‘Nobody Has any Intention of Building a Wall’ Some Reflections on the EU’s New-Found Assertiveness in the Sphere of Trade and Investment

Abstract

A major trend in international economic law during the last decades concerns the simultaneous rise of geopolitization and securitization. In today’s world, states increasingly pursue their interests not by classic military or political means, but rather through a clever application of particular economic and investment policies. To confront the concomitant challenges, the European Union has newly embraced a creed of ‘open strategic autonomy’ (OSA): a formula that is intended as a way of coping with the changing international environment, while at the same time remaining receptive to most ordinary commercial opportunities. Concerns have been raised however that the Union’s posture might well incite (or serve as a pretext for) old-fashioned protectionism, and is likely to trigger various forms of retaliatory action. The question thus arises to what extent, with this stated goal, the EU is able to weather or withstand the aforementioned trends. The current paper, after assessing the ambition’s key merits and reviewing its recent application in a number of sectoral domains, purports to showcase that, as long as certain preconditions are fulfilled, the pursued objective may actually be labelled as timely and apposite, not least in light of the positioning of other global actors. If correct, the exposé presents a soothing response to the ever more vocal criticisms of a perceived European tendency to ‘go it alone’. open strategic autonomy, geo-economics, EU, WTO, foreign direct investment, anticoercion instrument, foreign subsidies regulation, carbon border adjustment mechanism