8 - International Bureaucracies: Extraterritorial Reach of the European Commission’s Legal Expertise

Summary

The EU exercises significant influence over global regulatory standards, whether as a result of its ability to unilaterally export its rules to foreign markets via market mechanisms–a phenomenon that I have elsewhere described as ‘the Brussels Effect’–or by entrenching them globally through bilateral or multilateral negotiations. In all cases, the legal expertise of the Commission is central. It either pro-actively supplies its expertise to their foreign counterparts or responds to the demand to offer technical expertise to create a rule-based order that closely imitates the regulatory state in Europe. Companies also resort to the Commission as their preferred forum, relying on the legal expertise residing in Europe to resolve disputes originating far outside the borders of the EU. This contribution discusses the channels through which the EU’s legal expertise migrates to foreign markets, the political forces behind this migration, as well as the economic, political, and legal implications that the extraterritorial reach of EU’s legal expertise has. It shows how current crises both in the EU internal and external dimension have opened up new spaces for legal expertise to operate.