The Global Governance of EU-China Investment Protection Agreements

The paper analyses how the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) agreed in-principle between the EU and China affects the global governance of the investment regime, from the point of view of increasing the state regulatory power of both actors and reproducing EU's norms and values on investment, with respect to the previous BITs and other IIAs negotiated by the EU. It uses text-as-data and the content analysis of the so-called "Model EU" investment agreement, which has been inferred from the existing IPAs with Vietnam and Singapore, to evaluate the influence that EU's normative power has had vis-à-vis China. This is studied from two points of view: the EU as a rule-making power, that is, using Investment Protection Agreements (IPAs) to export its values and norms to be adopted as international norms and values; and the EU as the combined weight of 27 Member States that act in synergy due to this pool of negotiations. Secondly, the CAI is compared to the other IPAs concluded by the EU, to isolate the confounding variables in the previous analysis and uncover what is the level of influence that can be attributed to China and not to the EU’s negotiating and normative power. Therefore, and most importantly, the paper contributes to the single-voice literature that studies the influence of the centralisation of powers in the EU, but also to the foreign policy literature, to give insights on what added value and normative power does the EU bring to the table when negotiating bilaterally, in this case, with China; and what are the main obstacles that are found when trying to reach agreements, and the points where further cooperation can be envisioned.