The EU and Brazil: Trading Partners in Different Fora. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 8, No. 11 June 2008

[From the Introduction] This paper aims at understanding the potential of partnership of the European Union (EU) with Brazil, focusing on international trade law and policy. Although the power base of Brazil is its respective region, there may be specific policy areas in which its influence might be global. (1) With this in mind, the paper raises interesting questions: is the EU an attractive partner for Brazil? Does the EU want cooperation with Brazil? What are the characteristics of Brazil? What are the EU’s priorities in its foreign trade policy? With which instruments can the EU engage Brazil and how can the EU internal coordination be ensured

Unsupervised zero-shot classification of Finnish documents using pre-trained language models

In modern Natural Language Processing, document categorisation tasks can achieve success rates of over 95% using fine-tuned neural network models. However, so-called "zero-shot" situations, where specific training data is not available, are researched much less frequently. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how pre-trained Finnish language models fare when classifying documents in a completely unsupervised way: by relying only on their general "knowledge of the world" obtained during training, without using any additional data. Two datasets are created expressly for this study, since labelled and openly available datasets in Finnish are very uncommon: one is built using around 5k news articles from Yle, the Finnish Broacasting Company, and the other, 100 pieces of Finnish legislation obtained from the Semantic Finlex data service. Several language representation models are built, based on the vector space model, by combining modular elements: different kinds of textual representations for documents and category labels, different algorithms that transform these representations into vectors (TF-IDF, Annif, fastText, LASER, FinBERT, S-BERT), different similarity measures and post-processing techniques (such as SVD and ensemble models). This approach allows for a variety of models to be tested. The combination of Annif for extracting keywords and fastText for producing word embeddings out of them achieves F1 scores of 0.64 on the Finlex dataset and 0.73-0.74 on the Yle datasets. Model ensembles are able to raise these figures by up to three percentage points. SVD can bring these numbers to 0.7 and 0.74-0.75 respectively, but these gains are not necessarily reproducible on unseen data. These results are distant from the ones obtained from state-of-the-art supervised models, but this is a method that is flexible, can be quickly deployed and, most importantly, do not depend on labelled data, which can be slow and expensive to make. A reliable way to set the input parameter for SVD would be an important next step for the work done in this thesis

The EC in GATT/WTO negotiations: From Rome to Nice Have EC Trade Policy Reforms Been Good Enough for a Coherent EC Trade Policy in the WTO?

This article is an attempt to a thorough chronological analysis of the ECs existing law in the field of international trade since the WTO agreement. It deals with the evolution of the ECs common commercial policy competence through the years, starting with the WTO agreement signed in Marrakesh in 1994 until the days of the European Convention establishing a Constitution for Europe, with a view to enabling the EC with a coherent policy in the WTO framework. Thus, a legal analysis of EC trade policy in the pre-Amsterdam Treaty period, at the Treaty of Amsterdam, at the Treaty of Nice and during the European Convention period is provided

Theories of Supranationalism in the EU

Supranationalism has been a topic of analysis from various points of view when trying to understand the process of European integration. This article aims at presenting the major theories of supranationalism when discussing the ongoing process of European integration. Three main theories are examined: 1) normative versus decisional supranationalism; 2) theories of partial integration, and 3) legal theories of economic integration (such as the neo-liberal economic policy, the European Community (EC) as a special-purpose association of functional integration, as well as the theory of the supranational and intergovernmental dual structure of the EC)

Polycephalous Anatomy of the EC in the WTO: An Analysis of Law and Practice

This article analyzes the unique legal position of the European Community (EC) in the world trading system. Its polycephalous anatomy derives from the fact that all 25 Member States of the EC are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) along with the EC itself. This means that when referring to the EC, the whole as well as its parts are independent Members of the WTO. This has legal and political consequences related to the allocation of powers between the national and supranational levels that will be analyzed. The article explains what is meant by a “mixed agreement” and analyzes the various existing types of mixed agreements in the field of the European Community’s external relations. The effects of the EC’s international agreements vis-à-vis third parties are examined. EC Treaty practice has become increasingly dominated by mixed agreements for they reflect the legal and political reality that the EC is not a single State for the purposes of international law. Problems raised by mixed agreements do not exist within the context of exclusive EC competence, but instead relate to the EC’s functioning. Within the EC treaty-making, there is a tendency to sign mixed agreements rather than pure Community agreements in areas dealing with the EC external relations. This shows their importance for the European Community and for its position in the world. The article concludes with some suggestions on what might be the optimal way to move forward in the complex field of external relations law of the EC and the European Union (EU)

Choice of Jurisdiction in International Trade Disputes: Going Regional or Global

This article is a legal and policy analysis of two international trade disputes fora, namely the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), for countries that have standing in both jurisdictions, i.e., the United Mexican States, the United States of America, and Canada. Both fora are judicially compared from the perspective of the respondent and of the complainant, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of each forum. The chosen time-frame of judicial analysis is between 1995 and 2001. The article concludes with two cases which may have been brought in either forum, Broomcorn and Canada – Patent Term, and recommends that, for the future, the Party concerned in international trade disputes would need to look at the factors compositely on a case-specific basis to determine whether a dispute should be brought under the WTO or the NAFTA