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Despite the onset of the current economic crisis there has been no significant move towards protectionism amongst most of the world's economies. Although rational institutionalist explanations point to the role played by the constraining rules of the World Trade Organisation, countries have largely remained open in areas where they have not legally bound their liberalisation. While accounts emphasising the increasing interdependence of global supply chains have some merit, I show that such explanations do not tell the full story, as integration into the global economy is not always associated with support for free trade during the crisis. In response, I develop a constructivist argument which highlights how particular ideas about the global trading system have become rooted in policy-making discourse, mediating the response of policy elites to protectionist pressures and temptations. Trade policy-makers and a group of leading economists have constructed an ideational imperative for continued openness (and for concluding the Doha Round, albeit less successfully) by drawing on a questionable reading of economic history (the Smoot-Hawley myth); by continually stressing protectionism's role as one of the causes of the Great Depression non-liberal responses to the current crisis have been all but ruled out by all except those willing to question the received wisdom. Adapted from the source document.

Following the stagnation of negotiations with the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, the centrepiece of the European Union's (EU's) trade and development strategy has been a reform of the Generalised System of Preferences. Although policy-makers in the Commission's Directorate General for Trade have argued they are 'refocusing' these preferences on the 'neediest', by rendering a significant proportion of emerging economies' exports ineligible for the scheme, this article argues that the reform is actually part of a broader 'reciprocity' agenda being pursued in the context of the current economic crisis. This is about ensuring the EU possesses sufficient offensive leverage in ongoing free trade agreement negotiations, rather than representing any mercantilist move towards greater domestic protection. In arguing that the EU's developmental trade agenda is increasingly subordinated to commercial imperatives, this article adds to a literature that has situated the study of EU trade and development policy within the field of political economy. Adapted from the source document.

In 2006 the European Commission announced its Global Europe strategy, which proposed pursuing a series of ambitious Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) premised on exchanging the EU's remaining 'pockets of protection' for market access. The first of these agreements was signed with South Korea in October 2010. This article asks how the Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade could successfully conclude this agreement in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis. Given a strong mobilisation of protectionists with access to policy-makers, this liberal policy outcome cannot be explained purely in terms of institutional insulation, as in much of the literature on EU trade policy, nor be simply 'read off' from the material interests of societal actors. This article, therefore, develops a constructivist framework which broadens our understanding of the power of strategically invoked economic discourses. By developing a novel analytical strategy to determine the intentional invocation of such discourses, it is able to show how DG Trade constructed an ideational imperative for liberalisation in Global Europe, enabling it to overcome opposition to the EU-Korea FTA. Beyond its contribution to constructivist scholarship, this article draws attention to the neglected dimension of ideas in trade policy and highlights the continued purchase of neoliberalism after the crisis. Adapted from the source document.

In the last decade the European Union (EU) has been negotiating with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries to establish Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In this article, EPAs are located within the context of the wider shift in EU trade policy towards bilateralism. This is done with reference to recent work in International Political Economy (IPE) emphasizing the "domestic-societal" and "systemic" drivers of preferential liberalization. Although these pressures are not necessarily sufficient to explain the EPAs, they do account for why they have gone beyond the original remit of "World Trade Organization (WTO) compatibility" and why aspects of the agreements bear close similarity to the EU's supposedly more commercially oriented bilateral agreements. Adapted from the source document.