU. Through the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the EU has increasingly aligned its peacekeeping and crisis management missions with UN operations in Africa and the Middle East. Further instruments, such as the recently established EU–UN Strategic Committee on Peace and Security, have led to further increased sharing of capacity and resources. Financially, the EU and its member states have collectively become one of the UN system’s largest financial contributors. While only representing 15% of UN member states, EU countries make up nearly one quarter of the assessed contributions to finance the UN’s core competencies, with the EU itself being the UN’s biggest non-government donor. In 2024, for instance, the EU directly contributed EUR 3.9 billion in voluntary contributions to the UN system, the highest level on record.
A New Reality
Despite decades of strengthening relationships, the EU and the UN now operate in a more fragmented, competitive and volatile geopolitical environment. Reflecting on past decades, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently argued that the world has enjoyed a “vacation from history”, warning this time is now at an end. His words capture the sentiment across EU political leadership that a more realist form of multilateralism will be needed to sustain its future. Merz envisioned Europe in a leading role to revitalise the rules-based order, stating that: “together with our allies and partners, we want to translate it for the new era.” Doing so will require a European strategy that can re-centre the United Nations in global diplomacy as it faces arguably the worst financial and legitimacy crises since its inception.
The UN’s liquidity crisis is largely driven by late or missing payments of assessed contributions by member states. The UN closed 2025 with $1.6 billion in unpaid assessments, with overall arrears across the regular budget, peacekeeping and two international tribunals exceeding $6.5 billion. Despite being reliable backers of the regular budget, most EU countries have also started cutting their voluntary UN budgets and development aid amidst financial reprioritisation towards defence spending and securing critical supply chains. Germany’s Foreign Office reduced acute emergency aid by EUR 1.18 billion, with further cuts a possibility. France cut its voluntary contributions by two-thirds under the 2026 finance bill, and the Netherlands is cutting back EUR 2.4 billion in development aid by 2029, with support for UNICEF and UNDP cut by around half. Hence, these cuts risk weakening the policy areas through which the EU has built much of its influence across the multilateral system.
Recognizing the mounting operational and geopolitical strain, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched the UN80 Initiative in 2025, a ‘system-wide’ effort that seeks to conduct a ‘mandate review’ and address the organization’s most bureaucratic and structural inefficiencies. The recently published UN80 action plan offers perspective, but initial reforms in 2026 have largely revolved around cutting back the regular budget, approving a 15% reduction in resources and 18.8% in posts to the UN programme budget, with planned reductions of future budgets continuing. The UN80 reform agenda continues to be welcomed by European leaders, as UN reform has been a recurring theme in the evolving meta-narratives and strategies devised by the European Council and Commission, predating more recent statements. A 2008 report on the implementation of the EU Security Strategy, for instance, explicitly called for a “renewal of the multilateral order” around the UN. Despite recognizing the pressures on multilateral global institutions, the EU has historically, however, struggled to assert the leadership or vision needed for such renewal.
This tension between EU rhetoric and initiative is evident in its calls for renewal of the UN Security Council. A guiding strategy document for the EU, the 2022 Strategic Compass frames the UNSC as the heart of the global peace and security architecture of the global political order, while simultaneously calling for major reform of its permanent seats and veto power usage. The EU has translated its support for UN Security Council reform into a limited set of concrete initiatives promoted by individual Member States, principally backing a French-Mexican veto-restraint initiative in mass-atrocity situations, and fuller application of Article 27(3) of the UN Charter. On council membership reform, EU ambassador to the UN Stavros Lambrinidis stated that “The EU supports comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council […] to better reflect today’s realities by strengthening the voice of underrepresented regions.” This applies to the African continent but could also include Germany’s accession to permanent membership as part of the G4 coalition.
Yet the EU has largely refrained from using its platform to promote a detailed, collective blueprint for enlarging permanent or non-permanent membership. This caution reflects the EU’s dependence on a Council consensus that must balance divergent member-state preferences, as ultimate voting power in both the UNGA and UNSC remains a member state, not an EU competency. Despite strong voting cohesion, divisions among EU member states have emerged in several cases, as national prestige and strategic interests are carefully guarded over the EU’s collective interest. Notable divisions over action on the Iraq War, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and more recent conflicts in Gaza and Iran illustrate the limits of Europe’s ability to adopt a coherent foreign policy position. Moreover, these divisions constrain the EU’s ability to present itself as the global actor it desires to be.
