Regional actorness and interregional relations:ASEAN, the EU and Mercosur

The European Union (EU) has a long tradition of interregional dialogue mechanisms with other regional organisations and is using these relations to project its own model of institutionalised actorness. This is partly motivated by the emerging actorness of the EU itself, which benefits from fostering capable regional counterparts in other parts of the world. This article advances the argument that actorness, which we conceptualise in terms of institutions, recognition and identity, is a relational concept, dependent on context and perception. Taking the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) and their relations with the EU as case studies, this article demonstrates that the actorness capabilities of all three organisations have been enhanced as result of ASEAN-EU and Mercosur-EU relations. However, there are clear limits to the development of the three components of regional actorness and to the interregional relations themselves. These limits stem both from the type of interregionalism at play and from the different regional models the actors incorporate. While there is evidence of institutional enhancement in ASEAN and Mercosur, these formal changes have been grafted on top of firmly entrenched normative underpinnings. Within the regional organisations, interactions with the EU generate centrifugal forces concerning the model to pursue, thus limiting their institutional cohesion and capacity. In addition, group-to-group relations have reinforced ASEAN and Mercosur identities in contrast to the EU. The formation of such differences has narrowed the scope of EU interregionalism despite the initial success of improved regional actorness

Het neurotische lussen model: een leertheoretische conceptualisatie van complex disfunctioneren

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The geopoliticization of European trade and investment policy

First published: 27 October 2019The academic debate about trade policy in the EU has been dominated of late by claims about the new politicization of trade. After many decades of insulation from domestic politics, trade policy has erupted into public discourse with the unprecedented mobilization against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Wallonia's coup in blocking the implementation of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada. As a result, a body of academic scholarship has emerged that looks at the causes and implications of this politicization and variations across time and issue areas, as well as the nature of agreements and likely trends for future policies. In this review contribution, we push back argue against this prevailing diagnosis on two counts. Firstly, internal politicization is nothing new. For decades trade agreements may not have had much public salience, nor played a role in creating political cleavages during electoral campaigns, but behind the scenes member states have been engaged in a hard political fight over competences and interests. Moreover, some salient and, arguably, successful public mobilization has happened before, notably in the late 1990s. Second, it is our contention that, rather than simple politicization, the most important recent development has been the geopoliticization of trade and investment policy. Call it the China syndrome or the Trump effect, tariffs, retaliatory measures and counter‐retaliation have featured prominently in the news in 2018, and the rhetoric of trade negotiations has given way to the language of economic battlefields and trade warfare. This geopoliticization of trade may pose a serious challenge to interdependence and multilateralism, which the EU has long safeguarded, but it is simply here to stay