Book contents
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making: Introduction
- Part I Theorising Legal Expertise
- Part II In-House Legal Expertise
- 6 WANTED: A Creative Lawyer with Great Technical Skills for Demanding Work in the European Parliament
- 7 The Politics of Legal Expertise at Westminster in Times of Crisis
- 8 International Bureaucracies: Extraterritorial Reach of the European Commission’s Legal Expertise
- 9 The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements
- Part III External Legal Expertise
- Index
9 - The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements
from Part II - In-House Legal Expertise
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2022
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making: Introduction
- Part I Theorising Legal Expertise
- Part II In-House Legal Expertise
- 6 WANTED: A Creative Lawyer with Great Technical Skills for Demanding Work in the European Parliament
- 7 The Politics of Legal Expertise at Westminster in Times of Crisis
- 8 International Bureaucracies: Extraterritorial Reach of the European Commission’s Legal Expertise
- 9 The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements
- Part III External Legal Expertise
- Index
Summary
While witnessing the dismantling of a rule-based multilateral trading system, trade negotiators and diplomats in the US and the EU have revamped trade liberalisation through free trade agreements (FTAs). The failed TPP, TTIP, the renegotiation of NAFTA, and the rise of the Pacific Alliance in Latin America have put trade policy under scrutiny by media and civil society. As a result, trade negotiators have acquired new legal expertise in administrative and investment law to justify the need for innovative FTAs. As part of their limited negotiating capital, trade negotiators and diplomats have deployed neutral concepts of transparency and efficiency to justify the incorporation of domestic preferences. An analysis of the EU’s four Asian FTA transparency commitments offers insights into how national transparency mandates, together with geopolitical realities of international trade regimes, constitute the bargaining power of trade negotiators. The politicisation of legal expertise and trade negotiator’s negotiating capital creates a set of constraints and agency that allows for wiggle room in articulating, bargaining, and drafting what appears as neutral transparency provisions in FTAs.
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- Law, Legal Expertise and EU Policy-Making , pp. 173 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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