Imposed Coherence: Negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements

Abstract: Ensuring coherence in the European Union's relations with other actors is no easy task and particularly difficult when several distinct policy areas are handled within one and the same international negotiation. Such was the case in the recently concluded negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with regional groupings of Asian, Caribbean and Pacific countries. The aim of this article is to analyse the challenges facing the EU when struggling to ensure coherence in its relations with developing countries and to shed light on the institutional characteristics that either prevent or promote coherence. It is argued that the highly compartmentalized character of EU policy fields and the disjointed decision-making machinery constitute historically grounded institutional obstacles to coherence. At the same time, however, both external institutional linkages — primarily to the WTO — and the internal institutional definition of EPA negotiations as trade negotiations have a logic of their own, which favour a coherent approach. The result is a process of 'imposed coherence': while the EU formally acts as one united body in the negotiations, the disjointed character of EU policy making means that the negotiation stance of the Union is fundamentally ambiguous and characterized by significant tensions and conflicts between policy objectives.