Shaping a New International Trade Order: Competition and Co-operation among the European Union, the United States, and China
- Following the establishment of the World Trade Organisationin January 1995, American and European trade relationships werefor a timecharacterised by ‘competitive interdependence’,astheUS and EUsimultaneously aimedtoadvance their commercial interests inthird countries. Under conditions of competitive interdependence, trade actorsresort to certain policy choices to gain advantage for their producers while restricting others’ ability to enter a market (Sbragia, 2010).In the last decade, however, European and American trade policymakers have facedthe challenges of a more competitive world and the emergence of newer trade powers such as China. Both actors have veered away frommultilateral deals as their preferred trade policy choices. In this paper, weuse the Sbragia (2010) framework to analyse the trade policy shifts made bythe EU and the US in the last decade. We argue that what had been a competitive interdependence relationship has recently changed toa trilateral structure in which both the EU and the US have focused their attention on countering Chinese competition. Moreover, China’s emergence has also pushed the USto reinvigorate the role of unilateralism and the EU to bolsterbilateralism as they both seek to secure their commercial shares worldwide.