No 13, Issue 2       

MINI-LATERAL DIPLOMACY AFTER FEBRUARY 2022: PROCEDURAL INNOVATION, LEGITIMACY COSTS, AND THE LIMITS OF COALITION GOVERNANCE

Mihai ALEXANDRESCU

pp. 50-69

Abstract

The period following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 produced a distinctive governance pattern: the most consequential institutional responses to the aggression were delivered not through universal multilateral organs but through mini-lateral formats—the NATO–Ukraine Council, the network of bilateral security agreements initiated under the G7 Vilnius Declaration, and the oil price-cap coalition. This article treats these three formats as the central objects of analysis rather than as incidental features of a broader order narrative. Drawing on the literatures on mini-lateralism and on procedural legitimacy in international institutions, the article develops a comparative procedural framework—ten institutional dimensions applied across the three cases—and a legitimacy-deficit diagnostic that maps seven criteria onto empirical evidence. The analysis demonstrates that post-2022 mini-lateralism resolved the problem of operational speed and coherence but generated a systematic procedural legitimacy deficit concentrated on contestability and revisability, not on publicity or Charter anchoring. If left unaddressed, this deficit risks converting coalition instruments from expressions of international law into preferences of a bloc.

Keywords: minilateralism; procedural legitimacy; NATO–Ukraine Council; bilateral security agreements; oil price cap; coalition governance; post-2022 international order.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.