Power and Contestation of EU Trade Policy Within Europe: Geopolitics, Civil Society and Institutional Politics

Abstract

The geopolitical landscape and the intensification of geo-economics now feature prominently in EU trade policy. The increasing interpenetration of commerce and security, of economic interest and traditional security, spans issues and decision-making. This raises questions of how different aspects of geo-economic trade policy are constructed, both politically and institutionally. Beyond the existing legal institutional requirements for policy making, we can identify the contours of new political arrangements, both formal and informal. There are also significant internal debates over policy and institutions that potentially carry both political and commercial ramifications, again signifying how political and security concerns permeate commercial policy and its various instruments. The papers on this panel address how internal debates, lobbying, and national interests, both indirectly and directly, shape different aspects of the common commercial policy in this new era. The papers by Hamilton and De Bièvre (on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism), Schild (on EV tariffs), De Pupo (on Geographical Indicators) examine the internal debates, looking at how both economic and national interests shape different aspects of EU trade policies that have direct effects on third parties. They apply the political economy approach and specifically analyze the distributional consequences of new trade policies, interest group politics and bargaining power underpinning them and use a range of quantitative, qualitative, and formal methods to examine these factors. Similarly, Garcia-Duran, Eliasson and Serra assess the internal contestation that led to a novel, formal institutional arrangement in a trade defense instrument, the Anti-Coercion Act. The new decision-making structure reflects the overlap and interlinked nature of supranational (trade) and intergovernmental (foreign and security policy), perhaps setting a precedent for future reforms, while also leaving in place much political and legal uncertainty. Finally, Postnikov examines the strategic behavior of civil society actors in a new geo-politicized trade environment and their adaptation strategies via collation-building and lobbying. Together, the five papers open the black box of geo-politicized trade policy-making and highlight empirically how the internal contestation of new trade policies and the institutional politics behind them are linked to the EU’s broader normative goals and instruments in global trade and how it affects their effectiveness.

Title	Details
National power and the structure of European discourse coalitions: Adaptation costs, bargaining power and CBAM	View Paper Details
Economic coercion, the World Trade Organization, and the EU’s anti-coercion instrument	View Paper Details
Civil Society Responses to the Geo-Economic Turn in EU Trade Policy	View Paper Details
Geographical Indications and the Politics of EU Trade: Regulatory Design, Contestation and Negotiation Outcomes	View Paper Details
Taking a Geoeconomic Turn in Trade Defence? The EU’s Countervailing Duties on Chinese Battery-electric Vehicles	View Paper Details