Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper examines the European Union (EU)'s promotion of social norms through trade agreements, a goal to which it committed itself in 2001. The first part compares the level of social commitment of all bilateral and biregional trade agreements concluded since the 1990s. Here we discern a strong trend towards increased social ambition. While the first agreements contained only general references to social cooperation and social dialogue the scope has broadened and now systematically include Core Labour Standards. Surprisingly enough they are even included in agreements with large trading powers, despite the ideological shift from centre-left to centre right in the EU and despite the decreased attention social norms receive in current trade strategies such as Trade, Growth and World Affairs (2010). While the last two trends would result in fewer attention for social norms, the opposite is true. The second part therefore advances the theory of historical-institutionalism to explain the stickiness of these social norms. I present three arguments to build my case. Firstly the original inclusion of social norms as a counterweight to civil-political rights in agreements with the ACP-group resulted in the European Commission seeing itself as the preserver of such rights. Secondly, member states didn't anticipate that labour rights would ever become a major issue to ratify an agreement, as was recently the case with the trade agreement with Colombia and Peru. Thirdly over time transnational groups (such as trade unions) have emerged that oversee the inclusion and implementation of social norms. This makes an exit from this path very costly and unlikely.