ABSTRACT
Some scholars of European Union trade policy argue that we should primarily focus on interest groups in explaining Europe’s modes of external trade relations. Moreover, scholarship shows that the institutional interplay between the European Commission and the member states influences the European Union’s actorness in international trade governance. To date, however, little work has systematically examined the strong influence of international factors on European Union trade policy. Chapter 2 remedies this gap in the literature, and, by integrating International Relations and European politics theorizing, develops a theory that it coins ‘commercial realism’. This theoretical reformulation of realist thinking helps the reader to understand the role of factors located at the international level in the European Union’s external trade relations. The chapter deduces hypotheses as well as process-tracing evidence from commercial realism which it contrasts to a set of competing hypotheses derived from liberal-institutionalist approaches: the principal-agent framework and commercial liberalism. In doing so, Chapter 2 is one of the first advances in this area of research that employs ‘rigorous process-tracing’ by developing transparent tests.
