New is old? TheEU's Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy

Abstract

The European Commission presented its Open, Sustainable and Assertive (OSA) trade strategy in early 2021, heralding the document as representing a new and strategic approach to countering dependency and strengthening resiliency. We analyse the OSA through policy paradigms, making two contributions to the trade policy literature. First, we show that embedded liberalism and fair trade—often presented as two trade paradigms —are rather elements of one, namely managed globalisation (MG). Using qualitative and quantitative content analyses, we argue that MG has been more influential in shaping 21st‐century trade policy than heretofore recognised in the literature. Second, we show that the OSA represents a paradigmatic rebalancing and complementarity, between the MG and a realist trade‐as‐foreign‐policy paradigm. The OSA represents an EU seeking to increase its capabilities in order to defend its values and interests, while simultaneously promoting the return to a rules‐based liberal international trading order; the co‐dominance of MG and trade‐as‐foreign‐policy represent an evolution from managing interdependence to managing dependency.

As Open as Possible, as Autonomous as Necessary: Understanding the Rise of Open Strategic Autonomy in EU Trade Policy

“…In fact, the language of autonomy increasingly eclipses the language of the market across many policy areas and is used by asset managers and trade unions alike. Moreover, this time around, embedded neoliberalism was not just challenged by politicization of trade, but by geopoliticization, which connects economic (and social) with geopolitical concerns and thus widens the group of relevant stakeholders to include security actors (Meunier and Nicolaidis, 2019; Eliasson and Garcia‐Duran, 2022). Lastly, the EU has already adopted policies whose goals differ meaningfully from embedded neoliberalism's agenda of internal and external liberalization.…”

“…Whilst OSA does not completely break with neoliberal ideas of open(ing) markets, it constitutes the most significant challenge to and departure from these ideas so far. Eliasson and Garcia‐Duran (2022), in a keyword‐based quantitative analysis of EU trade policy strategies, find that, relatively speaking, (i) OSA contains the least references to ‘free trade’, (ii) by far the most references to ‘trade as foreign policy’, and many references to ‘fair trade’, both in the narrow sense of ensuring a level playing field and the broader sense of allowing non‐economic concerns to influence trade policy (de Ville and Siles‐Brügge 2018, p. 246). Whilst EU trade policy has reacted to the politicization of trade by including fair trade ideas before, particularly under Commissioners Lamy and Malmström (de Ville and Siles‐Brügge, 2018, p. 251), OSA additionally reacts to the geopoliticization of trade by including ‘trade as foreign policy’ ideas.…”

“…Theoretically, we combine various strands of European integration research in a novel theoretical framework that focuses on (i) how changes in the external environment (Sandholtz and Zysman, 1989; Lavery and Schmid, 2021; Schimmelfennig 2021) (ii) create an opening for actors to challenge a hegemonic compromise (van Apeldoorn, 2002; Bulmer and Joseph, 2016; Warlouzet, 2017) during which (iii) ambiguous ideas can be used as coalition magnets to forge a new compromise (Jabko, 2006; Béland and Cox, 2016). Empirically, we are among to first to shed light on the coalitional and ideational politics underlying the recent evolution of European trade policy under the banner of OSA (Eliasson and Garcia‐Duran, 2022; Gehrke, 2022; Helwig, 2022; Jacobs et al ., 2022).…”

Supply chain divergence challenges a ‘Brussels effect’ from Europe's human rights and environmental due diligence laws

“…Yet, the world has become more complex since Bentham (1793) recommended that Europe emancipate its colonies and refrain from scrutinising how they would conduct their businesses as independent sovereign states. Europe, for one, has increasingly moved away from a free‐trade paradigm and towards using trade as a tool to ‘manage’ globalisation according to its values and interests (Eliasson & Garcia‐Duran, 2023). Moreover, the global environmental implications of tropical deforestation – as well as greater supply chain transparency and stronger sensibilities to ecosystem destruction or human rights violations – make it much harder for consumers or traders to avoid scrutiny about the practices they support (Gardner et al., 2019; Grabs & Carodenuto, 2021).…”

When Foreign Policy Becomes Trade Policy: The EU's Anti‐Coercion Instrument

“…Third, the EU has been reacting, with a lag, to the geoeconomic turn taken by China, but also the United States, which has adopted or reinforced a series of economic policy tools at the service of their geopolitical ambitions (Haroche, 2023; Herranz‐Surralles et al, 2024). This shift from market logic to security logic is at the heart of the EU's concept of ‘open strategic autonomy’ (Eliasson and Garcia‐Duran, 2023; Schmitz and Seidl, 2022; Weiß, 2023) and the EU's new ‘Economic Security Strategy’ (European Commission, 2023).…”