The increasing geoeconomic usage of the Single Market for financial services

Before the Single European Act, a move towards more free trade received permissive consensus. Today free trade can be severely contested, although often based on imperfect information. In a time of populism, the reputation of democracy itself is suffering if politicians mainly act out of fear of losing votes. Within the EU, ISDS is an example of this phenomenon. The Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) is a mechanism within a free trade agreement (FTA) or investment treaty that provides foreign investors access to an international tribunal to resolve investment disputes. In this paper, we study ISDS from various angles: ▪️ From the perspective of various EU member states, leading to different perspectives of the need for ISDS, as a means of attracting foreign investments. This section is based on an economic analysis of the law and the legal systems. ▪️ From the perspective of the EU. The EU has to represent the sum of Member States on the international level, as well as protect its own interests alongside that of individual Member States. This section is based on the legal politics of the EU. ▪️ From the perspective of public opinion. It of course raises the question whether public opinion actually matters. Do the EU and the Member States respond to public opinion? It sometimes makes a difference but not automatically. Should we expect to find a correlation between the EU’s or Member States’ positions on ISDS and the citizen’s conceptions about federalism, their degrees of connectedness with a particular level of government, or the trade immersion of their country? Overall, we do not expect to find a correlation between the EU’s or Member States’ positions on ISDS and the citizen’s conceptions about federalism, their degrees of connectedness with a particular level of government, or their state’s degree of trade immersion in the sense that the first are dictated by the latter. A reverse effect is however possible. Misrepresentation or the instrumentalization of the subject for political advancement is a likely explanation for the polarization effect of the issue of ISDS. In other words, it is ISDS which helps create conceptions about federalism and its benefits in this way.