Explaining (De)politicization of EU Trade Policy Across International Institutional Settings, Trading Partners, and Domestic Mobilizing Actors

As a result of the considerable domestic political turmoil generated by recent EU trade agreement negotiations with partners such as the US and Canada, EU trade policy is increasingly depicted as a highly politicized and contested policy process. At the same time, the demand and supply of preferential trade agreements has been argued to be strongly driven by the relative political power of firms engaged in Global Value Chains. In this paper, we intend to disentangle the conditions under which EU PTAs and European trade policy in general becomes politicized and when it does not. Some EU trade agreement negotiations have garnered support or sailed along in relative indifference, just like a whole range of administrative measures, while other negotiations and some exceptional judicial-administrative cases have generated fierce contestation campaigns. In the mid-1990s, a small number of high-profile WTO trade disputes sparked very considerable political controversy in the EU, while in recent years these trade disputes have been less and less an object of public attention and political controversy. What might explain these varying degrees of politicization of EU trade policy? We explore the relative explanatory force of several arguments and map how they might combine, by reinforcing or neutralizing each other. First, the institutional setting of issue-linkage based trade negotiations sets very different incentives for political mobilization than do administrative procedures such as antidumping proceedings or judicial politics in WTO dispute settlement. The first fosters the mobilization of a wider set of societal actors and provides opportunities for small, yet vocal groups to increase the visibility of and polarization over trade issues, while the second stimulates de-linkage and leads to product-specific interest aggregation, thereby reducing the potential for politicization. Second, characteristics of the EU's trading partner may affect the propensity for politicization by EU domestic actors. Perceptions of economic threat emanating from the US or China indeed differ from those emanating from, say, Canada, Vietnam, or even a large economy like Japan. Last, NGOs and civil society groups differ from firm and sector-specific lobby groups in the size of the portfolio of issues they are able to juggle simultaneously, as NGOs tend to engage in contributor boosting flash fire campaigns, whereas trade associations and multinationals tend to engage in influence seeking activity through sustained multi-issue lobbying.