Workshop directors: Andreas Dür (University College Dublin) and Manfred Elsig (Universität Bern, World Trade Institute) 14-19 April 2009, ECPR joint sessions, Lisbon 2009
The EU is an influential player in the global economy due to its economic weight and the internal coordination of foreign economic policies. However, research on the EU’s foreign economic relations is fragmented across different sub-fields of political economy. Only little attention has been paid to the interactions between the various aspects of the EU’s foreign economic relations (for example, trade policy, monetary policy, competition policy, global taxation issues, financial markets and financial stability, and development policy). The workshop attempts to capture the nature of the EU as a key actor in the world economy by overcoming this shortcoming in the literature. Across the various policy fields, the workshop aims to cover the following major topics:
1.) Preference formation: what is the relative weight of geopolitical interests, interest group pressures, and norms and ideas in shaping EU preferences on foreign economic policies?
2.) Bargaining strategies and tactics in international economic negotiations: what strategies and tactics does the EU use to achieve its objectives in international economic negotiations? How does the EU’s negotiating behaviour compare to the one of other entities in the global economy?
3.) Bargaining power: how much power does the EU have in international economic relations? Does the EU’s bargaining power vary across policy areas?
4.) The EU in international economic organizations: what role does the EU play in international economic organizations, such as the World Trade Organization? How does it interact with other international economic organizations (such as the IMF and the World Bank), standard setting organizations (such as the Codex Alimentarius and the Basle Committee), and plurilateral clubs (such as the G7/G8)?
We are interested in papers that approach these questions and the field of EU foreign economic relations in general from different theoretical angels and using different methodologies.
Applications with a short abstract of the proposed paper should be sent by e-mail to
and by no later than 1 December 2008.
