Special issue on new globalization challenges and EU trade policy

PERSPECTIVAS, JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, SPECIAL ISSUE 9 Special Issue on New Globalization Challenges and EU Trade Policy Guest Editors Annette Bongardt Francisco Torres ✦ This special issue sets out to take stock of the essential features of today’s trading system and the challenges facing the EU in a weakened multilateral trade order. It seeks a political economy approach and discusses the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. It gathered economists, political scientists, international lawyers and other social scientists both from academia and/or from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Institute for European Environmental Policy. The objective of the special issue is, above all, to shed light on how EU trade policy has evolved and to discuss EU trade dynamics in light of new challenges. To do so calls for taking a closer look at the EU’s new generation deep free trade agreements and at why those deep trade agreements imply a qualitative change in EU trade, and for discussing the interaction between external trade and EU regulation and the impact on the European model. Articles address EU trade and regulation in the context of today’s world trading system, spelling out the challenges facing the Union as a byproduct of its trade dynamics, which have been pushing it towards further deepening globalization through an ever increasing number of deep and comprehensive ‘new generation’ trade agreements with a growing geographical reach. Also, EU trade policy pays tribute to European values, but it is not clear to what extent the European model central to the EU’s identity is thereby being upheld, not least in light of the complexity of issues involved that would need to be contemplated in trade talks (Bongardt and Torres, 2017). The experience with the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the EU’s showcase new generation trade agreement examined in various articles of this special issue, has underscored both the complexity of issue areas and the difficulties associated with ratification of mixed agreements. In our call for papers at the end of April 2022, we had encouraged authors to take in recent developments that promise a break with past practice. Perhaps most visibly, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have exposed vulnerabilities of existing globalization patterns (supply chains, energy dependency, food supply) facing the EU (and not only). Conversely, the climate crisis highlights the issue of the carbon footprint of international trade. Foreign policy and geopolitics increasingly affect trade relations and indeed the very functioning of the internal market (the example of the EU’s and the US’s sanctions on Russia; China’s boycott of Lithuanian (content) exports after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a representative office under its name). Finally, it was also necessary to broadly discuss globalization and global governance, which constrain and provide opportunities for an enhanced role of EU trade policy, notably PERSPECTIVAS, JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, SPECIAL ISSUE 10 in areas such as the environment, climate change and sustainable development. A group of renowned authors based in the US, Canada, China and the EU Vitor Gaspar, David Amaglobeli Aaditya Mattoo, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, Jeffry Frieden, Pompeo Della Posta, Francisco Pereira Coutinho, Eline Blot, Patrick Leblond, Crina Viju-Miljusevic, Helena Guimarães, Sjorre Couvreur, Ferdi De Ville, Thomas Jacobs and Jan Orbie have joined us in addressing those issues. Not only did they respond swiftly to our call, providing different perspectives on the topic in a matter of just a few days we had assembled a rather long but complete special issue, which could not have taken in one more article but articles ended up also speaking to each other in substance. Throughout the process we (as guest editors) have benefited a lot from the discussion of each submitted article. We hope that our readers, researchers, students, lecturers, policy makers and the general public, will also find this special issue valuable for their research and for an enhanced understanding of the topic we set out to analyse. We are also like to acknowledge the work of the reviewers of the articles that were submitted to this special issue. Some of the reviewers have not only done thorough and substantive reviews but also managed to do so in a very short time, which allowed for concluding the refereeing process in time for the special issue to come out in December 2022. The quality of the special issue certainly owes much to them. This special issue provides an up-to-date look at EU trade, capturing the nature of recent new challenges for established globalization patterns and their impact on EU trade policy. When preparing the special issue, we learned about other similar projects on the subject running parallel to ours. Those are certainly of interest to the readers interested in this special issue. One of them has also already been concluded: Duina, Francesco and Crina Viju-Miljusevic (2023), Standardizing the World: EU Trade Policy and the Road to Convergence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. It has two authors (and a co-editor) in common with our special issue and forthcoming book. We would also like to thank Francesco Duina, Ana Margarida Fernandes and Amy Verdun for various useful suggestions. Last but not least, we are also grateful to Miguel Rocha de Sousa, the journal’s editor-inchief, and his colleagues of the editorial team, José Passos Palmeira, Miguel Ângelo Rodrigues and Irene Viparelli, for inviting us to act as Guest Editors of a special issue of Perspectivas and for giving us the freedom to choose the subject of study and define the research agenda. The editors’ idea behind the invitation made in mid-April was to "leverage"the journal and to ask for Scopus indexation, which the editorial team has done in the meantime. We hope that the articles of this special issue have underscored Perspectivas - Journal of Political Science, part of the Research Center in Political Science of Universidade do Minho and Universidade de Évora, as a journal of reference in its field. We would also like to thank Francisca Abreu, Perspectivas’ editorial assistant, who has done an excellent job in guiding the articles to (online) press. A book version of this special issue will come out as Bongardt, Annette and Francisco Torres (eds) (2023), New Globalization Challenges and EU Trade Policy, Coimbra: Almedina in April, contributing to the dissemination of this fully accessible online issue. PERSPECTIVAS, JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, SPECIAL ISSUE 11 Referências [1] Bongardt, Annette and Francisco Torres (2017), "Comprehensive Trade Agreements: Conditioning Globalization or Eroding the European Model?", Intereconomics, 52, 3, 165-170. Annette Bongardt is an integrated member of CICP, U. Évora and U. Minho, and a Visiting Professor of European Political Economy at UCP, Lisbon. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics (1990) from the European University Institute (EUI). Recently, she was a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE, a Visiting Fellow at the RSCAS of the EUI, and an Academic Visitor at St Antonys College, Oxford. She also held positions as Robert Schuman Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of the European Commission at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, and as Research Fellow at the International Centre for Economic Research, Turin, and at the Rotterdam School of Management. In Portugal, she was, among others, a regular Visiting Professor (and National Coordinator) at the National Institute of Public Administration and UFP and Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Aveiro. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3264-5519 Francisco Torres is Visiting Professor of European Political Economy at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics. He has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE and a PEFM Associate and Visiting Fellow at St Antonys College, Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. in European Political Economy (Católica, Lisbon), a Master in Economics (Nova, Lisbon) and a 5-year degree also in Economics (Católica, Lisbon). He also holds an MA in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, and held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. Moreover, he was a researcher (Economics Dept) and a Visiting Fellow at the RSCAS at the EUI in Florence and the 1st Robert Schuman Fellow of the European Commission at CEPS. In Portugal, he taught mainly at Católica, the National Institute of Public Administration and at the University of Aveiro (Visiting Associate Professor). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6396-7081