TPP Spurs EU to Make Up Lost Ground in Asia Trade Diplomacy

TPP Spurs EU to Make Up Lost Ground in Asia Trade Diplomacy
Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai and European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen at the 5th China-EU High Level Economic and Trade dialogue, Beijing, Sept. 28, 2015 (AP photo by Andy Wong).

After the collapse of multilateral trade talks at the World Trade Organization in Geneva in 2008, governments around the world went back to the drawing board to devise new trade strategies. As a second-best solution, trade officials increasingly looked to bilateral and plurilateral trade negotiations to generate commercial opportunities for domestic businesses and strengthen their economic and geopolitical positions in regions of strategic importance.

In anticipation of the failure of the WTO’s Doha Round, European Union leaders had already ended, in 2006, the EU moratorium on bilateral trade talks and made concluding comprehensive trade and investment agreements with emerging and developed economies a top priority of EU commercial diplomacy. In East and Southeast Asia, that EU negotiation strategy is now beginning to bear some fruit.

In December, the EU formally signed a free trade agreement with Vietnam; many of the important political details had already been finalized in August. The trade pact is a landmark deal for several reasons.

Keep reading for free!

Get instant access to the rest of this article by submitting your email address below. You'll also get access to three articles of your choice each month and our free newsletter:

Or, Subscribe now to get full access.

Already a subscriber? Log in here .

What you’ll get with an All-Access subscription to World Politics Review:

A WPR subscription is like no other resource — it’s like having a personal curator and expert analyst of global affairs news. Subscribe now, and you’ll get:

  • Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of tens of thousands of articles.
  • Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts, delivered to you every weekday.
  • Regular in-depth articles with deep dives into important issues and countries.
  • The Daily Review email, with our take on the day’s most important news, the latest WPR analysis, what’s on our radar, and more.
  • The Weekly Review email, with quick summaries of the week’s most important coverage, and what’s to come.
  • Completely ad-free reading.

And all of this is available to you when you subscribe today.

More World Politics Review