1.1 The Normative Aspirations of EU Trade Policy
The European Union (EU) is a pivotal player in international trade relations, holding formidable power in trade but also capable of exercising substantial power through trade. Trade policy therefore represents a strategic field for the EU to shape its image as a healthy economy and an ethical trade power. In other words, it is an actor committed to using trade agreements in order to promote norms such as economic liberalism, sustainable development , and human rights on a global level.
A brief excursus on trade relations between the EU and developing countries confirms that the Union has constantly striven to demonstrate its leadership in development cooperation and ability to promote norms internationally. Even though the protectionist implications of the Common Agricultural Policy have been a major challenge to its efforts to play an uncontested leadership role in international development throughout its history, it is fair to say that the EU is one of the major architects of programmes seeking to integrate trade and development goals and that it has consistently promoted trade agreements with developing countries that also include a strong normative component. The European Community was the first member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to establish in 1971 a Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) aimed at supporting the process of integration of developing countries into global markets. From 1975 to the early 2000s, it implemented non-reciprocal preferential schemes based on unilateral tariff removal as a form of development cooperation with the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. Those preferences had been negotiated and agreed upon jointly with the ACP group in the Lomé Conventions.
Since the end of the 1990s, the EU has further reinforced the normative ambition of its trade policy. By negotiating preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with regional blocs of states in South America, East Asia, and the Southern Mediterranean, it deliberately supported processes of regional integration beyond its borders. In so doing it gained the reputation of ‘the patron saint of inter-regionalism in international economic relations’ (Aggarwal and Fogarty 2006, p. 327). In 2001, the EU also adopted the Everything but Arms initiative , which was conceived to set opportunities for export-led development and contribute to conflict prevention in developing countries. The initiative provides duty-free and quota-free access to all imports to the EU from the least developed countries, with the exception of armaments. Most notably, in the same year, the EU emerged as the most fervent supporter of the Doha Development Agenda , launched in November 2001. In that context the EU promoted a comprehensive multilateral agreement aiming at regulating global free trade while putting developing countries in a condition to take profit from it. Since then, the ambitious goal of supporting trade governance structures that are instrumental to ‘managing globalization’, that is, integrating market-creating and market-correcting rules, has been the cornerstone of the EU’s trade policy strategies at both multilateral and bilateral/regional levels. While promoting a comprehensive multilateral agreement in the Doha Round, in a revision of the GSP, named GSP-plus (which entered into force in 2006), the EU provided additional market access to eligible developing countries, under the condition that those countries ratify, or show progress in the direction of ratifying and implementing, a list of international conventions on human rights, good governance, and sustainable development. The European Commission considered this programme as a ‘structural aid measure’ aimed at helping developing countries to ‘develop their capacities to be involved in the negotiations’ (Scheipers and Sicurelli 2008, p. 616).
Even when the EU decided to abandon its ‘multilateralism first’ approach to trade policy and decided to move more forcefully towards a strategy of trade liberalization through bilateral/regional agreements in 2006 (European Commission 2006), the Union continued to stress the risks that an excessive marketization of the global economy might have for the increasing marginalization of developing countries in the global economy. This rhetoric has survived even in the face of the challenges brought about by the rise of emerging economies (especially the BRICS, i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the global economic downturn that started in 2007–2008. For one thing, since 2010 the EU has consistently sought to advance a ‘deep trade agenda’ aimed at removing behind-the-border barriers to trade such as competition policy , public procurement , investments , intellectual property rights (IPR) , and technical and sanitary standards in the context of so-called new-generation trade deals with its trading partners (Araujo 2016). However, and in contrast to the PTAs concluded by the US, the Commission’s mandates for these negotiations have also consistently included provisions for broad normative and developmental objectives such as the promotion of international law in the fields of labour rights, environmental protection, and human rights.
Recent communications of the European Commission have further elaborated on the image of the EU as an actor committed and able to contribute to development cooperation through trade. The communication of the European Commission (2012) on Trade, Growth, and Development specifies that, while the EU should promote deep trade liberalization through PTAs, it must do so by taking into account the level of development and specific development needs of its negotiating partners. More recently, in a communication ambitiously titled ‘Trade for All: Towards a More Responsible Trade and Investment Policy’, the European Commission (2015) synthesized the representation of the EU as an ethical trade power, defining its views of the trade–development nexus as one that ‘involves using trade agreements and trade preference as levers to promote, around the world, values like sustainable development, human rights, fair and ethical trade and the fight against corruption’. According to the European Commission, this view requires ‘a flexible approach’ to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and ‘negotiations to take account of the economic realities of its partners’. In 2016 the Commission (2016) declared a twofold overarching goal, namely, that of fostering economic growth in Europe while, at the same time, promoting development and growth abroad, both in developed and in developing countries.1 In other words, the EU aims to increase its competitiveness in world trade while acting as a liberal and responsible power. Quoting the rhetoric of the European Commission, ‘The EU’s success is inextricably bound up with the success of our trading partners, both in the developed and developing world’ (ibidem).
This solidarity-based and normative discourse used by the EU is consistent with Manners’ (2002) representation of the EU as a normative power, namely, as an actor that is structurally bound to promote norms and values beyond its borders. This definition has been widely applied to the analysis of European trade policy (Van den Hoven 2006; Khorana and Garcia 2013; Hirsch 2017). Scholars adopting an approach that focuses on the material interests that underpin the making of EU trade policy, however, criticize this research agenda, claiming that the image of a coherent and effective civilian force for good that pursues a mostly normative foreign policy agenda has no empirical foundations (Young and Peterson 2014). The financial crisis and the growing Euroscepticism have contributed to weakening the heuristic potential of the conceptualization of the EU as a normative power. Yet, the definition of the EU as a normative power still features among the ‘key controversies in European integration’ in the academic debate (Zimmermann and Dür 2016). As Pollack (2016) observes, recent studies take distance from an uncritical celebration of the normative difference of the EU and investigate, instead, the conditions under which the EU successfully asserts normative leadership. From this perspective, here is still a need for systematic assessments of the EU’s normative power aspirations through trade (Carbone and Orbie 2014).
1.2 Research Questions and Methodology
This volume investigates the domestic conditions for the emergence of the EU as a normative power through trade. In doing so, it largely borrows from traditional international political-economy (IPE) approaches, which tend to assume that patterns of political mobilization of organized societal actors largely contribute to shape governments’ preferences over trade policy (Hiscox 2001). This approach has been used extensively to analyse US trade policymaking (see Feinberg 2003) and has increasingly gained ground in scholarly investigations of EU trade policy as well (for a review of these approaches, see Poletti and De Bièvre 2014). From this perspective, the European Commission appears largely exposed to industry and civil society pressures in the shaping of its negotiating positions. These analyses have investigated different aspects of EU trade policy, including its role in multilateral trade negotiations (Conceição-Heldt 2011; Poletti 2012; Poletti and De Bièvre 2016), the politics of anti-dumping (Eckhardt 2011), and the politics of PTAs (Dür 2007; Eckhardt and Poletti 2016). These studies, either implicitly or explicitly, all question the validity of approaches that identify in the normative aspirations of the EU the sources of its trade policy strategies.
Despite the relevance of the potential conflict between the self-representation of the EU as a normative trade power and the logic of interest-based political mobilization by key economic constituencies that many studies have considered crucial in defining EU trade policy, surprisingly few studies have systematically subjected to empirical scrutiny whether, and under what conditions, the EU can live up to its normative ambition to use trade policy as a means to support sustainable growth, environmental protection , and human rights in developing countries...