2 - The EU’s Trade Policy

Summary

Chapter 2 analyses the evolution of the EU Trade Policy and how it reached the new focus on stronger enforcement of EU’s trade rights and ensuring a level playing field in trade, i.e. more assertively representing EU interests. Thus, it depicts how initially EU Trade Policy was mainly focused on multilateralism in the WTO context, then shifted to combining multilateralism with active bilateralism by signing deep and comprehensive FTAs, and finally adopted the reviewed trade policy based on ’open strategic autonomy’ model seeking a more assertive trade policy, which is also presented in more detail herein. It also explores the drivers that instigated this reorientation of trade policy, in particular the crisis of trade multilateralism, the rising nationalism, the systemic challenges posed by the Chinese exceptionalism, as well as digitisation, climate change, and COVID-19.