Maria Garcia

European Union–India Trade Negotiations: One Step Forward, One Back?

This article contributes to debates on the proliferation of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs), by analysing novel empirical material: the EU–India FTA negotiations, which have attracted little academic scrutiny. By elaborating on the underlying negotiating interests and strategies of the EU and India, the article examines the significance of overarching interests in ongoing negotiations and articulates the defensive and offensive interests of both parties. It presents a vision of the controversial and milieu-shaping interests at stake, which offer an alternative theoretical explanation for the pursuit of FTAs, and highlights possible outcome scenarios.

The European Union and Latin America: ‘Transformative power Europe’ versus the realities of economic interests

Relations between the European Union (EU) and regional subgroups in Latin America (Mercosur, the Andean Community and Central America) are clear examples of ‘pure interregionalism’ and provide evidence of the EUs active promotion of regional integration. Within the context of these cases, this article explores what type of international power the EU wields, how interregionalism is embedded in that power, and how it is deployed. Combining strands of literature on EU–Latin American relations, interregionalism, EU external policy and power provides a framework within which interregionalism can be understood as an important normative and practical tool for the EUs external power projection. Drawing on official documentation and interviews with key individuals, the paper highlights the EUs articulation of power in interregional relations and reflects upon its mixed success. It concludes that, while imperial qualities and aspirations can be observed in the EUs penchant for interregionalism, the transformative power of the EU remains limited.

Incidents along the Path: Understanding the Rationale behind the EU–Chile Association Agreement

Relying on process-tracing, this article shows how changing institutional settings help to explain the unexpected decision for the European Union to negotiate its most extensive Association with Chile, and reveals the explanatory power of historical-institutionalist approaches as an optimum framework for the understanding of seemingly inconsistent policy decisions.

The Value of Gender Equality in EU-Asian Trade Policy: An Assessment of the EU’s Ability to Implement Its Own Legal Obligations

This chapter assesses the tension that exists between the EU internal and international legal obligations to achieve gender equality in all its activities, and the lack of actual implementation of this value in the context of trade negotiations with the Asian region. The EU’s willingness to foster good economic relations with key rising markets in Asia together with the Asian countries’ systematic rejection of the inclusion of norms in Free Trade Agreement create a double barrier for the diffusion of gender equality norms. Ultimately, the failure to insert gender equality norms within trade negotiations with Asian countries casts serious doubts about the EU’s international “actorness” and it fails to serve women in Asia.

Handbook on the EU and International Trade

e Handbook on the EU and International Trade presents a multidisciplinary overview of the major perspectives, actors and issues in contemporary EU trade relations. Changes in institutional dynamics, Brexit, the politicisation of trade, competing foreign policy agendas, and adaptation to trade patterns of value chains and the digital and knowledge economy are reshaping the European Unions trade policy. e authors tackle how these challenges frame the aims, processes and e ectiveness of trade policy making in the context of the EUs trade relations with developed, developing and emerging states in the global economy.

Building Global Governance One Treaty at a Time? A Comparison of the US and EU Approaches to Preferential Trade Agreements and the Challenge of TTIP

Preferential trade agreements have become a tool for the external institutionalisation of a state’s preferred economic governance model, with the US and EU at the forefront of exchanging market access for acquiescence of their preferred rules. The institutionalisation and codification of the relationship with the TTIP was intended to create the world’s largest market and largest regulatory institutional arrangement, whose structural power and gravitational pull would bring other states towards it and its rules and norms. It should have been the Treaty that would bring an end to bilateral treaties. However, the underlying differences in EU and US preferences on this, as revealed in the comparison on recent agreements in this chapter, the potential for politicisation and contestation, and the importance of power asymmetries in negotiations have derailed negotiations. Yet these challenges were severely underestimated at the highest political levels, when the original ambitions for TTIP were set out.

China’s Alternative Energy Sources

China’s sustained industrialization since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms has turned the country into the world’s largest user of energy resources. To date, manufacturing processes and the country’s modernization have relied mostly on energy and electricity derived from burning fossil fuels. Coal, found in abundance in China, still accounts for seventy per cent of all energy consumed in the country. Oil dependence has also been on the rise. It accounts for 23 per cent of the energy mix, which has turned China into a net importer of this crucial commodity and a net importer of energy since 1997 (Liu et al., 2011, p. 518). Estimates suggest that China’s dependence rate on imports of oil is expected to increase to over 70 per cent by 2020 (Brookings Institute 2006, p. 6).