News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
The first EU ASEAN summit, gathering heads of state and government from the ten South East Asian Nations and the twenty seven EU member states plus the head of the Council and the European Commission was mainly a very symbol-laden act that cements recent efforts at greater political rapprochement between …
After a few months of calm at the World Trade Organization, a storm has descended upon the dispute settlement body in Geneva. China requests consultations with US over semiconductor export controls A Chinese official confirmed that the government requested consultations at the dispute settlement body with the United States regarding …
Let’s be prepared for a big week in trade policy in and around Europe.
Panellists in the dispute settlement cases brought by China, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey in an almost coordinated fashion after 2018 could no longer delay the publication of perhaps the politically most salient case in the World Trade Organization’s twenty-seven year history: the United States Section 232 steel and aluminium tariffs. …
Chile and the European Union sealed a long-awaited package to upgrade a twenty-year old Association Agreement. The deal is a strategic move for the EU in its quest for greater critical raw materials security. For Chile the announcement of the agreement comes as its political institutions are finalising their ratification …
The usually low-key, technocratic Export Control Forum, a big bash organised by the European Commission with allies and business and civil society stakeholders each year in Brussels was unusually well attended this time round. It reveals the new salience of the EU’s export control regime in times of war on …
The European Union requested the establishment of dispute panels in two geopolitically salient cases regarding China related to intellectual property protection and what the EU considers coercive trade measures affecting its member state Lithuania.
A bit of sarcasm can’t do any harm, right?
The amount of energy going into the EU US Trade and Technology Council in the Brussels bubble is astounding. It’s at times as if nothing else counted: everyone is obsessed with it. Will the TTC have delivered more on what happened outside its formal framework than within?
Nobody will have missed the news of European Council president Charles Michel’s solo trip to China on Thursday. The trip revealed the EU’s entrenched internal rifts over China. It can be read as the post-pandemic restart of a very difficult domestic European conversation about China.
