Putting the EU in its place: policy strategies and the global regulatory context

Abstract:

On the one hand, research has trumpeted the European Union's (EU's) influence over international regulation. On the other hand, a significant literature details the limits of EU efforts. How can we reconcile these conflicting findings? This contribution's answer turns on the global regulatory context, two dimensions of which (the distribution of regulatory capacity across the major economies and institutional density at the global level) are used to deduce scope conditions under which the EU can (or cannot) be expected to adopt different policy strategies. The study posits that variation along these dimensions is likely to result in four strategies: regulatory export; first-mover agenda-setting; mutual recognition; and coalition-building. The analytic exercise helps identify sources of and constraints on potential EU behavior as the polity engages in the politics of global regulation. The framework could in principle be extended to explain the strategies of other regulatory great powers; it unifies existing theoretical arguments, contributes to a growing literature in international relations, comparative politics, and European studies on the role of context in conditioning causal relationships, and offers a nuanced and tractable set of expectations about the EU as a global actor.

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