Squaring the EPA-circle: Will the EU’s trade and development policies ever meet?

Pilegaard, Jess. (2007) Squaring the EPA-circle: Will the EU’s trade and development policies ever meet? In: UNSPECIFIED, Montreal, Canada. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The EU has many different 'faces' in international relations. It is not only an emerging diplomat, but also a fierce trade negotiator and one of the most important partners in international development cooperation. This diversity of roles makes for equally diverse and ambiguous external relations. The EPA negotiations and the emerging 'Aid for Trade' agenda, where the EU is both friend and foe of the developing countries provide particularly clear examples of the tensions in the EU's external policies. This diversity and the resultant ambiguity is difficult to model theoretically, and most theoretical approaches are consequently based on a simplified version of the EU as international actor. The proposed paper seeks to develop an alternative conceptualisation of the EU as an international actor based on foreign policy analysis and historical institutionalism. Specifically, Walter Carlsnæs’ integrative analytical framework for foreign policy analysis is adapted and applied to analyse the EPAs as an EU foreign policy initiative. The EU is analysed as a political system comprising several relatively independent policy sub-systems, in which different political coalitions compete for the right to define the specific policy objectives of the EU. In this conceptualisation, the EU is a compartmentalised and therefore contingent international actor.

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