Kalypso Nicolaïdis

The European Union as a conflicted trade power

Abstract The EU is a formidable power in trade. Structurally, the sheer size of its market and its more than forty-year experience of negotiating international trade agreements have made it the most powerful trading bloc in the world. Much more problematically, the EU is also becoming a power through trade. Increasingly, it uses market access as a bargaining chip to obtain changes in the domestic arena of its trading partners, from labour standards to development policies, and in the international arena, from global governance to foreign policy. Is the EU up to its ambitions? This article examines the underpinnings of the EUs power through trade across issue-areas and across settings (bilateral, inter-regional, global). It then analyses the major dilemmas associated with the exercise of trade power and argues that strategies of accommodation will need to be refined in each of these realms if the EU is to successfully transform its structural power into effective, and therefore legitimate, influence.

'This is my EUtopia ...': Narrative as Power

The original comparative mission of JCMS testifies to the propensity of the EU, since its inception, to project its model on to the rest of the world. This article argues that narratives of projection are indeed key to the EU’s global influence and that, in this particular sense, the idea of Europe as a civilian power is more relevant than ever. But such narratives require our engagement with their reflexive nature: what is usually projected is not the EU as is, but an EUtopia. At a time when both the EU and the international trade system are undergoing crises of legitimacy, EU actors can learn a lot from the remedies suggested for the global level by such an EUtopia.

Ideas, interests, and institutionalization: “trade in services” and the Uruguay Round

After much deliberation, member governments of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreed to pursue a new regime for international trade in services as part of the Uruguay Round negotiations begun in 1986. The talks have produced a draft agreement—the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—which, if ratified, could have important implications for the world economy. But when the question of trade in services first arose, most governments did not understand the issues or know whether a multilateral agreement would be to their advantage. If anything, their existing national interests and institutions seemed contrary to the goal of liberalizing trade in services. This article argues that an epistemic community of services experts played a crucial role in clarifying and framing the complex issue of trade in services and placing it on the global agenda. Through their analyses of the services issues and their interactions with policymakers, the epistemic community members were able to convince governments that international services transactions had common trade properties and that the liberalization of services through removal of nontariff barriers was potentially advantageous to developing as well as developed countries. In addition to fostering international negotiations within the GATT forum and helping states redefine their interests, the community members were instrumental in specifying a range of policy options to be considered. However, once governments understood their interests and domestic constituencies were mobilized, their policy choices were influenced more by power and bargaining dynamics than by continuing, direct epistemic community influence.

The Federal Vision: Legitimacy and Levels of Governance in the United States and the European Union

The Federal Vision is about the complex and changing relationship between levels of governance within the United States and the European Union. Based on a transatlantic dialogue between scholars concerned about modes of governance on both sides, it is a collective attempt at analysing the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis in our multi-layered democracies, and possible remedies. Starting from a focus on the current policy debatea over devolution and subsidiarity, the book engages the reader in to the broader tension of comparartive federalism. Its authors believe that in spite of the fundamental differences between them, both the EU and the US are in the process of re-defining a federal vision for the 21st century. This book represents an important new contribution to the study of Federalism and European integration, which seeks to bridge the divide between the two. It also bridges the traditional divide between technical, legal or regulatory discussions of federal governance and philosophical debates over questions of belonging and multiple identities. It is a multi-disciplinary project, bringing together historians, political scientists and theorists, legal scholars, sociologists and political economists. It includes both innovative analysis and prescriptions on how to reshape the federal contract in the US and the EU. It includes introductions to the history of federalism in the US and the EU, the current debates over devolution and subsidarity, the legal framework of federalism and theories of regulatory federalism, as well as innovative approaches to the application of network analysis, principal-agent models, institutionalist analysis, and political theories of citizenship to the federal context. The introduction and conclusion by the editors draws out cross-cutting themes and lessons from the thinking together of the EU and US experiences, and suggest how a federal vision could be freed from the hierarchical paradigm of the federal state and articulated around concepts of mutal tolerence and empowerment. Contributors to this volume - Jacques Delors Joseph Nye Robert Howse and Kalypso Nicolaidis Daniel Elazar Joseph Weiler Mark Pollack David Lazer and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger John Kincaid Andrew Moravcsik George Bermann Daniel Halberstam Giandomenico Majone Cary Coglianese John Peterson Vivien Schmidt Fritz Scharpf Sujit Choudhry Elizabeth Meehan Marc Landy Denis Lacorne Robert Howse and Kalypso Nicolaidis

European Demoicracy and its Crisis

This article offers an overview and reconsideration of the idea of European demoicracy in the context of the current crisis. It defines ‘demoicracy’ as ‘a Union of peoples, understood both as states and as citizens, who govern together but not as one’, and argues that the concept is best understood as a third way, distinct from both national and supranational versions of single demos polities. The concept of ‘demoicracy’can serve both as an analytical lens for the European Union-as-is and as a normative benchmark, but one which cannot simply be inferred from its praxis. Instead, the article deploys a ‘normative-inductive’ approach according to which the EU’s normative core ‐ transnational non-domination and transnational mutual recognition ‐ is grounded on what the EU still seeks to escape. Such norms need to be protected and perfected if the EU is to live up to its demoicratic nature. The article suggests ten tentative guiding principles for the EU to continue turning these norms into practice.

