In 2006, the European Commission released its Global Europe Communication, in which it announced a shift from a multilateral to a bilateral trade strategy. One of the key pillars of this new strategy was to strengthen the bilateral trade relations with key Asian countries. In contrast to existing analyses that focus on European Union (EU) decision makers’ agency, we propose an explanation for this notable shift in the EU’s trade policy that stresses the political role of import-dependent firms. In light of the increasing integration of such firms into global value chains, the article argues that a plausible case can be made, both theoretically and empirically, that import-dependent firms had a clear stake in the signing of preferential trade agreements between the EU and Asian countries and that their lobbying efforts significantly affected the EU’s decision to start negotiations with South Korea, India and Vietnam.

Two recent developments have the potential to fundamentally alter the conventional view of EU trade policy-making: the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) and the recent backlash against globalization. In this paper we summarize the conventional wisdom after which we delineate the main expectations derived from the GVC and the globalization-backlash perspectives. In so doing, we focus on the EU's trade and non-trade preferences, and the EU's ability to achieve its preferences in international trade negotiations. We then discuss the research agenda that would allow testing the expectations derived from these different perspectives. A key point that emerges from this discussion is that the conventional perspective, the GVC perspective, and the globalization-backlash perspective may all be needed to fully understand EU trade policy. The challenge is to know under which conditions which of these perspectives best explains the process and outcomes of EU trade policy-making.

This article introduces and summarizes the key questions and findings of this special issue of Global Policy on the role of domestic and international institutions in the study of global value chains (GVCs). The article starts by briefly introducing the concept of GVCs and the state‐of‐the‐art of the existing literature focusing on the political implications of these landmark changes in the global economy. Then, we make a case for grounding this emerging literature more strongly into an ‘institutionalist’ perspective. More specifically, we argue that while a great deal of attention has been paid to intra‐chain governance modes – that is, the different ways in which firms organize their cross‐border production arrangements – the role external institutional forces play in structuring chain dynamics remains surprisingly under‐researched. These observations invite an analytical perspective that brings institutions back into the study of GVCs. The contributions to the special issue focus on multiple causal pathways linking GVCs and various types of domestic‐ and international institutions. Altogether, these contributions underscore that the politics engendered by GVCs, as well as how they evolve, can only be fully understood by paying attention to the external institutional context in which they are embedded.

The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication to an independent third party and the enforcement through multilaterally authorized sanctions, we show that: (i) upward regulatory harmonization leads actors preferring weak regulatory intellectual property rights standards to strive for venues with low degrees of judicialization, whereas those favoring stringent intellectual property rights protection prefer highly judicialized venues; and (ii) downward harmonization leads to the opposite constellation of institutional preferences. We show how these expectations hold by way of in‐depth case studies of two instances of global intellectual property rights regulation: the regulation of plant genetic resources and intellectual property rights for medicines.

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Over the last decade, European Union (EU) trade agreement negotiations in the form of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada have been strongly contested. By contrast, many other EU trade negotiations have sailed on with far less politicization, or barely any at all. In this contribution, we assess a series of plausible explanation for these very varying degrees of politicization across EU trade agreement negotiations—conceived of as the combination of polarization of opinions, salience given to them in public debate, and the expansion of the number of societal actors involved therein. Through a review of existing explanations, we show how each of these explanations faces a set of challenges. In the third section, we argue it is useful to conceive of these existing explanations as structural background conditions enabling agency on the part of interest group and civil society organizations. We therefore close by sketching how literature on the relationship between interest group mobilization and public opinion could inform further comparative research on trade policy negotiations, and on politicization of EU policy making in general.