The role of ideas in legitimating EU trade policy: from the Single Market Programme to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

Ferdi De Ville and Gabriel Siles-Brügge

Chapter 13 in Handbook on the EU and International Trade, 2018, pp 243-262 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Ideas matter in politics, but, sadly, this is a point that has often been missed in the study of EU trade policy. Ideas may influence what actors think should be the objectives of trade policy or be used strategically to justify a certain policy course to convince (or coerce) otherwise critical actors. We analyse this dual role of ideas in EU trade policy from the completion of the European Single Market Programme (1992) to the recent negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We argue that what could be called the ‘free trade paradigm’ has been consistently dominant over this period in shaping the policy and pronouncements of the European Commission officials responsible for external trade. However, ideas from other paradigms have been also been attached to this central ideational thread at various points in order to respond to increasing criticism of ‘free trade’.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781785367465/9781785367465.00022.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:17116_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().