The Promise of Critical Historical Institutionalism for EU Trade Policy Analysis
Main
Abstract
This paper aims to convince the reader of the potential of a critical version of historical institutionalism (HI) as a theoretical perspective for EU trade policy analysis. It argues that critical HI sensitises the analyst to important but hitherto often neglected factors including: the influence of the past on EU trade policy; the complex, multiarena and multilevel nature of contemporary trade policy; and issues of distributional conflict. The core concept in critical HI is ‘reactive sequencing’, conceiving of policy evolution as a chain of events produced by reactions and counter-reactions. This paper demonstrates that this is invaluable to understand contemporary EU trade politics. Some examples of EU trade policy decisions and its general strategic evolution since the conclusion of the Uruguay Round are given to show the value of critical HI. Finally, the external dimension of “Europe 2020” as the latest trade policy strategy is analysed from a critical historical institutionalist angle.
Details
Article Keywords
EU trade policy, critical historical institutionalism, reactive sequencing, new trade politics
Section
Research Articles
Article Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.- Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
- Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
- Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.
