Acceso usuarios
Panayotis M. Protopsaltis
Within the global economy, the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) are engaged in a form of structural competition in which each uses bilateral, regional and multilateral agreements to protect and advance its own interests. In international trade, the EU and the US have followed a similar pattern involving the selection of the most favourable regulatory venue for the achievement of greater liberalisation. Using the stick of exclusion from and the carrot of inclusion in the preferential access to their respective markets, the two commercial superpowers established their networks of asymmetric preferential trade agreements with selected, economically weaker, politically like-minded countries or groups of countries. The extension of their networks may allow them in the future to establish plurilateral rules of trade involving them and their partners while their alliance would have allowed them to increase their leverage in the future international trade negotiations or even create an EU/US-led trade organisation and marginalize the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Although now a rather distant prospect, such an alliance may not have been that desirable for it may have altered the equilibrium of power between the strongest players of the international trade inducing unsympathetic countries to institutionalise their own alliances, leading to the fragmentation of international trade and jeopardising the existence of the WTO.
