Saturday, 12 June 2010 01:19

By Pedro Solbes and Richard Youngs for FRIDE

The reform of global economic governance is still firmly on policymakers’ radar screens, but there is little evidence that since London’s G20 Summit in April last year the EU has developed a forwardlooking or coherent approach to the new forms of global governance that G20 leaders had committed to.

Several strands of the current European debate are ostensibly joined together by a shared commitment to multi-lateralism. In devising rescue plans for the EU’s financial sector, its drawing up of the new ‘2020 strategy’ and the fashioning of a new EU diplomatic identity, the principle of enhanced multilateralism has taken centre stage. And yet the way in which the EU is currently positioning itself on global governance belies its self-declared status as the world’s ‘good multilateralist’.

The G20 pledged that multi-lateral co-operation and interdependence would guide the world out of crisis. Most European policies, however, do not sit well with the spirit of such commitments.

The EU may not have imposed sweeping quotas and tariffs, but powerful ‘behind the border’ protectionism has emerged in the form of subsidies, bailouts, ‘buy national’ injunctions and new restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI). Global Trade Alert, an independent monitor, has identified more than 300 new protectionist measures introduced by G20 members.