Putting the EU in its place: policy strategies and the global regulatory context

ABSTRACT

On the one hand, research has trumpeted the European Union's (EU's) influence over international regulation. On the other hand, a significant literature details the limits of EU efforts. How can we reconcile these conflicting findings? This contribution's answer turns on the global regulatory context, two dimensions of which (the distribution of regulatory capacity across the major economies and institutional density at the global level) are used to deduce scope conditions under which the EU can (or cannot) be expected to adopt different policy strategies. The study posits that variation along these dimensions is likely to result in four strategies: regulatory export; first-mover agenda-setting; mutual recognition; and coalition-building. The analytic exercise helps identify sources of and constraints on potential EU behavior as the polity engages in the politics of global regulation. The framework could in principle be extended to explain the strategies of other regulatory great powers; it unifies existing theoretical arguments, contributes to a growing literature in international relations, comparative politics, and European studies on the role of context in conditioning causal relationships, and offers a nuanced and tractable set of expectations about the EU as a global actor.

KEY WORDS:

• Context effects
• EU as a global actor
• foreign economic policy
• international regulation
• regulatory capacity
• regulatory power

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Drafts of this contribution were presented at the ‘Regulatory power Europe? Assessing the EU's efforts to shape global rules' Jean Monnet Chair Workshop, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 18 April 2014, and at the 14th Biennial International Conference of the European Union Studies Association, Boston, 5 March 2015. We thank Darius Ornston, Sofia Perez, the other participants of these events and, especially, Alasdair Young, as well as two anonymous referees.

Additional information

Biographical notes:

Abraham L. Newman is an associate professor at the BMW Center for German and European Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Elliot Posner is an associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.