This chapter considers relations between the European Union and other European States. The European Economic Area establishes something close to a single market, with non-EU States transposing swathes of EU law into their national law. A customs union with Turkey in non-agricultural goods requires Turkey to align its laws with EU laws relating to external trade and free movement of goods. A hybrid regime exists with the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland aligns its external trade and free movement of goods law with EU law. A free trade agreement exists for the rest of the United Kingdom which abolishes tariffs on movement of goods but allows regulatory barriers. A free trade agreement also operates with Ukraine under which it aligns its laws with EU law in free movement of goods, most of free movement for services, environmental, labour and competition law. A limited free trade agreement exists with Switzerland, alongside a number of agreements in which Switzerland aligns its laws with EU law in return for access to the EU market or territory. The chapter also considers the ‘Brussels effect’ under which non-EU States and industries voluntarily adopt EU law to access the EU market.

The question is raised of whether the EU is acting with the goal to raise rights protection standards for the global community in its exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the data protection sphere. The research conceives of the EU’s exercise of jurisdiction as falling somewhere into three categories along a spectrum: pure rule diffusion (third States enacting laws to trade with the EU), consequential norm diffusion (third States striving for strong data protection having internalised these laws), or full norm export (the EU actively spreading a high data protection standard globally). First, the EU has used its market leverage to influence third State law. Second, the EU’s actions could incidentally ratchet up global data protection standards and start to take on more of a normative character; it could be consequential norm diffusion. Third, although initially appearing parochial, the EU increasingly sells its data protection regulation worldwide as the gold standard. Consequential norm diffusion, as opposed to self-proclaimed norm export, is the most effective way of spreading values in practice, but the EU also has responsibilities not to exercise jurisdictional overreach in viewing its role solely as an exporter of a strict data protection norm.

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.