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Competitive Liberalization and the ‘Global Europe’ Services and Investment Agenda: Locating the Commercial Drivers of the EU–ACP Economic Partnership Agreements *
Author(s) -
HERON TONY,
SILESBRÜGGE GABRIEL
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
jcms: journal of common market studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.54
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1468-5965
pISSN - 0021-9886
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5965.2011.02220.x
Subject(s) - bilateralism , international trade , european union , free trade , liberalization , negotiation , general partnership , transatlantic trade and investment partnership , international economics , context (archaeology) , commercial policy , market access , economics , business , politics , political science , multilateralism , market economy , geography , archaeology , finance , law , agriculture
Abstract In the last decade the European Union (EU) has been negotiating with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries to establish Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In this article, EPAs are located within the context of the wider shift in EU trade policy towards bilateralism. This is done with reference to recent work in International Political Economy (IPE) emphasizing the ‘domestic‐societal’ and ‘systemic’ drivers of preferential liberalization. Although these pressures are not necessarily sufficient to explain the EPAs, they do account for why they have gone beyond the original remit of ‘World Trade Organization (WTO) compatibility’ and why aspects of the agreements bear close similarity to the EU's supposedly more commercially oriented bilateral agreements.