How Institutions Affect Europe's Voice in the World

Abstract

Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations. By Sophie Meunier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 248 pp., $35.00 (ISBN: 0-691-12115-X). In the past decade Sophie Meunier has become a well-known figure in the circle of experts on the European Union (EU), recognized especially for her work on the Union's external economic relations. Her many articles have carefully dissected the changing institutional shape of the EU's external representation, and her prize-winning first book offered the best overview yet of the challenges of globalization to her native France (Gordon and Meunier 2001). Trading Voices , her second book, returns to her MIT doctoral dissertation and sets out a framework for understanding how much progress the EU has made toward achieving one of its original basic goals. Her questions concern how and under what conditions EU institutions have given member states greater external bargaining leverage. Most scholarship on this question presents a simple linear relationship—or none at all—between the EU project and influence in international negotiations. Institutionalist theorists and Europhiles point to various bargaining successes and suggest that the more Europe's small- and medium-sized countries centralize their voice, the more leverage they enjoy vis-a-vis powerful countries like the United States (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Paeman and Bensch 1996). Realists and other skeptics highlight episodes in which one EU state (usually France) hijacks the EU position and theorize that Europe's institutions ultimately …