The EU-IANUS project (2013-2016), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, was designed to investigate the European Union’s reaction to adverse changes in multilateral institutions. The first decade of the twenty-first century has highlighted the important challenges facing multilateralism in the world order. Emerging powers and the Global South in general have raised the need to reform liberal institutions, which have become a scenario of power redistribution and regulatory controversy. The repolarization of the international system and the crisis of multilateralism have coincided in time with a European Union in crisis. All this has created a context of adversity for the Union as a normative power and promoter of multilateralism. EU-IANUS analyses how the European Union acts in multilateral institutions under such adverse conditions.

The concept of adversity and the focus on the Union’s response have been the innovative elements of the EU-IANUS project. This analytical framework operationalises the change in multilateral institutions and identifies the expected response strategies of the Union: accommodation, as a promoter of multilateralism, or entrenchment, as a normative power.

The empirical work involved applying the analytical framework to ten well-defined representative case studies from diverse fields: climate change (Oriol Costa), reform of and loans from the International Monetary Fund (Robert Kissack), governance of energy resources (Gonzalo Escribano), trade negotiations (Patricia García Durán and Montserrat Millet ), child labour (Jean Grugel), transnational crime (Juan Pablo Soriano), women in armed conflict (Esther Barbé), the International Criminal Court (Gemma Collantes), the Energy Charter Treaty (Anna Herranz-Surrallés) and nuclear non- proliferation (Benjamin Kienzle ). The outcome of the first presentation and discussion of the case studies was the monograph The EU and international order: accomodation or entrenchment (2014), published by the Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals.

The analytical framework and the case studies have also been presented and discussed at international conferences. The group organized panel discussions in ISA and UACES as well as a round-table discussion at EISA. These provided relevant feedback for the final publication of the project, the collective book EU Policy Responses to a Shifting Multilateral System (Palgrave 2016), edited by Esther Barbé, Oriol Costa and Robert Kissack. Articles in various international journals have also been published, such as an article by Michal Natorski in the European Journal of International Relations (2015).