SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper explores the disjunctures in the rhetoric and policy of the European Union (EU) Member States and EU institutions on labour standards, trade and development. Such disjunctures arise from the fact that the EU is seeking to foreground the social dimension of market integration – within the EU and globally – whilst simultaneously promoting an accelerated pace of trade liberalization, with the likely effect of undermining realization of that social dimension on the global level. The paper draws insights from the experience of EU integration, examining the extent to which such 'social regionalism' – the social law and labour market institutions developed in response to EU trade liberalization – might be transferable to other regions or trading blocs, given the backdrop of the limited policy space available to developing countries to promote their own equivalents to trade adjustment mechanisms of the sort which have existed within the EU.