Normative power meets realism: EU trade policy scholarship at the turn of the decade

Abstract

This review article focuses on three state-of-the-art works on EU trade policy putting them in the larger context of international trade. Each of them generates innovative theoretical and empirical insights into the politics of EU trade policy. Taken together, they represent the diversity and depth of EU trade policy scholarship in recent years which has achieved significant conceptual and methodological maturity and can help us understand some of the most critical trends in international trade pertaining to the EU, especially when productively combined with international and comparative political economy approaches. The article also contemplates on some questions stemming from these works s..