Minilateralism in practice: assessing the EU’s and its members’ selective embrace of minilateral diplomacy

This study investigates the European Union’s (EU) evolving engagement with minilateralism – small-group diplomatic formats. The EU and its member states have adopted a dual approach: engaging in both EU-led and member-driven minilateral initiatives. Employing a mixed-method textual analysis of 44 official documents, this article compares three distinct cases: the Normandy Format (embedded minilateralism), the 17 + 1 Initiative (outside-to-inside minilateralism), and the Ramstein Group (targeted minilateralism). Through Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and semantic cluster analysis, the study measures discursive, normative, and institutional convergence between the EU and each minilateral format. Findings reveal a high degree of normative alignment and practical cooperation in the Ramstein case, moderate alignment in the Normandy Format, and normative divergence with the 17 + 1 Initiative. These differences underscore the EU’s selective embrace of minilateralism, as a complement to multilateralism, calibrated to preserve its normative identity and institutional coherence.