Have JEEPA/JESPA fulfilled its promises? Relative success of tackling the paradoxical Expectation-Capabilities Gap of the EU-Japan partnership

The Japan Europe Economic Partnership Agreement (JEEPA) and its corollary the Japan Europe Strategic Partnership Agreement (JESPA) both entered into force in 2019. After 5 years of implementation in a particularly challenging global environment, and with an eye on the upcoming Treaty review process scheduled for 2026, the time has come to assess to what extent both agreements have met their initial expectations. Of particular concern to this paper is whether both agreements had any success in tackling the EU-Japan partnership’s distinctive challenge of a paradoxical expectation-capabilities gap, where often policy capabilities seemed to exceed political expectations (Tsuruoka 2008) rather than the more commonly documented reverse situation. To this end, the paper will explore - via process tracing - whether, how, and to what effect JEEPA/JESPA were mobilised by political actors to tackle some of the most salient shared political challenges of the past five years. The political challenges analysed are: the (i) ratification and joint monitoring of the agreement themselves, (ii) vaccine procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic, (iii) energy procurement in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and (iv) digital regulation efforts. In each of these cases the paper asks the questions: have the agreements led to a rise of the partnership's overall saliency on either side? Have they helped elevate political expectations? Have they facilitated a pooling of capacities?