Paper Titles & Abstracts

The European Union (EU) has become the main source and destination of foreign investment worldwide in the past two decades. These investments are increasingly being regulated through international investment agreements (IIAs), most notably Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and investment chapters in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Strong investment protection providing legal certainty to European investors abroad has been perceived by the European Commission as one of the necessary conditions for enhancing the EU's competitiveness. Since the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, the Commission's Directorate General for Trade enjoys full and exclusive competencies to formulate and negotiate new EU investment protection treaties. Currently, a new investment framework for future EU investment treaties is being formulated. EU investment policy, however, only materialized in the wake of the re-launch of European integration since the mid 1980s. Departing from a critical political economy perspective, the paper examines the transformation of European investment regulation and seeks to unravel the political processes that have given shape to its content, form and scope. The objective is thereby to explain the political decisions that have led to further European integration in the field of investment regulation. Importantly, the paper embeds these decisions into the broader context of transnationalized production, processes of financialization and a rapidly changing global economic order.