Transformation of the European Union's Foreign Economic Policy in the Context of Open Strategic Autonomy

Abstract

Changing parameters of economic globalization along with the transforming nature of the world economic hierarchy leads to the fact that key players in the world economy have to reconsider not only their place and role in the changing system, but also traditional approaches to economic policy and its main instruments. The European Union is no exception in this system, which today sets rather ambitious tasks to maintain its position in the global economy, as well as to transform its geo-economic power into geopolitical one. At least, this is how one might interpret the tasks set in the framework of the concept of open strategic autonomy of the European Union, which actually unambiguously unites different components of the Union's security (military, political, economic, etc.). This allows us to consider the EU trade and investment (foreign economic) policy (together with a number of other areas of activity) through the prism of the realist paradigm in the framework of international relations theory and to try to identify new political economy features of the EU's approach to its activities in the field of regulation of international trade and capital flows. By adjusting and transforming some key elements of external economic policy (primarily revising the parameters of preferential trade regimes, as well as approaches to bilateral and multilateral investment agreements), along with creating new coordination mechanisms and barriers to trade and capital flows (such as the Foreign Direct Investment Monitoring Mechanism and the Instrument for Protection against Economic Coercive Measures), the European Union is strengthening the "protective" component of its integration model, trying to adapt the EU's integration model to the changing parameters of the global economy. The mutual intertwining of the main directions of the EU's activities is clearly visible, which also applies to relatively new aspects of the union's positioning in the external arena (geo-economic anti-crisis policy, financial and monetary policies), which can potentially lead to new contradictions and limitations in the course pursued, taking into account the specifics of the integration structure.