The European Union and the political economy of enforcing international trade rules
| Author | Arlo Poletti,Emile van Ommeren,Dirk De Bièvre |
| DOI | 10.1177/14651165211001514 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The European Union and
the political economy of
enforcing international
trade rules
Emile van Ommeren
Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp,
Antwerp, Belgium
Arlo Poletti
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of
Trento, Trento, Italy
Dirk De Bi
evre
Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp,
Antwerp, Belgium
Abstract
The European Commission keeps track of foreign trade barriers through its Mar ket
Access Strategy. In this study, we examine some of the key political-economic con-
ditions under which the European Union decides whether and how to address these
trade issues. Drawing on an original dataset of (allegedly) illegal foreign trade barriers
faced by European Union businesses, we show that industries dominated by a few large
companies are more successful in gaining the support of the Commission to challenge
these foreign trade barriers. Moreover, we find that the European Commission’s strat-
egy depends on the economic power relationship with the trading partner: the
European Union privileges negotiations when seeking to enforce international trade
rules against economically weaker states, while it prefers to use litigation against
stronger trading partners.
Corresponding author:
Emile van Ommeren, Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Sint-Jacobstraat 2, 2000
Antwerp, Belgium.
Email: emile.vanommeren@uantwerpen.be
European Union Politics
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211001514
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
2021, Vol. 22(3) 377–400
Keywords
Dispute settlement, enforcement, European trade policy, lobbying, World Trade
Organization
Introduction
The European Union’s (EU) pivotal role in international trade relations is undis-
puted. The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc, ranking first both as a trader of
manufactured goods and services and as source of, and destination for, interna-
tional investments. Two factors have crucially contributed to making the EU such
a pivotal international trade player. First, placing trade policy under supranational
competence provided the European Commission (EC) the authority to elaborate,
negotiate and enforce trade relations with the rest of the world. Second, the rise of
the EU as a ‘great trade power’ was facilitated by the existence of a set of multi-
lateral trade rules – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – which
proved very successful in channelling and furthering the interests of powerful
European exporting constituencies by providing them predictable and non-
discriminatory access to nearly all foreign markets (De Bi
evre and Poletti, 2013).
As tariff barriers declined worldwide, continuing to effectively promote the
interests of EU exporters required expanding the functional scope of the multilat-
eral trade regime to a wide array of new regulatory issues. In turn, this required
effective enforcement mechanisms that could be eventually activated to restore
compliance with these new multilateral regulatory commitments. The EU con-
fronted this challenge in two ways. For one, it sponsored, together with the
United States (US), the creation of a quasi-judicial mechanism of enforcement
of rules, which materialized with the creation of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in 1995. In parallel, in 1996, the EU adopted a new Market Access Strategy
(MAS), strengthening its administrative capacity to keep track of foreign trade
barriers and enabling it to take full advantage of such an institutional innovation
at the WTO level (Poletti et al., 2016).
Despite the fact that the enforcement of WTO rules plays such a central role in
both the rhetoric and practice of EU trade policy, we know surprisingly little about
the political and economic factors underlying it. In particular, the EU trade policy
literature has so far remained largely silent on two key issues. First, under what
conditions can European exporters count upon EU policymakers’ support with
respect to their demands to seek the removal of foreign trade barriers? Existing
works explaining cross-national variations in observed propensity to enforce WTO
rules as a function of the legal capacity and resources of WTO members (Brutger,
2017; Guzman and Simmons, 2005) suggest that the EU may be better equipped
than less resource-rich trade actors in this regard. Over the years European firms
have reported many instances in which they were confronted with (allegedly) illegal
barriers to trade in foreign countries, and yet only a small subset of these cases
378 European Union Politics 22(3)
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