ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 is devoted to the empirical examination of the European Union’s trade policy towards the Americas. It pays particular attention to Latin America and analyzes why the European Union, in 2007, singled out Brazil in a bilateral Strategic Partnership although it started interregional negotiations on a comprehensive Association Agreement with the Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR) as a regional group and re-launched this format in 2010. By examining the European Union’s switch from interregionalism to bilateralism and its return to interregionalism in a comparative fashion, Chapter 3 shows the large extent to which the European Union was driven by competition with the US, and later also China, as well as MERCOSUR’s varying degree of cohesion. This also holds when controlling for the influence of interest groups and European member states’ preferences. The chapter incorporates a large amount of empirical sources that triangulates official documents of the European Union, trade data, and interviews with officials and stakeholders from both Europe and Latin America.
