Failing forward in the Common Commercial Policy? Deep trade and the perennial question of EU competence

ABSTRACT

The European Union’s (EU) Common Commercial Policy (CCP) is more fragile than the label ‘exclusive competence’ suggests. Ratification conflicts have increased since the 1980s and have further intensified in recent years. Simultaneously, the EU’s trade competence witnessed a progressive expansion in consecutive treaty reforms. In recourse to the ‘failing forward’ (Jones et al., 2016) argument, this paper argues that recurring failure and progressive integration have been equally constitutive elements in the CCP’s historical development. The substantive expansion of the international ‘deep trade’ agenda repeatedly laid bare the gaps in and fuelled intergovernmental conflict over the scope of the EU’s competences. Over time, these instabilities acted as a catalyst of integration, supporting supranational entrepreneurs’ quest for – and member state governments’ acceptance of – further yet ever-incomplete delegation. The paper thus demonstrates that, under certain conditions, the failing forward argument is applicable even to the EU’s historical core of regulatory market-making.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• Common Commercial Policy
• deep trade
• failing forward
• CETA
• Opinion 2/15

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their encouragement, criticism and suggestions. Many thanks also go to the JEPP’s editorial team, the three anonymous reviewers and all participants of the special issue workshop at Princeton University in the fall of 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to the Council’s ‘treaties and agreements database’ (Council of the European Union, 2020), of the 129 PTAs[1] entered into force between 1964 and 2020, 60 were mixed (see Figure 1). Historically, until the 2018 EU-Japan agreement, all of the EU’s multi-sectoral PTAs were mixed.

2 The data can be accessed in an online appendix.

3 This is not to suggest that exclusive agreements were void of ratification problems, as exemplified by two 1993 PTAs (with Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama) whose ratification took until 1998 and 1999, respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Freudlsperger

Christian Freudlsperger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Jacques Delors Centre of the Hertie School in Berlin.