Competing for economic power : South America, Southeast Asia, and commercial realism in European Union foreign policy

Resource Information

The work Competing for economic power : South America, Southeast Asia, and commercial realism in European Union foreign policy represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Competing for economic power : South America, Southeast Asia, and commercial realism in European Union foreign policy

Title remainder

South America, Southeast Asia, and commercial realism in European Union foreign policy

Statement of responsibility

Katharina Luise Meissner

Creator

• Meissner, Katharina Luise

Contributor

• European University Institute, Department of Political and Social Sciences

Subject

• ASEAN
• European Union countries -- Commercial treaties
• European Union countries -- Foreign economic relations
• MERCOSUR (Organization)

Language

eng

Summary

Since 2006, the European Union (EU) has increasingly made use of bilateral trade relations, and thus departed from its earlier commitment to interregionalism and multilateralism. Two examples for this are the EU's shift from interregional to bilateral relations with the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR) and its regional power, Brazil, and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its economically most important member Singapore. This turn to bilateralism is particularly puzzling in the cases of MERCOSUR and ASEAN because of the EU's long-lasting relationship with these regional organizations and because of the EU's financial support for their regional integration. Drawing on realist theorizing, this turn to bilateralism can best be explained by the EU's motivation to secure its economic and regulatory power in South America and Southeast Asia, and by the regions' varying levels of cohesion. Factors rooted in the international system rather than inner-institutional characteristics have shaped the EU's trade policy which calls the explanatory power of liberal approaches into question. Testing an alternative theoretical model coined commercial realism against commercial liberalism and the principal-agent framework, the analysis sets out the scope condition of theorizing and analyzing EU external economic policy from a realist perspective. Employing original data from 165 media press articles, 48 standardized interviews from a survey by Dür and De Bièvre (2007), 44 standardized interviews from an original survey with interest groups enrolled in the Civil Society Dialogue, 66 consultation sheets of the European Commission's consultation on EU future trade policy, and 46 elite interviews, this thesis analyzes the EU's recent switch in approach in a comparative fashion. A combination of primary and secondary cases, triangulation of data and methods, and a combination of research strategies, including rigorous process-tracing, maximizes the research design's external and internal validity

Cataloging source

FIE

Date time place

Defence date: 13 June 2016

Dissertation note

Thesis (Ph. D.)--European University Institute (SPS), 2016.

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

theses

Series statement

• EUI PhD theses.
• EUI theses