Suchergebnisse

1. Making sense of multiple trade politics -- 2. Pressure politics in agricultural negotiations -- 3. Deliberative politics in trade-and-competition negotiations -- 4. Civil politics in trade-and-environment negotiations -- 5. Executive politics in technical assistance and capacity building negotiations.

The existing literature on the EU's participation in the agricultural negotiations of the Doha Round assumes that EU policy-makers develop autonomous preferences in favour of liberalising agricultural trade, thus going against the preferences of the agricultural sector. This article challenges this view and argues that WTO judicialisation—the strengthened enforcement of rules introduced with the creation of the WTO—affects the domestic politics of trade in WTO members. My key contention is that WTO judicialisation confronts societal interests and public authorities with legal vulnerability, and that this elicits a willingness to co-operate with other WTO members and thus pre-empt foreign challenges to domestic policies. Empirically, the article shows that negotiations centred on offsetting the potentially disruptive effects of foreign legal challenges to EU farm policies.

This research seeks to provide an explanation for variations of "politics" of preference formation in international trade negotiations. Building on the 'policy determines politics' argument, I hypothesize the existence of a causal relationship between issue-characteristics and their variations with politics dynamics and their variations. More specifically, this study seeks to integrate into a single analytical framework two dimensions along which variations in the "politics of preference formation" can be organized: configurations of power relationships among the relevant actors in the structures within which they interact as well as the logic and the motivations of the actors involved in the policy making process. To do so, I first construct a four-cell typology of 'politics of preference formation' and, then, I proceed by specifying that the type of state-society configurations as well as the type of actors' motivations in the "politics of preference formation" depend, respectively, on the degree to which a policy issue is perceived as politically salient and on the extent to which the distributional implications of such an issue can be calculated by the relevant stakeholders in the policy making process. The empirical yardstick against which the validity of the theoretical argument proposed is tested is drawn from evidence concerning the European Union's negotiating strategy in four negotiating areas in the context of the so-called WTO's Doha Development Round of multilateral trade negotiations: agriculture, competition, environment and technical assistance and capacity building.

Since the early 1990s, Brazil and the European Union have come to realize that their commercial, economic and political synergies offer vast opportunities for cooperation that are worthy of further exploration. This article aims to develop a better understanding of the role of the EU as both a political and economic actor by providing an outline of how the EU's image is perceived in Brazil. Elaborating upon existing data and analyses at the levels of political elites, public opinion and the print media, the article argues that while the EU is regarded both as an opportunity and a challenge, the former perception is more structurally grounded in Brazil's public discourse. In addition, the article suggests that some of the crucial elements of the academic and self-representation of the Union as an international actor have produced similar depictions within Brazil. However, in this particular country study, the social–solidaristic themes typical of the EU's self-representation appear much less relevant in shaping the EU's image than part of the literature on the EU's 'international identity' suggests.

The promise of global governance? -- Does global governance empower developing country mobilization? -- Inequalities in access to global policymaking? -- Has the rise of transnational advocacy triggered the emergence of a global public sphere? -- Is a global public sphere emerging through interactions among stakeholders?