The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
Year: 2022
Type: book-review
Abstract: This book can be read as a “glass half-full” analysis of the role of the European Union (EU) in the world today, depicting enduring strengths where others see accumulating weaknesses. The author, Anu Bradford, argues that EU market regulation has a considerable and often preeminent global impact—hence the “Brussels Effect” to which the title refers. It is therefore wrong, Bradford argues, to cast the EU “as an aging and declining power” (p. xiii) beset by slow growth (p. 267) or internal political challenges and growing external threats (pp. 283–84). The most fundamental constraint on EU power—its lack of autonomous capacity to mobilize human or fiscal resources (“blood and treasure”) to project power in a traditional sense1—becomes, in Bradford’s telling, an unexpected advantage. It has compelled the EU to mobilize a different kind of resource—regulatory power—giving rise to an extensive apparatus of rules to govern the Union’s large and still valuable internal market (pp. 16, 36).2 In order to access that market, external actors must meet the EU’s often stringent regulatory demands, and this in turn generates a broader compliance pull with strong extraterritorial ramifications. The global impact of this regime, as well as its likely durability (as Bradford argues in the concluding chapter), challenges conventional depictions of European weakness. The EU’s regulatory power, she asserts, demonstrates instead how the Union is “an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image” (p. xiii). “Even in the absence of a [full-fledged political] federation,” the global impact of the EU’s market-access regulations shows how the Union “is already able to advance its interests”; to claim otherwise, she argues, wrongly adopts “a narrow and outdated vision of what power means today” (p. x).
DOI: 10.1093/ajcl/avad001
Author: Peter L Lindseth
Institution: University of Connecticut
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4321605499