EU in a New Geoeconomic Order

Event description

Over the past two decades, the European Union’s Common Commercial Policy (CCP) has undergone a transformation. Once centred primarily on trade liberalisation and market access, EU trade policy now operates in an international environment increasingly shaped by geopolitical rivalry, economic coercion, technological competition and concerns about strategic dependencies. 

The EU has responded by integrating trade policy more closely with economic and national security, resilience, industrial policy and the green and digital transitions. Open Strategic Autonomy and, more recently, the EU’s economic security agenda capture this changing orientation. Alongside traditional trade agreements, the Union has developed an expanding toolbox of unilateral and regulatory instruments, including investment screening, the Anti-Coercion Instrument, the Critical Raw Materials Act and CBAM. Standardisation, digital regulation and green industrial policy further demonstrate how regulatory power has become an important dimension of geoeconomic competition. 

These developments raise broader questions about the changing purposes and boundaries of EU trade policy. How can openness be reconciled with security? When does economic interdependence become a strategic vulnerability? And how does the EU combine its traditional commitment to a rules-based international economic order with an increasingly interventionist and security-oriented policy? 

The geoeconomic turn also creates new challenges for courts. As economic-security measures affect companies, investors and individuals, European and national courts will increasingly confront disputes involving complex economic assessments, security considerations and geopolitical objectives. Judicial review may therefore require courts to navigate the boundaries between law, economics and executive discretion, while judicial decisions may themselves shape the development of EU economic-security policy. 

Against this background, the seminar brings together two perspectives – “EU Trade Policy in a New Geoeconomic Order” and “Geoeconomic challenges facing EU Courts”– to examine how geoeconomic transformation is reshaping both European economic governance and its judicial oversight.

Participants:

Per Altenberg, Chief Economist at Kommerskollegium; Jörgen Hettne, Judge at the EU General Court. 

Peter Gottschalk, Erik Lagerlöf, Siri Silvereke and Joakim Zander, discussants.

Invitation and Programme

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Registration

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This conference is a collaboration between Lund University Centre for Business Law (ACLU), Centre for European Studies (CFE) and Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM)