Introduction: the new EU FTAs as contentious market regulation

Abstract

EU trade policy is in flux. This reflects various developments, chief among them: the deepening of the global trade liberalisation agenda, the EU’s own constitutional recasting of the Common Commercial Policy, and the politicization of trade. The purpose of this special issue is to analyse the changing politics of trade in the EU, focusing on the EU FTAs with Korea, the US, Canada, and Japan. We propose to view the negotiations of these agreements through the lens of contentious market regulation. This approach takes the regulatory turn in trade seriously, and sheds light on its ramifications for the mobilisation of new actors and the involvement of parliaments in the politics of trade. After tracing the development of the new EU FTAs and discussing the specificity of the EU’s approach to deepened liberalisation, the article presents the framework of contentious market regulation and the individual contributions to the special issue.

Keywords:

• EU trade policy
• contentious market regulation
• TTIP
• CETA
• KOREU
• EU-Japan FTA

Acknowledgments

Jens Ladefoged Mortensen, Joelle Dumouchel, and Alasdair Young provided helpful comments on earlier version of the article. We would also like to thank the two anonymous JEI reviewers and the participants in the panel on ‘The EU’s FTAs’, ECSA-DK annual conference, University of Copenhagen, 6-7 October 2016, and in the JEI workshop on ‘Writing the Rules of 21^st-Century Trade’, Odense, 10-11 October 2016 for their helpful and constructive comments.

Notes

1. The RCEP negotiations were formally started at the ASEAN summit in Cambodia in 2012. The Transpacific Partnership (TPP), signed in 2013 by the United States and 11 countries bordering the Pacific Ocean, is another potential mega-regional agreement. The 11 countries are: Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore (the original four starting in 2005) plus Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, Canada and Japan, which joined between 2008 and 2013. Japan was the latest country to join in 2013. The United States joined the negotiations in 2008 and signed the agreement in February 2016, under the Obama administration, only to pull out of it again in January 2017, under the newly-elected president Trump. As of June 2017, the fate of the TPP remained uncertain.

2. We thank JEI reviewer 2 for pointing this out to us.

3. One of the highlights of Trump’s bleak inauguration speech was a reference to America’s ‘rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscapes of our nation’; Trump promise the end of ‘many decades [during which] we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry’ (Trump’s inauguration speech, 20 January 2017).

4. We thank JEI reviewer 2 for pointing this out to us.

5. In 2013, however, WTO members reached in Bali an agreement on the fourth Singapore issue, trade facilitation.

6. Thus, provisions aiming at, e.g. liberalising public procurement and services are WTO + provisions, while provisions aiming at, e.g. harmonising competition law, developing environmental standards or providing dispute settlement mechanisms in the field of investment are WTO-X ((Horn, Mavroidis, and Sapir 2009).

7. We thank JEI reviewer 1 for pointing this out to us.

8. The ICT revolution refers to the development of cheap and reliable telecommunications and computing technology (computing, email, and internet) in the mid-1980s.

9. ‘They provide for the mutual recognition between trading partners of mandatory test results and certificates for certain industrial products. Under bilateral MRAs, each country agrees to accept product inspection, testing, or certification results performed by the other country’ (Alemanno 2014, 32).

10. Retraining and redistribution schemes are limited in quite a few Member States and the European Globalisation Fund is also quite limited. We thank JEI reviewer 1 for pointing this out to us.