A Forward-Looking Strategy
As Von der Leyen suggested, developing an EU strategy capable of dealing with the declining effectiveness of global multilateralism and the changing role of the United Nations requires a fundamental change in the EU’s global posture. While Europe can no longer serve as the custodian of the old-world order, it cannot propose an alternative through rhetoric alone. Fundamentally, it will be necessary for the EU to build a consensus among its member states, capable of formulating a strategic posture in international diplomacy that can embrace the most productive aspects of multilateralism and place the UN at its centre, without appealing to morals alone.
The EU need not look far for inspiration but can build on the work of Finnish President Alexander Stubb and his “values-based realism” approach. Values-based realism as a foreign policy posture aims to preserve core principles of the multilateral system: sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition of force under the UN Charter, while acknowledging the limits of universal ideological consensus and the threat of aggressors who dismiss its logic. It combines a commitment to those universal fundamentals with a realistic acceptance of global political, cultural, and historical diversity among the world’s nations, meaning that states should pursue compromise and practical cooperation with partners that do not share the EU’s full range of political values, while maintaining clear red lines around core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law. Adherence to those basic principles should form the basis for deepening partnerships.
The EU’s risk, however, lies in repeating itself without operationalising its ambition. The EU declared “an international order based on effective multilateralism” a strategic objective in 2003, while leaving important questions about what would make multilateralism ‘effective’ and how the Union should deliver it unresolved. By 2016, the Global Strategy had stopped using the term, and the 2021 Joint Communication conceded that the EU “cannot be multilateralists alone nor only for the sake of it,” and must be “firm on its principles, and agile in its conduct.” While the Joint Communication seeks to explicitly identify “what the EU wants” from multilateralism, the resulting statement remains high-level, normative, and is undermined by recent financial cuts. Any attempted EU strategy will face the same challenge if it does not attempt to define what the future of multilateralism should look like beyond normative commitments, and how to get there.
As one of the UN’s strongest advocates and largest contributors, the EU remains well positioned to take a lead role in constructing the partnerships that can sustain multilateralism. A realist approach, however, also recognizes the limitations of global multilateralism, and should pursue interest-based partnership-building outside of the UN when required. A powerful argument for such increasingly prominent ‘minilateralism’ among small and middle powers was articulated by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his Davos speech in early 2026. Urging audiences to “stop invoking the rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised”, he argued world leaders must learn to find and expand on common ground and interests that can advance practical cooperation, from trade to technological and climate-related cooperation. By doing so, middle powers can “aim to be both principled and pragmatic” and preserve adherence to the principles of the UN Charter. Visible successes of multilateral cooperation, such as the EU’s Global Gateway, could give renewed, material incentives to value cooperation-based diplomacy along UN frameworks.
Whether Europe can play a leading role in revitalizing multilateralism will ultimately depend on trust. The pull of multilateralism was still evident at the UN’s 2024 Summit of the Future, where the UN’s member states eventually adopted the Pact for the Future by consensus, intending to modernise the multilateral system in response to new threats, such as climate change, pandemics, and the shift in the global balance of power. The resulting Pact, however, masked deep frustrations by representatives of many governments across the Global South whose governments increasingly question whether existing institutions adequately reflect the distribution of political and economic power, and may hold differing perceptions of multilateralism. Prominent politicians, such as Alexander Stubb, have argued that the Global South will decide the direction of the next world order, and that influence will come from treating those states as co-authors of institutional reform rather than recipients of European norms, and finding mutually beneficial pathways to economic development.
The Union can indeed no longer act as custodian of a world that has passed, nor can it retain the vocabulary of multilateralism while quietly withdrawing the resources and political capital needed to sustain it. A realist strategy should instead work towards defining a revitalized UN the EU wants, and what it will spend or concede to obtain it: which reforms it will support, which coalitions it will seek beyond the like-minded, where the limits of pragmatic engagement lie, and highlight what successful multilateralism can look like. The UN’s enduring value lies in its capacity to bring virtually all states into the same room. For an EU that aspires to act globally, that is not a reason to loosen a critical partnership built over half a century, but a reason to articulate a credible vision for its future.
