Who implements the EU’s geoeconomic agenda?

Over the last five years, the EU has adopted a flurry of policies as part of its geoeconomic agenda. But a policy is only as good as its implementation. Given their hybrid characteristics, between economic and security policy, implementing geoeconomic instruments inherently presents a large challenge of horizontal coordination as not only industrial, fiscal and foreign policies need to be aligned, but also regulatory fields that operated largely independently are to be brought into the ‘strategic fold’. As the EU’s geoeconomic agenda cuts across policy domains that are both firmly supranational such as international trade or the internal market and at the same time highly intergovernmental like foreign policy or finance, its implementation is often governed through a complicated arrangement between member states and European Commission. This exercise is further complicated in the multi-level context of the EU as the organisation relies heavily on the member states for the implementation of its policies. Each of these member states independently assigns responsibility over each of the EU’s geoeconomic policies within their administration. The implementation of the EU’s geoeconomic agenda thus seems to demand a thorough and simultaneous adaptation of the EU and national institutional and administrative practices. If we are to analyse the performance of the EU as a nascent geoeconomic actor, it is crucial to understand who is to implement what parts of the policy and the systemic changes undergoing the EU governance as a result. Building on existing methods studying the delegation of implementing tasks in EU legislation, we code all major provisions of a sample of ten recent legislative acts covering both measures of outward oriented and inward oriented economic statecraft. To add more insight into the nature of tasks delegated, we propose a novel functional typology of implementing tasks. Our findings can help unlock subsequent research into the (lack of) effectiveness of the EU’s geoeconomic policies and its underlying causes.