The Rise (and Fall?) of the EU’s Performance in the Multilateral Trading System

The multilateral trading system represents an excellent case for analyzing the factors influencing the EU’s performance in international institutions, because of the marked changes that have taken place both in the EU and in the multilateral trading system over the past six decades. Moreover, trade is the international policy arena in which the EU has greatest power resources and greatest institutional capacity. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the EU has long performed well in the multilateral trading system.

The article, however, argues that internal changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s enabled the EU to advance a more ambitious agenda in the multilateral trading system. The enhanced ambition translated temporarily into enhanced performance within the multilateral trading system, but this was short-lived as the emergence of new trading powers hostile to the EU’s agenda in the late 1990s resulted in the erosion of its ambitious agenda in the Doha Development Round.