The European Union as a Global Actor and its Impact on the International Legal Order.

As the European Union ('EU') seeks to play a greater role as an actor at the international level, this not only gives rise to legal questions for EU law, but also increasingly for public international law. Public international law scholarship focusing on the EU as an actor in international law suffers from numerous conceptual problems, most notably questions regarding how international law should conceive of unique legal entities such as the EU. The thesis demonstrates the various ways in which the EU has had an effect on the development of public international law. It assesses how principles of public international law apply to the European Union when it acts on the international plane, examining inter alia the EU and the law of treaties, the EU in international organizations, the international responsibility of the EU, and the contribution of the Court of Justice of the European Union to the development of international law. Through these various case studies, the thesis explores how international law concepts, often developed in the context of states, apply to composite legal entities such as the EU. It discusses, for instance, the extent to which ‘specialized rules’ should be developed at the international level to take into account the unique nature of the EU and the EU legal order. The thesis argues that as the EU acts in its own right on the international plane, this is having a subtle but important effect on the international legal order, one that should be taken seriously by international law scholarship.status: publishe