ABSTRACT
The European Union’s (EU) position on world trade has recently undergone a rapid rise in levels of politicization. For a long time, the EU’s trade policy provided the playground of a limited number of technical experts, an area barely noticed by outsiders. That has drastically changed since the 1990s, with the increasing contestation of globalization as an important factor on the one hand, and with the escalating tensions on the respective roles of the European Commission and the EU member states in this area on the other. That the contestation of globalization affected the EU’s trade policy is unsurprising. It is about setting and applying the rules that will guide the import and export of goods and services between the EU and the rest of the world. However, these rules themselves have become ever more intrusive, and the concept ‘intrusive’ is used here in a normatively neutral sense. It is about the impinging of trade policy measures upon areas where fundamental choices about society, the values upheld by society, and the relationship between government and the market within society are at stake. Indeed, trade policy used to be about border measures. It was about restrictions that were applied at the border, when a good or a service crossed a border. A tariff measure is a typical example. Upon the import of a product into a country, a customs duty was levied when that product crossed the border between the outside world and that country. In this way, the price of that product could be increased in the domestic market of that country. As such, imported products could be made more expensive than similar domestically produced products. That was the purpose: to create incentives for domestic consumers to buy domestically rather than foreign produced products. The only policy instrument used for that purpose was an instrument applied at the border. Doing so became more difficult as a consequence of trade agreements negotiated and concluded among a large number of countries within the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and later on its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The EU member states, originally through the European Economic Community (EEC), later through the European Community (EC), were important players in this. Those trade agreements reduced the maximum level of the customs duties that countries, and thus also the EU, could levy at their borders. Countries could not protect their domestically produced products 200any more unless they resorted to so-called non-tariff barriers (NTBs). Many did so when they were confronted with an economic recession, or with serious political pressure from sectors that felt vulnerable to the competition that open, unprotected markets, would bring. These measures could take the form of technical standards, discriminatory norms, administrative procedures and so on. A technical standard could be used for protectionist purposes, for instance, when a rule is issued that requires all products sold in a country’s market to fulfil certain technical requirements but where those requirements happen to be those that are already used by the domestic producers, not the foreign ones. Even if such a rule is officially enacted for safety or product quality purposes, one may wonder whether the real purpose is not protectionism. In order to avoid this, trade policies were extended in scope. They would deal not only with tariff measures but also with non-tariff barriers. In doing so, however, trade policy started to impinge on the ability of states to set their own rules, to define their own regulations on a whole array of issues ranging from product safety and quality, to the way in which products are produced or processed. Trade policy thus started to define the limits within which non-trade policies—such as environmental or public health policies—had to be enacted without having discriminatory (and thus protectionist) effects when it comes to trade. As such, trade policy became a composite policy, as Martin Holland has observed:
… trade has become pervasive, touching almost all aspects of EU policy, both internal and external … .
(Holland 2002: 140)