The European Union as a Global Regulatory Power
Date
2020-12-03Publisher
Oxford University PressVolume
41Issue
1Pages
243-264Google Scholar check
Keyword(s):
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Global regulatory interdependence is increasingly prevalent, with decision makers often affected by choices of jurisdictions in faraway places. Anu Bradford’s The Brussels Effect makes a significant contribution to our understanding of power in contemporary societies, which extends beyond military and normative power to power defined by regulatory capacity and market forces. Bradford empirically traces the global regulatory power of the European Union, which affects foreign business practices and policy choices, and theoretically identifies the prerequisites for the emergence of this phenomenon. This review article further situates the Brussels effect, perceived by Bradford as a passive process, within the context of other kinds of unilateral mechanisms that actively extend EU regulation beyond EU borders. This contextualisation demonstrates that law is a significant explanatory factor for its emergence. Both the legal design of measures with extraterritorial reach and the Court of Justice’s permissive stance often determine the extent of the Brussels effect. Also, analysing the Brussels effect alongside more active mechanisms of the extraterritorial reach of EU law reveals important normative questions regarding the legitimacy of the EU as a global regulatory power.