Under what conditions does the internal cohesiveness of the European Union determine its external effectiveness on the world stage? This book asks this question, investigating the frequent political assumption that the more cohesive the EU presents itself to the world, the more effective it is in achieving its goals. Contributions to this book explore this theory from a range of perspectives, from trade to foreign policy, and highlight complex patterns between internal cohesiveness and external effectiveness. These are simplified into three possible configurations: internal cohesiveness has a positive impact on external effectiveness; internal cohesiveness has no impact on external effectiveness; and internal cohesiveness has a negative impact on external effectiveness. The international context in which the EU operates, which includes the bargaining configuration and the policy arena, functions as an intervening variable that helps us to explain variation in these causal links. The book also launches a research agenda aimed at explaining these patterns more systematically and determining the marginal impact of cohesiveness on effectiveness. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

The European Union, the world's foremost trader, is not an easy bargainer to deal with. Its twenty-five member states have relinquished most of their sovereignty in trade to the supranational level, and in international commercial negotiations, such as those conducted under the World Trade Organization, the EU speaks with a "single voice." This single voice has enabled the Brussels-based institution to impact the distributional outcomes of international trade negotiations and shape the global political economy.

Trading Voices is the most comprehensive book about the politics of trade policy in the EU and the role of the EU as a central actor in international commercial negotiations. Sophie Meunier explores how this pooling of trade policy-making and external representation affects the EU's bargaining power in international trade talks. Using institutionalist analysis, she argues that its complex institutional procedures and multiple masters have, more often than once, forced its trade partners to give in to an EU speaking with a single voice.

Through analysis of four transatlantic commercial negotiations over agriculture, public procurement, and civil aviation, Trading Voices explores the politics of international trade bargaining. It also addresses the salient political question of whether negotiating efficiency comes at the expense of democratic legitimacy. Finally, this book looks at how the EU, with its recent enlargement and proposed Constitution, might become an even more formidable rival to the United States in shaping globalization.

S’adapter ou disparaître sous la domination américaine : la globalisation économique représente un défi pour toutes les sociétés. Il est toutefois particulièrement dramatique en France, du fait de notre tradition étatique, de notre souci de justice sociale, de notre attachement à notre langue, à notre culture, à notre identité, ainsi que de notre vieille rivalité avec les États-Unis.

Beaucoup de Français s’accordent à penser que la mondialisation comporte des bienfaits, mais ils sont nombreux à s’inquiéter de ses effets sur la répartition des revenus, l’emploi, la culture et la position de la France dans le monde. Qu’en est-il vraiment? La France ne s’adapte-t-elle pas plus nettement qu’on ne veut bien le dire ? Et l’idée de " mondialisation maîtrisée "? Peut-elle devenir réalité ou bien est-ce un mythe inventé par les hommes politiques afin de rassurer le public?

"Un travail impressionnant pour mettre au jour les racines historiques et intellectuelles de la résistance française à la globalisation et pour montrer comment la France réussit à s’adapter sans s’américaniser." Stanley Hoffmann.

The French Challenge deals with France's effort to adapt to globalization and its consequences for France's economy, cultural identity, domestic politics, and foreign relations. The authors begin by analyzing the structural transformation of the French economy, driven first by liberalization within the European Union and more recently by globalization. By examining a wide variety of possible measures of globalization and liberalization, the authors conclude that the French economy's adaptation has been far reaching and largely successful, even if French leaders prefer to downplay the extent of these changes in response to political pressures and public opinion. They call this adaptation "globalization by stealth."

The authors also examine the relationship between trade, culture, and identity and explain why globalization has rendered the three inseparable. They show how globalization is contributing to the restructuring of the traditional French political spectrum and blurring the traditional differences between left and right. Finally, they explore France's effort to tame globalization—maîtriser la mondialisation—and the possible consequences and lessons of the French stance for the rest of the world.

