Redefining EU-Asia Relations through Free Trade Agreements
Maria Garcia, University of Canterbury
As the EU’s most visible, practical and potent tool for strengthening its relationship with Asian states, free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations take on a special significance in shaping the future of relations between the two regions, especially as the EU requires FTA partners to negotiate a complementary political cooperation agreement, which institutionalizes future coordination initiatives in all areas of international politics. Despite all the actors’ desires to diversify their trade and investment relationships and ameliorate market access, in the backdrop of competitive diffusion of free trade agreements throughout the region and the stalemate at the multilateral Doha Round, negotiations have proven more protracted and controversial than expected, given different industrial and economic policy preferences amongst negotiating partners. Process-tracing documentary evidence and interview materials, this paper explores how the EU’s preferences for a certain type of economic governance as portrayed in ‘Global Europe’ (and continued in ‘Trade, Growth and Jobs’), centred around export of its regulatory preferences especially in intellectual property, liberalization of services, harmonization of competition rules, and the opening of public procurement markets, have been translated into its FTA negotiations, and how this has been mediated and modified by the preferences of its interlocutors. It pays particular attention to the EU-South Korea FTA (as it is the only finalized once at the moment) and identifies elements in it that could set precedents that could facilitate or complicate ongoing negotiations with other states in the region (India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore), and therefore shape the future of EU-Asia relations.