From zero to hero? Explaining the European Parliaments influence on EU external trade policy

The aim of the project 'From zero to hero? Explaining the European Parliament's influence on EU external trade policy', has been to provide a better understanding of the European Parliament's influence on the European Union's (EU) trade policy. The EU is the world's largest and most powerful trading bloc. As a result, the EU's external trade policy is also its most important foreign policy instrument. At the moment, however, the EU's role as international trade actor is under immense pressure. Not only is the Chinese economy anticipated to exceed that of the Western world. The financial crisis has also increased the expectations directed towards the EU's trade policy. In addition to this external strain, the EU is also facing increasing pressure from one of its own. The Lisbon Treaty gave the European Parliament considerable powers over the EU's trade policy. The fact that the Parliament now will contribute to the making of trade legislation and veto international trade agreements has triggered a small revolution in the field. The question then is, in what direction the European Parliament will push the EU's trade policy. In recent trade negotiations, the European Parliament has demonstrated its will to push its preferences through. In the first agreement that was concluded after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty - the Free Trade Agreement with South Korea - the European Parliament was instrumental in introducing a comprehensive safeguard clause that would serve to protect especially national automobile industries. During the negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between EU and the USA, the European Parliament was at the forefront in demanding a change to the much contested investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, and contributed to the Commission's initiative to establish a permanent multilateral investment court. The EP could add force to national divisions and potentially complicate international negotiations, or become an advocate for a more normative approach to trade policy. Findings from this study show that the EP is caught in a dilemma: in order to gain influence over the EU's trade policy, parliamentarians have to cooperate with the European Commission and the Council. One of the things this entails is that they have to accept rules of secrecy to secure access to information and expertise. The problem is that this may lead to a weakening of the European Parliament's role as an arena for public democratic debate. The project leader Guri Rosén has been post-doctoral fellow at ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. The project duration is three years, and Rosén has spent the first two years of the project at the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg (CERGU). Several scientific publications have been published by Rosén, including articles in the peer-reviewed Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics and the Journal of European Integration. She has also presented her research at range of seminars and conferences, including the key international conferences in the field, staged by organisations such as APSA, CES, UACES and ECPR. Rosén also co-organised a large-scale interdisciplinary conference on the TTIP agreement (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) at the University of Gothenburg on 14-15 March 2016. The conference included a keynote speech and public debate with the EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström. In March 2017, she organized an international workshop entitled 'The new politics of EU external relations'. Building on this workshop, a special issue is under preparation for the journal Politics and Governance, entitled 'Parliamentary Impact on Politicised Policies' (with Christine Neuhold, Maastricht University) to be published in 2019.

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The EU's external trade policy is the strongest manifestation of the EU as an international actor. With the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament (EP) gained considerable powers over trade policy, which it is now putting to full use. However, there is very little research on the actual impact of the EP's new powers. The purpose of this project is to investigate what kind of influence the European Parliament exerts on trade policy, and how its impact can be explained. The project studies the EP's influence on trade at three different levels of analysis. First, the EP will have to grapple internally over how to prioritize. Secondly, it has to collaborate with the Council and the Commission to be able to influence trade regulations and negotiations of international trade agreements. Finally, this will determine how the EP affects the EU as a trade power and as an international actor. Due to the emergence of new economic powers and the financial crisis, the EU's trade policy is under unprecedented pressure. Thus, knowing how the EP establishes its policy and is able to influence EU policy, is crucial to understand the EU's global role. The EP will likely try to force its own agenda on the EU's trade policy. The project aims to shed light on the factors that determine this agenda as well as to what extent there has been a shift in the balance of power between the EU institutions. The EU's trade policy is a carefully constructed collective effort. The EP's new powers has brought a small revolution to the field by introducing a rather unpredictable actor that is more preoccupied with politics than technical details. The EP could add force to national divisions and potentially complicate international negotiations, or become an advocate for non-trade objectives pulling trade into the realm of foreign policy. Either way, the EP now has the capacity to define the EU's power and purpose on the international arena, and it is the goal of this project to explain how.