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Explaining the politicization of EU trade agreement negotiations over the past 30 years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2024

Luca Cabras Open the ORCID record for Luca Cabras [Opens in a new window]
Luca Cabras*
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Science, University of Milan, Via Conservatorio, 7, 20122 Milan, Italy
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Although the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the USA and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada have elicited considerable domestic contestation in Europe, several other agreements have been negotiated into public and media indifference. What explains this difference? In this article, I put forward a number of arguments on the structural causes of the politicization of European Union (EU) trade policy over the past 30 years and test them against a newly collected dataset covering 19 preferential trade agreements. The qualitative comparative analysis suggests that the politicization of EU trade negotiations is determined by the co-occurrence of several, well-defined conditions. More specifically, it tells us that: (1) the Lisbon Treaty's reform of EU trade policymaking is the main driver of politicization, (2) the level of public support for the EU is of particular relevance when it comes to ‘deep and comprehensive’ agreements that touch on sensitive domestic issues, and that (3) high adjustment costs expected from trade liberalization can lead to the politicization of trade negotiations.

Keywords

comparative politicsEuropean Unionpoliticization
Type
Research Article
Information
Italian Political Science Review / Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , July 2024 , pp. 138 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Società Italiana di Scienza Politica

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