To shed light on governments’ motives in geopoliticizing trade policy, the project will study which trade policy measures are legitimized via national security, which actors engage in lobbying on these policies, how decision-makers position themselves with respect to these policies, and how public opinion reacts to geopoliticization. A particularly innovative aspect of GEOTRADE is that the research will not be limited to individual countries. Instead, it will explicitly study variation in the geopoliticisation of trade policy across countries. After establishing patterns for all countries, the project will zoom in on six actors, namely China, the European Union, India, Mexico, Turkey, and the United States. GEOTRADE, however, will not only investigate why trade policy is geopoliticized but also to what extent this geopoliticization of trade policy contributes to the achievement of security policy goals. In this regard, the project expects that domestic actors often lead states to rely on ineffective measures. Many potentially effective measures negatively impact the economic interests of domestic actors, which is why they try to either stop them altogether or to attain loopholes that mitigate the effects of the measures. 

The first part of the project will assess variation in the extent of geopoliticization of trade policy across pairs of countries, types of trade policy measures used, and industries. Building on this aggregate analysis, we will then study the inputs into the policy process by exploring the stances of citizens and business associations. This part of the project will focus on six jurisdictions: China, the EU, India, Mexico, Turkey, and the U.S. In a third step, we will comparatively assess 24 cases of geopoliticization in these six jurisdictions. This will allow us to investigate which actors, if any, made security-related claims, and to analyse variation in the politics of geopoliticization across countries with distinct political institutions. Finally, we will analyse the consequences of the geopoliticization of trade policy for trade flows. 

Policy relevance

While GEOTRADE’s main purpose is to contribute to scholarly debates on the linkage of trade and security, improving our knowledge of the geopoliticization of trade is also of great importance to discussions outside academia. For example, geopoliticization likely contributes to the end of the liberal international order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. The project then can help to understand what the new international order will look like, to what extent this shift will be accompanied by interstate conflicts, and what impact the shift will have on the distribution of wealth both between and within states. In this way, GEOTRADE should also enable better policy decisions in a turbulent world.