ABSTRACT
The WTO’s Doha Development Agenda (DDA) suffers from a profound gridlock out of which it seems impossible to escape. After more then eight years of negotiations, an outcome is not in sight and repeated commitments to re-launch the negotiations have largely remained unmet. This chapter aims at getting a better insight into the consequences of this gridlock for one major trading block in the WTO: the EU. It does so by analysing the consequences of the WTO’s negotiating agenda for the ability of the EU’s negotiator, the Commission, to negotiate credibly and effectively in the WTO or in multilateral negotiations overall. That agenda, and the issues that prevail there, affect the opportunities and constraints that the Commission as negotiator faces, and with it, its ability to influence the pressures that it will face internally, particularly from the EU member state governments. The Commission and these governments are indeed engaged in a principal-agent relationship where the former negotiates on behalf of the latter on the basis of trade negotiating authority delegated by the latter, and in a context where the latter try to exert as much control on the former as possible. Negotiating in a multilateral setting may give the Commission the ability, however, to influence the kind of pressures that the EU member state governments will exert on it. The WTO’s negotiating agenda – in this case the DDA – may be a crucial element here. The point of this chapter is indeed that it is such a crucial element. In order to explain this, the principal-agent relationship that characterizes the role division between the EU Commission and the EU member state governments in the WTO needs to be extended with the notion of a delegation chain. In such a chain, it is taken into account not only that the EU member state governments exert pressure on the Commission with the aim of having a WTO agreement that promotes or represents their interests, but also that these governments themselves are exposed to domestic pressures as well. To the extent that these pressures emerge as a consequence of the negotiating agenda in the WTO, opportunities and incentives emerge for the Commission to influence the kind of pressures that the EU member
state governments are exposed to domestically, and thus, the kind of pressures these governments will exert on the Commission as negotiator. This chapter aims at clarifying this chain, the opportunities it provides, and the conditions under which these may present themselves. It does so by making a theoretical claim, and by providing some tentative empirical evidence.
