ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the negotiation phase 2002–2007 and analyzes why the impasse situation emerged by the end of 2007. I show that the choice of suboptimal negotiating strategies can best be understood by attending to the actors’ divergent interpretations of the rules of the game. Their resulting misperceptions reflected contested beliefs about the EPA’s development orientation, rather than a lack of information per se, as rationalist approaches might suggest. In developing this argument, the chapter systematically demonstrates how misperceptions of different aspects of the negotiation rules complicated bargaining and how the three mechanisms presented in Chapter 1 played out in the EPA process. It also situates the misperceptions in the context of both sides’ different readings of the history of EU-ACP relations, and the success or failure of past models of North-South trade cooperation.
