Patricia García-Duran and Johan Eliasson’s paper ‘New is old? The EU’s Open, Sustainable and Assertive Trade Policy’ has been recognised as among the top ten most cited papers for 2023 by Global Policy .
The paper analyses the EU’s so-called Open, Sustainable and Assertive (OSA) trade strategy of 2021, presented by the EU as countering dependency and promoting European economic resilience. Patricia and Johan demonstrate that embedded liberalism and fair trade, despite being often presented as separate trade paradigms, actually make-up the singular trade paradigm of managed globalisation. Their findings indicate that this has in fact been a more influential shaper of trade policy this century than had previously been recognised. In addition, the authors found that the OSA represents a shift towards balancing the realist trade-as-foreign-policy and managed globalisation, representing and evolution from managing interdependence to managing dependency.