Suchergebnisse

"The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of engaging in external trade relations outside of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with entire regions and economic powerhouses. Understanding why and how the EU engages in one of the most active fields of external relations is crucial. This book fills a gap in the literature by analysing motives on the modes bilateralism, inter-regionalism, or multilateralism - of EU external trade relations towards regional organizations in Asia and Latin America outside of the WTO. In particular, it examines why the EU turned from interregional to bilateral external trade relations towards these world regions a question that is, to date, under-researched. By developing and testing an original approach rooted in realist theorizing coined commercial realism, it examines systematically the explanatory power of commercial realism against liberal-institutionalist approaches dominant in the literature on EU external relations through five in-depth case studies. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in EU Politics/Studies, EU external relations, inter-regionalism and more broadly to International Relations and International Political Economy."--Provided by publisher.

AbstractTrade policy is among the EU's major capabilities to promote fundamental rights in developing countries. Conditionality clauses thus accompany EU trade agreements and tariff preferences under the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Yet while conditionality in trade agreements have come under the spotlight and the EP has stepped up its engagement in this area of decision‐making, the GSP has largely not been addressed in scholarly debate. This article fills this void in the literature by exploring the conditions under which the EP asks for trade sanctions on beneficiaries of the GSP. I argue that the EP invests political resources in a beneficiary when this country is salient under EU development cooperation. Hence, I observe a horizontal spill‐over effect whereby EP trade activities are driven by a country's salience in the area of development cooperation. However, this effect occurs only in the absence of security interests and the lack of development performance.

Among national parliaments (NPs) in the EU, the Austrian Nationalrat and the German Bundestag stand out as strong legislatures in EU affairs. Both parliaments have used their rights to great extent in recent EU negotiations on international agreements such as the one with Canada on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. Yet, in the negotiations with the UK their involvement varies. Why is this so? Scholarly work on Brexit so far focused on the European Parliament or the UK parliament, while attention to NPs in the EU27 is scarce. This article fills this void in research by tracing the Austrian and German parliaments' activities in the Brexit negotiations. Despite similar institutional strength I find that the German Bundestag is more extensively involved, particularly on an informal level, compared to the Austrian Nationalrat. The reason for this is Brexit's varying saliency in these two countries given their different levels of exposure to the UK's withdrawal. As saliency of a policy issue is considered a major explanatory factor for why NPs engage in EU affairs, the results of this article confirm this expectation within the realm of EU international negotiations.

Defence date: 13 June 2016 ; Examining Board: Professor Adrienne Héritier, EUI (Supervisor); Professor Ulrich Krotz, EUI/RSCAS; Professor Alberta M. Sbragia, University of Pittsburgh; Professor Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt, TU Dresden. ; Since 2006, the European Union (EU) has increasingly made use of bilateral trade relations, and thus departed from its earlier commitment to interregionalism and multilateralism. Two examples for this are the EU's shift from interregional to bilateral relations with the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR) and its regional power, Brazil, and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its economically most important member Singapore. This turn to bilateralism is particularly puzzling in the cases of MERCOSUR and ASEAN because of the EU's long-lasting relationship with these regional organizations and because of the EU's financial support for their regional integration. Drawing on realist theorizing, this turn to bilateralism can best be explained by the EU's motivation to secure its economic and regulatory power in South America and Southeast Asia, and by the regions' varying levels of cohesion. Factors rooted in the international system rather than inner-institutional characteristics have shaped the EU's trade policy which calls the explanatory power of liberal approaches into question. Testing an alternative theoretical model coined commercial realism against commercial liberalism and the principal-agent framework, the analysis sets out the scope condition of theorizing and analyzing EU external economic policy from a realist perspective. Employing original data from 165 media press articles, 48 standardized interviews from a survey by Dür and De Bièvre (2007), 44 standardized interviews from an original survey with interest groups enrolled in the Civil Society Dialogue, 66 consultation sheets of the European Commission's consultation on EU future trade policy, and 46 elite interviews, this thesis analyzes the EU's recent switch in approach in a comparative fashion. A combination of primary and secondary cases, triangulation of data and methods, and a combination of research strategies, including rigorous process-tracing, maximizes the research design's external and internal validity.

In 2007, the EU launched a Strategic Partnership with Brazil despite the EU's commitment to multilateralism and despite the long-lasting interregional relationship between the EU and MERCOSUR since 1995. By singling out Brazil, the EU shifted from the EU-MERCOSUR interregional negotiations on an Association Agreement (1999-2004) to a bilateral track. In view of the EU's inconsistency in multilateral, interregional, and bilateral approaches towards South America, the paper will analyze why the EU shifted to a Strategic Partnership, and it will compare the interregional negotiations (1999-2004) with the bilateral talks with Brazil (since 2007). The comparative analysis will rely on original data from 29 semi-structured elite interviews conducted in Brussels, Belgium, and Montevideo, Uruguay, and on grey literature and the news portal Mercopress. The paper argues that the EU switched from interregional to bilateral talks because it feared losing Brazil to its competitors, the U.S. and China. In its endeavor to prevent this loss, when interregional negotiations seemed fruitless because of MERCOSUR's increasing fragmentation, the EU privileged Brazil as a strategic partner. Although the EU has committed itself to supporting regional integration in South America, material interests have sidelined this commitment. This paper looks at these – to date little studied – material interests that have rendered the EU's foreign policy towards developing regions vulnerable to international factors.

The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of engaging in external trade relations outside of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with entire regions and economic powerhouses. Understanding why and how the EU engages in one of the most active fields of external relations is crucial.This book fills a gap in the literature by analysing motives on the modes – bilateralism, inter-regionalism, or multilateralism - of EU external trade relations towards regional organizations in Asia and Latin America outside of the WTO. In particular, it examines why the EU turned from interregional to bilateral external trade relations towards these world regions – a question that is, to date, under-researched. By developing and testing an original approach rooted in realist theorizing coined 'commercial realism', it examines systematically the explanatory power of commercial realism against liberal-institutionalist approaches dominant in the literature on EU external relations through five in-depth case studies.This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in EU Politics/Studies, EU external relations, inter-regionalism and more broadly to International Relations and International Political Economy.

In the wake of unsettling conflicts and democratic backsliding, states and organisations increasingly respond with sanctions. The European Union (EU) is one of them: Brussels makes use of the entire toolbox in its foreign policy, and its sanctions appear in different forms—diplomatic measures, travel bans, financial bans, or various forms of economic restrictions. Yet, there is little debate between different strands in the literature on EU sanctions, in particular concerning measures under the Common Foreign and Security Policy and those pertaining to the development and trade policy fields. Our thematic issue addresses this research gap by assembling a collection of articles investigating the design, impact, and implementation of EU sanctions used in different realms of its external affairs. Expanding the definition of EU sanctions to measures produced under different guises in the development, trade, and foreign policy fields, the collection overcomes the compartmentalised approach characterising EU scholarship.

AbstractAs in nearly all European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics. Yet, there is limited understanding of how the parliamentarians at the two levels interact. This article fills the gap by conceptualizing these interactions as a continuum ranging between cooperation, coexistence and competition. We use this continuum to explore multilevel party interactions in EU trade talks and show how cooperation compels politicization – national parliamentarians mainly interact with their European colleagues in salient matters. However, we argue that the impact of politicization on multilevel relations between parliamentarians in the EP and national parliaments is conditioned by party-level factors. Hence, we account for how and why politicization triggers multilevel party cooperation across parliaments in the EU through ideological orientation, government position and policy preferences and show how this takes place in the case of trade.