The Discursive Face of ‘Normative Power Europe’: The Case of CETA Negotiation on Trade and Sustainable Development

Against the stalemate of multilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization(WTO), the European Union(EU) has increasingly turned to Preferential Trade Agreements(PTAs) since the launch of Communication on “Global Europe” in 2006. This new generation trade agreements has consistently included a “trade and sustainable development”(TSD) chapter, dealing with the differences of social and environmental standards between the EU and its trading partners, combining with a specific monitoring and enforcement mechanism. This new chapter seems to support the argument about the distinctive nature of the EU as a ‘normative power’ in international relations. As this article argues, however, this perspective fails to capture tensions among domestic interests in Europe, influenced by the bargaining configuration between the EU and trading partners. This article aims to partly fill this gap by an in-depth case study on trade and sustainable development in the heatedly debated EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement(CETA). Taking a perspective of discursive institutionalism(Schmidt, 2008), this article focuses on the involvement of Civil Society Organizations and European Parliament in the EU’s trade agreements negotiation, and their discursive interaction with the only negotiator-European Commission. Methodologically, this article conducts a close process-tracing analysis of the official documents published during the whole negotiation-ratification-application process, as well as data collected from interviews. By tracing the EU’s normative identity back to a domestic discursive interaction in the CETA context, this paper aims to contribute to the EU’s trade governance on sustainable development empirically, as well as a more critical reading of EU’s normative power theoretically.