Internal Coherence vs External Influence? Managing Institutional Overlap in EU's Changing Approach towards Energy Charter Treaty

This study arge that European Union's changing approach towards the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) could be analysed as a case of formation, contestation, management, and removal of their institutional overlap. ECT got a special significance by being created as an instrument of external projection of EU-supported economic ideas which, however, with time evolved into a substantial obstacle to the coherence of EU common market policies. By utilizing IR research on IO mandate extension and institutional overlap, insights from dispersed literature on EU foreign policy actorness, this study explains EU’s withdrawal of ECT as contingent process dependent on multiple factors of EU’s evolving standing in global investment and energy governance regime complexes, as well as on opportunistic activities of economic non-state actors and purposeful advocacy of civil activists. Three main EU approaches of addressing overlap with ECT – neoliberal reformism, environmentalist incrementalism and environmentalist secessionism – were the natural outcome of short-term policy developments from different regime complexes. The evolution of EU’s approach demonstrated situation of dynamic tension between different goals and values of EU external economic policies.