Is EU trade policy at a critical juncture?

The European Union (EU) presented its new Open, Sustainable, and Assertive (OSA) trade policy strategy in February 2021. This paper analyses this strategy from a Historical Institutional perspective, assessing the presence and influence of the permissive and productive conditions necessary for a critical juncture to occur. It looks at whether OSA is a path-altering development in EU trade policy. It shows that the EU has responded instrumentally to changes in the international trading system, including a loosening of the international liberal order, by developing new trade defense and enforcement instruments (not just recalibrating or refining existing ones). We argue that this rebalancing is occurring in an international context where the EU’s two main competitors have increasingly embraced a realist logic. As such, the strategy represents the increased prominence of realist, geopolitical concerns, an approach endorse by the Council of Ministers in May 2021 However, there is, simultaneously, significantly less adjustment in the underlying normative perspective conveyed by the Commission in the OSA. In other words, the development of new trade policy instruments has not been accompanied by an ideational change despite all the talk about strategic autonomy in trade. The OSA thus represents an EU seeking to increase its resilience and autonomy in order to defend its values and interests, while simultaneously promoting the return to a rules-based liberal international trading order.