Perceptions of the United States in European public opinion greatly improved around 2008, while perceptions of China simultaneously deteriorated. The Transatlantic and Sino-European relationships stem from radically different historical contexts. Yet could the image of China and the image of the U.S. be related in the eyes of Europeans? This paper examines whether attitudes towards China have contributed to determining attitudes towards the U.S. in Europe by analyzing data from the Transatlantic Trends survey taken in 2010, a critical juncture in Europe’s relations with both the U.S. and China. We investigate three hypotheses about this relation: the “yin and yank” or negative correlation (the more Europeans fear China, the more positive they become about the U.S.; the more favorably Europeans view China, the more negatively they see the U.S.); the “open vs. closed” or positive correlation (the more favorably Europeans see China, the more favorably they see the U.S.; the more negatively they see China, the more negatively they see the U.S.); and no relation (European attitudes towards China and the U.S. are independent). To the question of whether anti-Chinese sentiment has the potential for replacing anti-Americanism in Europe, our main conclusion is that positively correlated attitudes towards the U.S. and China reveal a deep cleavage in Europe between those who are “in” and those who are “out” of globalization. 

Two alternate visions for shaping and explaining the governance of economic globalization have been in competition for the past 20 years: an ad hoc, laissez-faire vision promoted by the United States versus a managed vision relying on multilateral rules and international organizations promoted by the European Union. Although the American vision prevailed in the past decade, the current worldwide crisis gives a new life and legitimacy to the European vision. This essay explores how this European vision, often referred to as ‘managed globalization’, has been conceived and implemented and how the rules that Europe fashioned in trade and finance actually shaped the world economy. In doing so, we highlight the paradox that managed globalization has been a force for liberalization.

European policy-makers often speak of their efforts to ‘manage globalization’. We argue that the advocacy of managed globalization is more than a rhetorical device and indeed has been a primary driver of major European Union (EU) policies over the past 25 years. We sketch the outlines of the concept of managed globalization, raise broad questions about its extent, and describe five major mechanisms through which it has been pursued: (1) expanding policy scope; (2) exercising regulatory influence; (3) empowering international institutions; (4) enlarging the territorial sphere of EU influence; and (5) redistributing the costs of globalization. These mechanisms are neither entirely novel, nor are they necessarily effective, but they provide the contours of an approach to globalization that is neither ad hoc deregulation nor old-style economic protectionism.

Globalization and Americanization have often been intertwined and interchanged in the French political discourse. This article explores whether and how the election of Sarkozy, and then of Obama, are transforming this equation. The French obsession with globalization and Americanization was temporarily appeased at the time of the 2007 election, which enabled Sarkozy to come to power. Yet the French rapprochement with the US, at least on economic issues, is not so clear as has often been portrayed. However, the past couple of years have shown that globalization no longer equals Americanization. This should help mitigate the strains put on the Franco-American relationship by the world financial crisis.

Although culture is not at the heart of the policy agenda of the current French administration, it will likely be affected by the Sarkozy revolution. French culture seems to be in a state of crisis, as evidenced both by the end of its ‘rayonnement’ outside of France and by its diminutive focus on the producers instead of the consumers of cultural goods. The options available for reform can, paradoxically given France’s history of policy opposition to American culture, be inspired by what is done in the United States, as is suggested by Fre´de´ ric Martel’s 2006 book De la Culture en Ame´rique. A reform of French cultural policy would have implications both for foreign and for domestic policies.

Resistance to change seems to be a deeply ingrained trait of French national character, and therefore traditional political accounts of France emphasize historical continuity. Yet, France has changed considerably in the past two decades, whether in economic, social, or political terms. This article reviews Changing France: The Politics That Markets Make and, beyond this book, asks how France has and has not been transformed. The central argument is that this change has taken place for the most part in the shadows instead of being publicized and debated. This has led to an overwhelming feeling of malaise in society and to a crisis of political representation.

The decade-long transatlantic banana dispute was not a traditional trade conflict stemming from antagonistic producers’ interests. Instead, this article argues that the banana dispute is one of the most complex illustrations of the legal and political difficulties created by the nesting and overlapping of international institutions and commitments. The contested Europe-wide banana policy was an artifact of nesting – the fruit of efforts to reconcile the single market with Lome´ obligations which then ran afoul of WTO rules. Using counter-factual analysis, this article explores how the nesting of international commitments contributed to creating the dispute, provided forum shopping opportunities which themselves complicated the options of decision-makers, and hindered resolution of what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward trade dispute. We then draw out implications from this case for the EU, an institution increasingly nested within multilateral mechanisms, and for the issue of the nesting of international institutions in general.

