Expanding, complementing, or substituting multilateralism? EU preferential trade agreements in the migration regime complex

Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Sandra Lavenex, Philipp Lutz

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Intense pressure for international solutions and weak support for multilateral cooperation have led the EU to increasingly rely on its strongest foreign policy tool in the pursuit of migration policy goals: preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Starting from the fragmentary architecture of the migration regime complex we examine how the relevant content of the EU PTAs relates to multilateral institutions. Depending on the constellation of policy objectives, EU competence, and international interdependence, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions under which EU bilateral outreach via PTAs expands, complements, or substitutes international norms. Based on an original dataset of migration provisions in all EU PTAs signed between 1960 and 2020, we find that the migration policy content in EU PTAs expands or complements the objectives of multilateral institutions only to a very limited extent. Instead, the predominant constellation is one of substitution in which the EU uses its PTAs to promote migration policy objectives that depart from those of existing multilateral institutions.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)49-61
Number of pages13
JournalPolitics and Governance
Volume11
Issue number2
Early online date26 Apr 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Funding

This research was supported by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) “On the Move” (www.nccr‐onthemove.ch) and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We are very grateful to Julia Gubler and Laura Mauricio for their excellent research assistance, to the anonymous reviewers, to Oliver Westerwinter, and to the editors of this thematic issue for their constructive comments on previous ver‐ sions of the manuscript.

FundersFunder number
nccr – on the move
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

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