Abstract
The article deals with the phenomenon of EU actorness and, replicating the study and testing the EU actorness model proposed by Thomas Gehring, Sebastian Oberthür and Marc Mühleck, questions why the EU is recognised as an autonomous actor by some international organisations but not by others. Gehring et al. link EU actorness to the type of competences it has in the respective policy areas of cooperation: in areas of exclusive competences full actorness is to be expected, and in areas of complementary competences, non-actorness. To test this assumption, two organisations – the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) – are scrutinised. While the expectation in the case of WIPO was wholly confirmed, the cooperation of the EU with UNESCO required another explanation. The author reinterprets the reference model by adding an ideational component and conceptualising it by using three concepts: normative power and soft power approaches supplemented by the diffusion theory.