The EU's trade relations with China, 1975-2008: a linkage power at work ?

The EU’s Trade Relations with China (1975-2008): A Linkage Power at Work? (Summary) The central aim of this thesis is to improve our understanding of the EU’s power, in particular in its external trade relations/negotiations. Our hypothesis is that the EU is a distinctive kind of linkage power, defined as an actor relying on linkage as a crucial modus operandi in its external relations. We explored how, to what extent and in which distinctive ways the EU is such a linkage power. Our analysis was based on three logically interrelated concepts – power resources, linkage and linkage power. Linkage refers to a leveraging strategy, with an aim of packaging relevant power resources, so as to increase leverage in bargaining, or more generally attain a policy objective. I identified seven types of linkages that the EU used: political-economic issue linkage, economic-economic issue linkage, conditionality, contextual linkage, linkage with a third party, cognitive linkage and synergistic linkage. Linkage can hardly work without proper power resources. The latter, as Dahl (1970) defined, refers to all the resources-opportunities, acts, objects etc – that an actor can exploit in order to affect the behaviour of another. So, linkage is a bridge between power resources and impacts – meaning affecting or changing the behaviour of another party. By putting linkage and power together, we created a new term – “linkage power”, referring to a power based on linkages. The EU, the US, China or any other power can all be such labelled, though these actors may diverge in power resources, linkage strategies and the variables affecting linkage effectiveness. When applying such an analytical framework to the EU, we gave particular attention to the implications of the EU’s sui generis nature on its linkage power. Our case study is the EU’s trade relations with China (1975-2008), which were punctuated by two critical historical junctures – the Tian’anmen Square Incident in 1989 and the EU-China Textile Crisis in 2005. In 1975, The EEC’s ...