Interests or values: What drives regional actors’ involvement in EU trade policy?

EU trade policy has recently witnessed a novel degree of public contestation which oftentimes crystallised at the regional level of government. Well beyond the oft-cited case of Wallonia, regional actors in various EU member states became increasingly involved in trade, with regional parliaments passing detailed declarations or declaring themselves CETA-, TTIP- or TiSA-free. Against this backdrop, our paper investigates the drivers of regional actors’ increased involvement in EU multilevel trade governance in the post-Lisbon era. Drawn from the literatures on functionalism and post-functionalism, we derive two independent causal factors to explain regional involvement. First, regional units act on both economic, i.e. the protection of import-competing or the promotion of internationally competitive firms, and political interests, i.e. the safeguarding of their regulatory autonomy. Second, regional units respond to value-based contestation in regional mass publics. Our empirical analysis of multilevel trade governance across seven EU member states finds that, bar exceptional instances of mass politicization surrounding agreements such as CETA and TTIP, regional actors’ economic and political interests have provided the dominant and most long-standing motivation for their involvement in EU trade policy. The systematic engagement of traditional stakeholders such as regional ministries of the economy or agriculture, which precedes the Treaty of Lisbon and harks back to at least the early 1990s in most cases, provides a case in point. On the other hand, identity-based mass politicization has played a lesser role over the entirety of the period under investigation. It has flared up sporadically, especially in the heated policy environment of the mid-2010s, engaging regional legislatures and executives in charge of “deep trade” dossiers such as consumer protection, environmental regulation or labour rights. In the context of more recent and less politicised agreements, however, this broader involvement has faded again.