“Putting the EU in Its Place: Policy Strategies and the Global Regulatory Context”

Newman, Abraham and Posner, Elliot (2015) “Putting the EU in Its Place: Policy Strategies and the Global Regulatory Context”. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

Introduction: Moving beyond arguments maintaining that the EU ‘matters’ in a uniform and static way, our study, a largely deductive exercise, identifies potential causal linkages between context and strategies and suggests that as the context changes, so too does the EU’s foreign regulatory engagement. The article’s core, then, develops an analytic framework that predicts different strategies under alternate conditions and indicates how shifts in these conditions are likely to alter strategies (George and Bennett 2005). In particular, we posit that temporal and spatial trends in the regulatory context are likely to result in four distinct strategies: regulatory export, first mover agenda setting, mutual recognition, and coalition-building. In instances, for example, of a large gap in regulatory capacity between the great powers, the EU is more likely to engage in rule projection strategies such as regulatory export or first mover agenda setting. Alternatively, high institutional density in concert with parity in regulatory capacity can constrain such rule projection strategies, creating incentives for the EU to move to more negotiated interactions with regulatory partners. The analytic exercise helps identify both sources of and constraints on potential EU behavior as the polity engages in the politics of global regulation (Young 2015). Given the special issues’ focus on the role of the EU in influencing global regulation, we limit our empirical illustrations to examples that involve the European polity. That said, our analytic framework could in principle be extended to explain the strategies of other regulatory great powers such as the United State or potentially China. Our synthetic approach, moreover, unifies a number of existing theoretical arguments about rival standards, first mover advantages, and regulatory export into a single framework (Drezner 2007; W. Mattli and Büthe 2003, Young 2015). It also highlights the limits of existing literature that pits various power resources (normative or civilian power) against one another to explain EU influence. Such resources do not operate in opposition but are integrated and embedded in the broader regulatory context. Finally, the article contributes to a growing literature in International Relations, comparative politics, and European studies highlighting the role of context for conditioning causal relationships (Copelovitch and Putnam 2014; Falleti and Lynch 2009; Müller, Kudrna, and Falkner 2014). As such, it is part of a broader trend toward the incorporation of history and temporality into regulatory politics (Büthe 2002; Farrell and Newman 2010; Posner 2010; Fioretos 2011). The article proceeds in four parts. First, we briefly lay out the stakes involved in global regulatory debates. Second, we review the relevant literature on EU influence and power, emphasizing the empirical puzzles. Third, we develop the framework described above, from which we derive a typology of expected EU strategies. Finally, we conclude with implications for research on the EU as a global actor as well as International Relations theory about time, context and causal relationships.

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