Michael Reiterer

The Role of ‘Strategic Partnerships’ in the EU’s Relations with Asia

Four out of ten strategic partnerships the EU has entered into worldwide are with Asian countries: China, Japan, India and South Korea. To qualify a partnership as ‘strategic’, certain conditions have to be met both internally and externally. Internally, after some years of trust and confidence building among partners an upgrade to ‘strategic partnership’ has to meet the agreement internally of all member states and the EU institutions. Externally, a strategic partnership has to rest on reciprocal interests, either normative or substantive, as well as on rights and duties to realise mutually defined goals. The partnership has to be multidimensional in both substance and geographic scope. In terms of substance, it has to be built on comprehensive relations, the main groups being politics/security (including climate change; energy security); economics/finance/trade; and people-to-people contacts. Its scope has to be global or at least with a strong regional impact, for example, transcending the purely bilateral dimension. Multilateral cooperation is a strong goal. Strategic partnerships are built on a variety of common interests which take precedent over differences, which should be handled in a spirit of mutual respect and equality with the objective of avoiding open conflicts.

The Doha development agenda of the WTO: possible institutional implications ∗

Size of membership, diverging interest because of different stages of development and the depth of regulation undertaken or foreseen in the World Trade Organization (WTO) made the economics and politics of international trade negotiations more complicated. This has repercussions on the negotiating mechanics in the WTO including the continued appropriateness of the technique of ‘rounds’. At the same time, the rational of further trade liberalization in the context of sustainable development is questioned. The widening scope of issues covered – which impact of domestic policies give raise to – quests for more transparency and accountability. The lack of adequate know-how renders the effective participation of developing countries in the negotiating round more difficult or even impossible. New forms of network formation – drawing on the many forms of international cooperation, participation and agenda setting – have to be developed in order to maintain the WTO as the centre of the multilateral rule-based system.