Strange Bedfellows: Agricultural-Environmental Cross-Cleavage Discourse Coalitions Against Trade Liberalisation

Recent EU trade agreements, most notably the EU-Mercosur agreement, have provoked opposition from actors with traditionally diverging interests, particularly environmental organisations and agricultural producer groups. While previous research has documented cross-cleavage alignments in politicised trade conflicts, it has not sufficiently theorised the discursive mechanisms that enable coordination among structurally antagonistic actors in the absence of interest convergence, or the processes through which discursive configurations articulated within one policy domain are selectively translated, recontextualised, and partially reassembled – rather than directly reproduced – across distinct institutional settings. Building on discourse coalition theory (Hajer, 1995), the article conceptualises coalition-building as enabled by shared yet interpretively flexible storylines that facilitate coordination without resolving underlying conflicts of interest. Empirically, the study uses a qualitative discourse-analytical research design to examine primary statements and policy-relevant texts related to the EU–Mercosur agreement produced in recent years. The empirical corpus comprises official documents issued by EU institutions, organisational position papers, and publicly articulated statements by agricultural producer organisations, environmental non-governmental organisations, and policy-oriented think tanks. The analysis systematically examines the articulation, circulation, and recontextualisation of discursive elements across the trade and agricultural policy domains. The findings indicate that coalition formation in the trade policy domain is influenced by a dominant liberal trade discourse, which presents liberalisation as welfare-enhancing and relies heavily on economic modelling and impact assessments. In this discursive context, environmental and agricultural actors unite around counter-storylines – such as preventing deforestation and achieving regulatory “level playing fields” due to high EU standards – which challenge the depoliticising authority of economic expertise while remaining sufficiently ambiguous to accommodate differing objectives. In contrast, this discourse coalition does not persist as a stable actor alignment in the agricultural policy domain. Instead, individual elements of the shared discourse are selectively recontextualised: macro-level propositions articulated by environmental actors are adopted by agricultural producer groups to legitimise opposition either to stricter environmental conditionality or to further trade liberalisation. The article helps to clarify how resistance to EU trade agreements is articulated and sustained in the face of widely claimed economic benefits. Furthermore, by theorising the discursive conditions under which structurally opposed actors coordinate across cleavage lines, the article contributes to debates on trade politicisation and discourse coalitions, while revealing how such alignments remain contingent and are reconfigured as they circulate across distinct policy domains.