This paper critically examines and questions one of the most commonly held assumptions about the European Union (EU) foreign policy: that EU unity is a prerequisite for the EU’s ability to shape global outcomes. With the help of a detailed case study—the EU’s role and impact in the United Nations Human Rights Council—this paper argues that the pursuit of EU unity impacts negatively upon the EU’s overall effectiveness. In fact, EU unity not only fails to increase the EU’s ability to achieve its objectives, but in most cases it actually undermines it. This is largely due to the specific nature of the UNHRC on the one hand and the unacknowledged costs and limitations of pursuing and applying EU unity on the other hand. The argument of this paper builds on an in-depth analysis of three core aspects of EU collective foreign policy in the UNHRC: the formation, negotiation, and promotion of EU collective positions. The paper argues that in each of these stages, the cost of unity by far outweighs its benefits. The limited influence of the EU, as a result of its relentless efforts to act collectively, can be observed in the three core areas the UNHRC’s work, which are the creation, promotion and protection of international human rights standards. Overall, this paper hopes to generate some fundamental reconsideration of the EU’s default strategy of pursuing unity and ‘speaking with one voice’ at all costs. Instead, this paper argues for a more differentiated and context-sensitive strategy.
