Good global governance through trade: constitutional moorings

Abstract

Ensuring good global governance through trade is not just a powerful idea, or a ‘global strategy’; it is also firmly anchored in the highest laws of the European Union. Promoting good global governance through trade policy brings together two of the hallmarks of the EU as an international actor. On the one hand, it concerns the area of the EU’s most obvious asset, its economic clout. On the other hand, this relates to the idea of the EU not only as a ‘civilian power’, but as a ‘normative power’ which shapes the world around it by harnessing its economic strength according to a larger vision and based on values which go beyond the strictly economic realm. In order to capture the constitutional moorings of the mandate to pursue ‘good global governance’ through trade and to elucidate its implications, the present chapter shines the spotlights on this issue through three different lenses: historical, comparative and legal-institutional. First, it retraces the evolution of this idea and its progressive codification in the course of time. Second, it puts the EU’s constitutional ‘conscience’ as a trade power into a comparative context. Against this double backdrop, the chapter then turns to the legal significance of such norms, addressing what they can – and cannot – achieve as norms of EU constitutional law.