The EU regulatory trade agenda and the quest for WTO enforcement

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has increasingly called for regulatory agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in areas such as investment, competition, environment, and labour. Why has the EU attempted to satisfy such new demands by pursuing regulatory goals within the WTO rather than within other international organizations? I suggest two reasons for the EU's choice of the WTO. First, the nature of issue linkage in international trade negotiations has changed from exclusive exchanges of market access to the exchange of market access for regulation. Owing to the diversity of domestic constituency demands and consensus decision-making, the EU is particularly reliant on such broad issue linkages. And second, judicialization and the possibility of cross-retaliation in the WTO have enhanced the credibility of WTO commitments, increasing the organization's attractiveness for issue linkages across policy fields. I show how these two factors have contributed to the EU's attempt to place regulatory issues on the agenda of the Doha Development Round.

Keywords:

• Doha Development Agenda
• European trade policy
• international regulation
• issue linkage
• judicialization
• WTO

Acknowledgements

My thanks for critical comments to Andreas Dür, Chad Damro, Guy Peters, John Peterson, Cornelia Racké, Chris Reynolds, Arndt Wonka, and Alasdair Young, as well as Sebastian Burghof for editorial assistance. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the ECPR General Conference in Budapest on 9 September 2005, at the Universiteit Maastricht on 30 September 2005, and at the 2005 meeting of the section on international politics of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft (DVPW) in Mannheim on 6 October 2005. This research has benefited from funding from the EU Research and Training Network Dynamics and Obstacles of European Governance (contract number HPRN-CT-2002-00233) as well as from the VolkswagenStiftung at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim.

Notes

1. I use the term judicialization rather than ‘legalization’, which semantically is the process of making legal, as in the phrase ‘the legalization of soft drugs’. The term ‘judicial’ and its derivations have the advantage of distinguishing between legislative and judicial functions of international institutions (De Bièvre 2006).