China as a Catalyst of the European Union’s Trade Defence Instruments

By Laia Comerma

Journal of Common Market Studies

Scholars have paid significant attention to the ‘geopoliticisation’ and ‘securitisation’ turn in EU trade policy. As part of this shift, the EU has begun to develop autonomous trade defence instruments under the ‘Open Strategic Autonomy’ toolbox, to find a new balance between security and competitiveness. This article offers a thorough descriptive and discursive framing analysis of a broad dataset comprising speeches and press releases from EU institutions and mainstream media that link China to the development of these trade defence instruments. This provides a comprehensive account of the ‘China factor’ in accounting for the enactment of these instruments, showing that it precedes other factors generally associated with the geopolitical turn in EU trade policy, like the COVID-19 and Ukraine crises. It reveals that the foundations of the link between the China factor and the EU’s trade defence instruments are deeply tied together at the level of communicative discourse, which provides insights on the heterogeneity of narratives on China in EU trade discourse, challenging the popular claim that the instruments are ‘country-agnostic’ at the level of communicative discourse. The findings of this article are significant for understanding China’s influence on EU trade and economic policy.

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