Conclusions and Implications

Abstract

The power perspective delineated in this book helps understand inter-organisational relations in two major ways: it helps understand the motives or reasons for these relations and their consequences. An improved understanding of these relations, in turn, increases our understanding of the organisations themselves: in particular of how and why they change. This, in turn, is essential in international relations. The conclusive chapter draws together the insights of the EU’s power and the complications of power analysis and shows how this matters through a look at implications of EU-NATO-UN relations for third actors, states and organisations, finding that they actually do matter for them. It goes on to look at where the analysis should continue to go. In the harsh climate of 2010s where international organisations, also the three studied here, are under great pressure and are even actively worked against by some states, power matters even more than before. The organisations now need to appear as powerful while in the past they might have been better of appearing powerless. Who does what, what is relevant and who is legitimate are crucial questions. In conclusion, the examples of this book tell not about mutual irrelevance but of mutual relevance: about how the organisations come to be dependent on each other perhaps even more than on their member states. Power for, or power with, seems to outweigh “power over.”