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Singapore, through the colonial era up to the present, has fulfilled an entrepôt role in European-Asian economic trade. This role continues, but Singapore has increasingly promoted and undertaken the role of being a bridge between Asian business culture and western business culture. The government of Singapore has actively encouraged the city to become a centre of western-style financial institutions and a place where an uncorrupt ‘rule of law’ is applied to commercial transactions. On the other hand, the Singapore business community has strong traditional relation-based networks across Asia. It is a place where European Union business persons can operate in a familiar milieu yet connect with wider markets across Asia. To facilitate this relationship both Singapore and the EU have negotiated formal trade, financial and broader-based agreements. The chapter reviews a selection of these formal agreements.

News reports often talk about the political influence that major corporations and industry groups have on EU trade policy decisions. But exactly what role do business actors play in EU trade policy-making? And why do EU policy-makers listen to the demands of firms and their lobby groups? This chapter tries to answer these questions by identifying the type of firms involved in EU trade politics, analysing their political strategies and influence, as well as detailing the institutional setting in which EU trade policy-making takes place. In doing so, this chapter provides a detailed account of business-government relations in current EU trade politics and how these dynamics have changed over time.

What role does the Council of the European Union fulfil in EU trade policy? In this chapter, I argue that the Council fulfils both a legislative as well as an executive function. Starting from the legal foundations, three different instruments of EU trade policy are distinguished, each with their own decision-making procedures and each with a different role for the Council. Supplanting such a legal framework with an administrative perspective provides the reader with the type of practical knowledge that facilitates a better understanding of the existing literature but also clarifies the aptness of a focus on both the Council’s legislative and executive roles. A third layer adds a political perspective by overviewing the academic literature. This perspective highlights the Council’s role (1) as a legislative body, seeking to control the European Commission (particularly in external negotiations), (2) as a defender of national competencies before the court of justice, and (3) as an executive body whose decision-making process is less characterized by political conflict and bargaining and more by collective problem-solving, coordination and cooperation. The chapter ends with a prospective outlook and lays down three directions for future research on the Council in the domain of trade policy.

This chapter focuses on the importance of the impact of e-commerce and digital technologies in the transition from the European single market into a Digital Single Market (DSM). Highlighted is the opportunity that this change may present to enable the growth of the European Union’s international trade by capitalising on the potential of electronic transactions to enhance trust within the European digital framework. Key issues of data protection and data localization – the former leading to trust, while the latter causes fragmentation – and the importance of data security for trust and the interoperability of data flows under the DSM are analysed.

In the twenty-first century, relations between the EU and Africa have been defined by intense diplomatic activity. In this chapter, we survey the focal point of this activity – the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) – and highlight an unresolved tension between the economic dimension (reciprocity in matters of trade and investment) and the political dimension (institution building and the promotion of regional integration) of this process. We provide a background to contemporary EU-Africa trade relations before looking at the interregional dimension more specifically. We note the diverse array of different functional logics that have historically defined African regionalism, both prior to and in parallel with the EPAs. Accordingly, the influence of the EPA negotiations on these (partially if not wholly independent) processes of integration has been highly uneven and contradictory. We conclude by considering these effects with respect to each African ‘region’ and the longer-term implications for African governance and development.

The EU trade dispute resolution strategy is currently reshaped by new initiatives, from the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EUVFTA), in which the need for human rights-related provisions integration and clarification, including for dispute settlement, have partially been taken into account. It is in the dispute settlement domain that sovereign States’ interests are challenged, while emerging trade giants like China or India, and a number of Asian developing countries, are deploying all their heterodox economic strategy. In this general context, this chapter questions the concepts of the peaceful multilateral settlement of disputes in reference to a number of key disputes between the EU and Developing Asia. It concludes in qualifying developing Asia’s activism as a form of assertive legalism for political autonomy and proposes a new strategy for the EU to address developing-Asia-related trade disputes.

As the Lisbon Treaty entered into force, the EU’s common commercial policy (CCP) constituted in Article 207 TFEU has been extended and clarified. Over time, the EU’s exclusive competence to conclude international agreements, which was formerly limited solely to trade in goods, has been expanded to encompass trade in services, foreign direct investment, and commercial aspects of intellectual property. Furthermore, there is an obligation on the EU to liberalise trade in a manner consistent with the ‘universal’ values that inspired its own creation, such as human rights and democracy, in accordance with Article 21 TEU. The requirement to export such values through its trade agreements brings within the scope of the CCP broader objectives not typically associated with economic liberalisation. Through an examination of the evolving Treaty frameworks and the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), this chapter examines the evolutive nature of the EU’s external competence to conclude international agreements and argues that the CCP has become an increasingly powerful foreign policy tool, especially in the negotiation of EU free trade agreements. Finally, this chapter argues from a legal perspective that the external trade policy of the EU is being used to promote ‘universal’ values, sometimes with unintended consequences.