The European Convention: Bargaining in the shadow of Rhetoric

The European Convention on the Future of Europe was initially presented as a turning point in the history of European integration. This article argues that, although its composition was broader, its process more transparent and its rules more flexible than classic intergovernmental conferences, the Convention was not Europes Philadelphia. Since it took place under the shadow of the IGC and under a leadership especially sensitive to the positions of big member states, the Convention reproduced, by extension, the logic of intergovernmental bargains. Nevertheless, some of the Conventions outcome – the most formal aspects of its draft treaty with less predictable distributional consequences – can be explained by the ‘social norm’ of constitutional deliberation conveyed by its president and supported by a majority of its members.

Mutual Recognition on "Trial." The Long Road to Services Liberalization

Abstract In his 1986 White Paper on completing the single market, Lord Cockfield hailed mutual recognition as the miracle formula for the much needed liberalization of services markets. Twenty years later, the European Union is passing a services directive where the principle of mutual recognition is conspicuously absent, at a time when effective liberalization seems ever more necessary. How do we explain this puzzle? Why has mutual recognition been put ‘on trial’? We make three interrelated arguments. First, the initial draft directive overlooked the EUs prior experience in this area, which is one of ‘managed’ mutual recognition. Second, the political context had changed significantly, with enlargement exacerbating the distributional consequences of the adoption of mutual recognition. Third, the final compromise succeeded precisely because it recovers the spirit of managed mutual recognition, albeit in a minimalist form. Nevertheless, final agreement has come at a price: the symbolic sacrifice of the principle of mutual recognition itself.

We, the Peoples of Europe ...

Political tremors are shaking the old continent. As the European Union’s enlargement brings most of the continent under the same banner, Europeans, like their American cousins two centuries ago, are on the verge of treating themselves to a full-blown constitution. In June, after more than two years of heated debate, eu heads of state settled on the text of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. The treaty will not enter into force, however, until it is ratified by all 25 member states, through their national parliaments or popular referendums. And a single defection could spell the end of the entire exercise. Was the June meeting Europe’s Philadelphia? The text’s drafters claim that it was. They argue that the constitution will give the eu a more eaective government, better adapted to its greater size and ambitions, and make it a more democratic polity. The document’s detractors, meanwhile, make one of two critiques. Some say the document is not bold enough, especially on the social front; others claim that it is a watershed but warn that it will blur the precious diaerences among the members’ unique histories and identities, turning the eu into a monolithic “United States of Europe.” The eu’s original sin may be that it was not built on a democratic foundation; its citizens were not asked to vet the union’s creation. But

Enhancing WTO Legitimacy: Constitutionalization or Global Subsidiarity?

Increasingly, scholars have articulated the challenge of global economic governance in constitutional terms. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is often painted as an incipient global economic constitution. Its legitimacy would be enhanced, some contend, by transforming the WTO treaty system into a federal construct. But the application of the language of constitutionalism to the WTO is likely to exacerbate the fears of the “discontents” of globalization that the international institutions of economic governance are not democratically accountable to anyone. We argue that the legitimacy of the multilateral trading order requires greater democratic contestability. The notion of global subsidiarity would be a more appropriate model for the WTO than that of a “federal” constitution. This notion incorporates three basic principles: institutional sensitivity, political inclusiveness, and top-down empowerment.

Trusting the Poles? Constructing Europe through mutual recognition

Abstract European integration has been and will continue to be flawed with conflicts, conflicts of interests embedded in broader conflicts of identity. I argue that these conflicts and the bargains they require exhibit similar patterns across a wide array of issues, as struggaes around ‘mutual’ recognition where mutuality plays a crucial role. Indeed, the challenges and perils of recognition are universal. But Europe can be seen as an experimental polity where, more formally than elsewhere, actors debate the contours of a norm which has migrated from regulatory praxis to mode of governance, and beyond, to political principle. If the ‘Polish plumber’ has come to serve as the emblem for the denial of recognition in the EU, mutual recognition is no less conflictual when it comes to the status of refugees, Bosnians or cartoonists. Normatively, if ‘managed mutual recognition’ is to serve as a blueprint beyond international political economy, we need to better analyse the relationship between recognition and trust, blind and binding trust, deferential and interventionist recognition.