Limits to market power: Strategic discourse and institutional path dependence in the European Union–African, Caribbean and Pacific Economic Partnership Agreements
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116639359 |
| Author | Peg Murray-Evans,Tony Heron |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116639359
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(2) 341 –364
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116639359
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Limits to market power:
Strategic discourse and
institutional path dependence
in the European Union–
African, Caribbean and
Pacific Economic Partnership
Agreements
Tony Heron
University of York, UK
Peg Murray-Evans
University of York, UK
Abstract
The following article offers a critical engagement with recent economic constructivist
scholarship as a means of understanding the nature of the European Union’s ‘market
power’. It does so by focusing on the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of countries, and
seeks to explain why — in spite of the European Union’s preponderant market power —
the goal of promoting trade liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation through regional
Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) ultimately fell short of original ambitions. We
highlight the inadequacies of materialist accounts of the European Union’s market power
in this case and instead take our cue from the (predominantly) constructivist literature
emphasising the role of transnational advocacy coalitions. We argue, however, that
the latter do not go far enough in their exploration of the non-material correlates of
the European Union’s market power by considering fully its discursive dimension. To
address this shortcoming, we draw on Craig Parsons’ distinction between ideational
and institutional logics of explanation to understand how the invocation of institutional
constraints affects the impact of particular discursive strategies. We argue that, in our
specific case, the success or failure of the Economic Partnership Agreements rested not
Corresponding author:
Tony Heron, University of York, Derwent College, Heslington, York, YO32 5UG.
Email: tony.heron@york.ac.uk
639359EJT0010.1177/1354066116639359European Journal of International RelationsHeron and Murray-Evans
research-article2016
Article
342 European Journal of International Relations 23(2)
just on the fungibility (or otherwise) of the European Union’s material power or the
campaigning of transnational coalitions, but on the congruence between the ideas used
by European Union policy actors to justify the Economic Partnership Agreements and
the institutional norms associated with the setting in which these ideas were deployed.
Keywords
African, Caribbean and Pacific, constructivism, Economic Partnership Agreements,
European Union, institutionalism, market power, regionalism
Introduction
In this article, we offer a theoretical and substantive contribution to debates concerning
the European Union’s (EU) external relations with the Global South. In doing so, we
encounter two interconnected ideas familiar to students of International Relations and
EU Studies. The first is that the EU’s power in the international system stems from the
size of its internal market — that is, its ‘trade’ or ‘market power’ (Damro, 2012; Meunier
and Nicolaïdis, 2006; Young and Peterson, 2014). The second is that this market power
affords the EU the ability to export its own distinctive model of regional capitalist devel-
opment to the Global South (Aggarwal and Fogarty, 2004; Grugel, 2004; Söderbaum and
Van Langenhove, 2005; Telò, 2007). The empirical focus of the article is the EU–African,
Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) economic partnership agreements (EPAs): specifically, we
ask why — in spite of the EU’s preponderant market power — the goal of promoting
trade liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation among the ACP through regional inte-
gration ultimately fell short of original ambitions. In essence, the EPAs were designed to
be both consistent with and complementary to multilateral trade disciplines by (re)intro-
ducing the principle of reciprocity to EU–ACP trade relations, while extending the cov-
erage of this to services and the so-called ‘Singapore issues’ (competition policy, trade
facilitation, government procurement and investment), which were introduced to the
multilateral trade agenda at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) inaugural ministe-
rial meeting in 1996. To date, four out of a possible seven regional EPAs have been
concluded (or are close to conclusion) but only one of these — the EU–CARIFORUM1
EPA of 2008 — comes close to matching the original prospectus.
How do we account for this suboptimal outcome? According to Chad Damro (2012:
682), the EU constitutes a ‘market power’ because of its ability to exercise leverage over
third countries through the ‘externalisation of economic and social market-related poli-
cies and regulatory measures’. In the case of the EPAs, however, bargaining outcomes
appear to be only weakly correlated with the EU’s market power vis-a-vis individual
ACP regions and states (Murray-Evans, 2015; Nyaga Munyi, 2015). This discrepancy
belies the general analytical thrust of much of the EU–ACP trade literature from the early
2000s, which interpreted the EPAs through the lens of the EU’s independent, political
and commercial interests (Brewster et al., 2008; Farrell, 2005; Goodison, 2007; Hurt,
2003, 2010, 2012; Stoneman and Thompson, 2007). In other words, these accounts took
the outcome of the EPA negotiations for granted, focusing on the (anticipated) economic
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