Suchergebnisse

Recently, the EU concluded trade agreements with emerging markets in different regions of the world. What explains the EU's pursuit of these agreements? I present an argument that suggests that exporters in the EU mobilize in response to discrimination abroad and push the EU to conclude trade agreements to protect their foreign market access. In two case studies, I show that this protection-for-exporters argument offers a plausible account for the EU's agreements with Mexico and Chile. Adapted from the source document.

The European Union's (EU's) 2006 Global Europe communication established an offensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA) agenda premised on serving the interests of the EU's upmarket exporters at the expense of the EU's remaining "pockets of protection". This has remained in place with the advent of the 2010 Trade, Growth and World Affairs strategy. Such a development defies both rationalist International Political Economy (IPE) explanations – which emphasise the protectionist bias of societal mobilisation – and accounts stressing the institutional insulation of policy-makers from societal pressures because the recent economic crisis and the increased politicisation of EU trade policy by the European Parliament have coexisted without leading to greater protectionism. Adopting a constructivist approach, we show that this turn of events can be explained by the neoliberal ideas internalised by policy-makers in the European Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade. We then deploy a novel heuristic to illustrate how DG Trade acted upon these ideas to strategically construct a powerful discursive imperative for liberalisation.

Today, trade policy is used more and more often to achieve geopolitical goals. To defend European interests in this new geo-economic environment, the EU must recalibrate its unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral trade toolbox. While the EU needs to counter the increasingly unlevel international playing field, self-sufficiency is not a viable option. The strength of the EU depends on its openness and integration in world markets.

The introduction of over half a dozen unilateral European Union (EU) trade policy instruments in the past few years seems to represent a major shift to the EU's previous focus on bilateral and multilateral avenues. This article investigates the origins of the recent unilateralization of EU trade policy and the main characteristics of the new instruments. What are the new instruments' goals and why does the EU introduce them now? We identify six key determinants of this trend: the rise of state interventions, increasing sustainability ambitions, a more adverse geopolitical context, the paralysis of the multilateral trading system, the resistance to bilateral trade agreements and changing preferences within key Member States. The instruments can be divided in three clusters focused on competitiveness, sustainability, and security. They share to a larger or lesser degree five key features: reciprocity, deterrence, built-in engagement, extension of internal policies, and the pursuit of international public goods. Our analysis points at a unilateral turn with EU characteristics, offering a framework for studying trade unilateralization in comparative perspective.
EU, Trade Policy, Unilateralization, Geopoliticization, Bilateralism, Multilateralism, Sustainability