Economic Internationalization and Competition Policy: International and Domestic Sources of Transatlantic Cooperation

Transatlantic competition relations have transitioned from a largely adversarial reliance on unilateral extraterritoriality to cooperative bilateralism. To explain this surprising transition to international cooperation, the dissertation introduces a cross-level approach that accounts for the influence of economic internationalization and the strategic interaction among various actors operating within causally significant domestic institutional environments. The findings suggest that self-interested competition regulators have driven transatlantic cooperation in competition policy, using their discretionary authority to structure policy coordination through three distinct processes: rule-making, implementation and exploratory institutional cooperation

The geoeconomic turn of the Single European Market? Conceptual challenges and empirical trends

The nature of global economic interactions is undergoing profound changes. Rising concerns over the security and strategic implications of economic interdependence are leading to what is often defined as a “geoeconomic world order”. In framing this Special Issue, this article sets a common conceptual ground to assess whether, how and why the Single European Market is experiencing such a geoeconomic turn, and how EU responses are shaping other international actors in the process. It develops a research agenda to examine (i) the systemic pressures pushing towards geoeconomic responses, (ii) the internal drivers and processes determining the nature of the EU’s geoeconomic turn (what we term “shades of geopoliticisation”) and (iii) the external consequences of the EU’s embrace of geoeconomics. The analytical discussion is complemented by an overview of empirical trends, drawing examples from the various fields of market integration and European policy-making covered in the contributions to this Special Issue

Expanding actorness to explain EU External engagement in originally internal policy areas

© 2018, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Despite its increasing importance for European integration, there remains a lack of scholarly attention to the growth of EU external action in originally internal policy areas. This article advances a comprehensive framework for understanding and explaining the emergence of EU external engagement in such areas. It combines insights from two sets of literatures: the EU external relations literature offers useful concepts–particularly ‘actorness’–as building blocks for explanatory purposes, while the public policy literature provides relevant insights regarding policy entrepreneurship and agenda-setting. The article contends that EU external engagement results from a favourable interplay between an external ‘opportunity’ and the EU’s ‘presence’ in a given domain, which is identified and capitalized upon by a set of policy entrepreneurs, who are driven by interest-based and/or ideational motives. To evaluate the salience of the framework, the article applies it across several policy areas.status: publishe