The rise and fall of CAI: an illustration of EU open strategic autonomy

The world politics has witnessed that trade is increasingly driven by geopolitical ambition and not strictly by marketoriented calculus. This is particularly true for the accelerating big power competition between the United States and China, but also for the European Union’s aspirational goal of ‘Open Strategic Autonomy (OSA)’ as articulated in its latest trade strategy. Yet the practical implications of OSA are still left unstated. This article takes the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) as an illustrative case to understand what OSA means in practice. In the past two years, the CAI has experienced a rise to conclusion at the end of 2020, and a fall to frozen status since the March of 2021. Enlighted by the Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), this research aims to analyze the proponent and opponent’s application of OSA in their arguments on CAI.