Billy A. Melo Araujo, The EU Deep Trade Agenda: Law and Policy

Abstract

The Chapter reviews the book The EU Deep Trade Agenda written by Melo Araujo that provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal and political issues of the EU deep trade agenda which started with the pronouncement of the new Global Europe trade strategy of the European Commission in 2006. The overall message of the research presented by the author is the statement of the ambiguous, double-faced character of the EU’s trade policy after 2006. For, the then rather new trade policy strategy initiated a turn of the EU towards the interests of EU trade stakeholders in saving the global position of the EU economy amidst the gravitational shifts of World trade since the 1990s, and opening up markets for EU goods and services. The former generally rather altruistic attitude of favouring multilateral approaches in codifying common trade rules over selfish economic orientations has been amended, if not replaced by a much more pragmatic stance which seeks to sustain European shares in world trade by recourse to bilateral or regional FTA.

The book by Melo Araujo is the first comprehensive analysis of the EU DCFTAs and their implementation of the EU Global Europe trade agenda. The author presents a thorough and convincing law and politics examination of the drivers of the formation of the new trade policy and its realisation by way of FTAs. Even though one might not agree with the author’s views in every respect, the structure of analysis and the way of argumentation makes the overall conclusions extremely compelling.