CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Márton, Péter |
|---|---|
| Title | Reacting to Uncertainty: Institutional Responses to the Politicization of EU Trade Policy |
| Summary | The EU’s Common Commercial Policy (CCP) has long served as one of the primary justifications for European Integration. A vehicle for delivering welfare-enhancing public goods to Europeans, the CCP has evolved along a logic of gradual trade liberalization and a shift towards regulatory cooperation since the creation of the WTO. This agenda had gone largely uncontested in Europe. It wasn’t until the EU moved to agree a deep and comprehensive free trade and investment agreement with the United States that this changed. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) embodied a newfound politicization of trade which swept over the CCP as a force majeure, questioning the objectives and underlying standards of legitimacy of the CCP. I set out to answer the question of whether this phenomenon of politicization triggered EU institutions within the CCP to pursue changes in policy goals, institutional arrangements, and modes of operation. While it seems obvious that EU institutions have to respond to politicization in a meaningful way, I demonstrate that the core policy objectives of the CCP have proved to be quite resilient. The EU trade élite’s commitment to upholding the post-WTO liberal consensus has in fact translated into a preference for circle-fencing the CCP’s core objectives and de-politicizing trade. This has meant that institutional changes in anticipation of and in response to politicization have followed a logic of incremental change, whereby the EU trade élite has tried to reconcile its institutionalized trade preferences with public resistance to these. Bizarrely, the CCP is arguably more throughput legitimate as a result while there has been little change in substantive policy preferences. I set out to make this argument with the help of a theoretical framework derived from different strands of new institutionalisms used in combination with each other for better analytical purchase. My expectations are developed with the help of a process-tracing research design. I trace the evolution of the CCP from the Constitutional Convention on the Future of Europe taking place between 2001 and 2003 to the European Court of Justice’s landmark 2/15 Ruling in 2017 on trade competences. I rely on primary source documents and a set of (N44) élite interviews conducted with a wide range of EU decision-makers from the institutions. The exercise in process tracing reveals that while anticipation of increasing public interest did play a part in shaping the CCP’s post-Lisbon ruleset (as the European Parliament was empowered as a veto-player to make trade more legitimate) once the floodgates broke open, the Lisbon ruleset proved inadequate to de-politicize trade. The struggle to save the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada – which had become first test case for comprehensive New Generation Trade Agreements – drove a series of institutional changes which not only rebalanced the power relationship between the institutions, but also led to a more streamlined institutional structure for the CCP. One which is better equipped to side-step politicization should it flare back up in the future. |
| Supervisor | Sitter, Nick |
| Department | Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/marton_peter.pdf |
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