The EU, Asia and the Governance of Global Trade

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between EU-Asia trade and the mechanisms of governance that have emerged to regulate the global trading system.

The chapter begins with a general review of the problems attending the governance of global trade in the contemporary period, and of the institutions and interests involved in the process. It then proceeds to look at the ways in which the EU-Asia relationship reflects the more general tendencies, and identifies the range of interests and positions that can be discerned in EU-Asia trade relations. It argues in this context that a clash of interests between market-opening and modernisation is key to understanding the EU-Asia trade relationship, and also that this interacts with shifts in ‘trade power’ between the two regions in such a way as to produce problems of negotiation and mutual understanding. This argument is then pursued in a study of three levels of EU-Asia trade relations: the multilateral (primarily within the WTO), the inter-regional (within the Asia-Europe Meeting and the EU-ASEAN relationship) and the bilateral (both between the EU and its major trading partners such as China, India and Japan, and between the EU and those other countries with which it has pursued bilateral free trade agreements).

The key conclusion of the chapter is that the EU’s trade relations with Asia reflect an increasing tendency towards defensiveness and bilateralism, as opposed to previous periods in which there was at least a rhetorical commitment to openness and multilateralism. This is likely to have negative implications for the development of global governance in trade, and to promote the pursuit of ‘competitive interdependence’ based on a politics of differentiation and exclusion rather than multilateral solutions.