Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper revives the concept of great power management by drawing on Waltz and Bull's understanding of what leading international states do beyond balancing against one another. The purpose behind this move is use a great power management perspective to examine what role regional organizations (ROs) can play in the post-American international order, where security practices other than balancing are evident. For this task, the paper argues, Structural Realism is a poor theoretical guide as although it explicitly applies to the most important actors in the international system-the "great powers"-Waltz's definition conflates great power as status with great power as role. This reduces the expectations that make up that role to the balancing of "enemies" in international anarchy. However, balancing is only one of the expected behaviours that make up the great power role: it is a means to the larger end of great power management of international security, we locate in the work of Waltz and Bull. Using the case of the European Union, the paper explores the notion of whether a non-state actor, an RO, can participate in great power management of international security. Contrary to claims about the EU as a normative power of soft balancer, the paper shows that the EU is currently an agent of great power management; it carries out many of the tasks typical of great powers, and is acknowledged by important players as doing so. That is, the EU is actively managing relations with other great powers and developing a regional sphere of influence where the intention is to find European solutions to policy problems. The paper concludes by showing the implications for understanding how ROs can be drawn into security multilateralism as orchestrated by great powers for the sake of managing global order in a post-unpiolar era.