The Trade Policy of the European Union

Bièvre, Dirk De; Gstöhl, Sieglinde

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-93583-3

Cited by 28 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Whereas the Commission holds exclusive institutional responsibility for the EU's Common Commercial Policy (CCP), the Council is responsible for CFSP matters. And while the Commission's trade practices are technically aligned with the EU's principles for external action enshrined in the Treaty on European Union's articles 21(1) and 21(2) (Ott & Van der Loo, 2018), and member states have historically been able to influence the Commission in trade negotiations (da Conceição, 2010;Gstöhl & De Bièvre, 2018), the Commission's Directorate General for Trade holds a large degree of operational autonomy in trade-related matters. In its proposal for the new ACI, the Commission explicitly seeks to maintain this vital role as it suggests that ACI measures will also be enforced as part of the CCP and hence via the EU's comitology procedures.…”

Section: Defensive Trade Measures: a New Anti-coercion Instrumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diplomatic Realisation of the EU’s “Geoeconomic Pivot”: Sanctions, Trade, and Development Policy Reform

Olsen

2022

PaG

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At a time when policymakers of the European Union (EU) are pivoting towards a more assertive use of economic power in external relations, this article discusses the merits of situating the much-debated use of economic sanctions and other economic power-based instruments in the broader terminology of EU diplomatic capabilities. Pointing out a number of shortcomings in traditional literature on geoeconomics and economic statecraft, the article applies the concept of “geoeconomic diplomacy” to demonstrate how the EU’s geoeconomic success will heavily depend on the abilities of diplomats and civil servants from institutions and member states to engage in viable relationships with relevant public and private actors in the state-market realm. Based hereon, it identifies institutional and context-specific challenges that could affect the comprehensive realisation of recent EU policy reforms relevant to the geoeconomic agenda: (a) institutional measures to ensure a more robust enforcement of sanctions, (b) a new anti-coercion instrument to counter coercive trade practices by third countries, and (c) a more efficient, focused, and strategic utilisation of EU development funds for purposes of stability and peace. The article concludes by discussing the prospects for bringing such instruments closer together at the level of practical implementation through the establishment of stronger relationships between practitioners working across the EU’s various geoeconomic intervention areas.

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Section: Defensive Trade Measures: a New Anti-coercion Instrumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diplomatic Realisation of the EU’s “Geoeconomic Pivot”: Sanctions, Trade, and Development Policy Reform

Olsen

2022

PaG

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“…This result reflects the evolution of this phenomenon described in an earlier section. Type of agreement is also positive and highly statistically significant across all models, underscoring the reality that SNTIs are much more likely to be included in agreements that address political and foreign policy matters more broadly (Gstöhl and De Bièvre, 2018). Importantly for our purposes, however, the effect of geographical proximity is robust to the inclusion of these control variables.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Mostly in its Backyard: Security Provisions in EU Economic Agreements

Ariel

Haftel

2021

J of Common Market Studies

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Economic agreements concluded between the EU and third parties increasingly take on security matters, such as counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation and international criminal law. Highlighting the remarkable variation in the presence and content of these security non-trade issues (SNTIs), we argue that it is best explained by the EU's intensity of foreign policy interests vis-à-vis its partners. Specifically, different stakeholders have divergent views on this matter: some advocate strong linkage between trade and security, while others prefer to tackle these issues separately. We expect the former perspective to determine the content of economic agreements when the partner is in the EU's backyard. The latter perspective will dominate in negotiations with more distant partners. We test these expectations with a new data set of SNTIs in EU agreements. Employing quantitative methods and controlling for several alternative explanations, we find ample support for the theoretical framework.

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“…However, only CETA and TTIP negotiations became the subject of a high degree of politicization in a number of national legislatures. And secondly, the insistence of EU member state legislatures to ratify all external EU trade policy agreements (whether multilateral WTO or bilateral) has been a decade-old constant of EU trade policy making (Gstöhl & De Bièvre, 2018;Meunier, 2005). This de facto member state veto over crucial issues, can be (Young & Peterson, 2006), as well as of the deliberate strategy to include issues of socalled mixed EU and member state competence into the negotiation mandate so as to make national parliamentary approval mandatory (Meunier & Roederer-Rynning, 2020).…”

Section: Variation In European and National Parliamentary Control Over Eu Trade Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations

Bièvre

Poletti

2020

PaG

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Over the last decade, European Union (EU) trade agreement negotiations in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada have been strongly contested. By contrast, many other EU trade negotiations have sailed on with far less politicization, or barely any at all. In this contribution, we assess a series of plausible explanation for these very varying degrees of politicization across EU trade agreement negotiations—conceived of as the combination of polarization of opinions, salience given to them in public debate, and the expansion of the number of societal actors involved therein. Through a review of existing explanations, we show how each of these explanations faces a set of challenges. In the third section, we argue it is useful to conceive of these existing explanations as structural background conditions enabling agency on the part of interest group and civil society organizations. We therefore close by sketching how literature on the relationship between interest group mobilization and public opinion could inform further comparative research on trade policy negotiations, and on politicization of EU policy making in general.

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The Trade Policy of the European Union

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

Diplomatic Realisation of the EU’s “Geoeconomic Pivot”: Sanctions, Trade, and Development Policy Reform

Diplomatic Realisation of the EU’s “Geoeconomic Pivot”: Sanctions, Trade, and Development Policy Reform

Mostly in its Backyard: Security Provisions in EU Economic Agreements

Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations

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