The EU is a formidable power in trade. Structurally, the sheer size of its market and its more than forty-year experience of negotiating international trade agreements have made it the most powerful trading bloc in the world. Much more problematically, the EU is also becoming a power through trade. Increasingly, it uses market access as a bargaining chip to obtain changes in the domestic arena of its trading partners, from labour standards to development policies, and in the international arena, from global governance to foreign policy. Is the EU up to its ambitions? This article examines the underpinnings of the EU’s power through trade across issue-areas and across settings (bilateral, inter-regional, global). It then analyses the major dilemmas associated with the exercise of trade power and argues that strategies of accommodation will need to be refined in each of these realms if the EU is to successfully transform its structural power into effective, and therefore legitimate, influence.

This article examines how globalization and Europeanization interact with each other, either in a centrifugal or in a centripetal way, to alter French politics. It analyzes how globalization has redefined domestic politics in France and it explores whether Europeanization has accelerated or hindered these transformations. It studies in turn the impact of globalization and Europeanization on power, preferences and institutions — three essential components of a country’s domestic politics. The central argument is that globalization and Europeanization not only have transformed the nature of domestic politics, but are also becoming a new cleavage around which domestic politics are being structured.

This article studies the determinants of international bargaining power in instances of trade negotiations between the European Union and the United States. The authors’ central hypothesis is that an appraisal of the US–EU trade relationship requires an understanding of the ways in which “domestic” political institutions shape the bargaining behavior of international actors. In particular, this article argues that the frequent EU “successes” in its negotiations with the US are the result of the bargaining power that its unique institutional arrangements grant its negotiators. In order to explain the distributional outcomes of international trade negotiations, the authors explore the “Schelling conjecture” and analyze why it is particularly relevant to the understanding of the unique bargaining power of EU negotiators when they are confronted with their American counterparts. To examine the explanatory power of domestic institutions in episodes of trade negotiations, the article analyzes the US-EC Uruguay Round agricultural negotiations (1986–1993).

Although the Member States of the European Union (EU) have long since relinquished their power to act as autonomous actors in international trade negotiations, they have now chosen to regain some of their lost trade sovereignty. Neither the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) 1994 opinion, nor the 1997 reform of the trade policy process at Amsterdam delegated full negotiating authority to the Commission over the 'new trade issues' of services and intellectual property. Instead, Member States settled on a hybrid form of decision-making to enable ad hoc rather than structural delegation of competence. Was this a rollback of EU competence? If so, why has it occurred in the EU's oldest and most successfully integrated, policy sector? A shift in the perceived trade-off between economic interests and ideological bias on the part of key Member States can explain such a change. This article also explores the consequences for the future conduct of the EU's trade policy and its influence in shaping the world political economy, as well as for the evolving pattern of federal allocation of jurisdiction in the EU.

Was the European Court of Justice a key actor in the "relaunching" of European integration in the 1980s? This article examines the crucial political role that was played by the Court with its Cassis de Dijon judgment in the rejuvenation EC harmonization policy and the development of the Single European Act. The authors challenge the dominant view that the Court's legal decisions in themselves create policy consequences, or that legal verdicts reflect the views of dominant member states, so as to create focal points around which a policy consensus emerges. They argue, instead, that the Cassis verdict acted as a catalyst, provoking a political response by the Commission, which attempted to capitalize on the verdict to create a "new approach to harmonization." This political entrepreneurship by the Commission triggered the mobilization of interest groups that lobbied their national governments for and against mutual recognition. Generalizing from the case, this article concludes that the Court performs three crucial roles in the EC policy-making process: opening political access to self-interested individuals, launching ideas into the policy-making arena, and provoking political responses through bold argumentation and unpopular verdicts.