Bridges and Gaps: Operationalizing EU-CPTPP Cooperation

The rupture in the international trading system has generated an extraordinary volume of commentary and a new vocabulary: just-in-case rather than just-in-time; de-risking rather than integration; conditional rather than unconditional most-favoured-nation treatment; variable geometry in place of universal multilateralism. The common premise is that the system built during the era of globalization was fundamentally flawed and must be replaced. 

Yet, after the better part of a decade of trade and technology war premised on globalization having gone wrong, three things are observable. 

• Global trade has proved resilient; the trade and tech war is flailing and failing.
• The global factory remains largely intact. To be sure, there is superficial decoupling at the level of final assembly, but this masks continued deep interdependence of supply chains. 
• The small open economies are rallying around the system rather than abandoning it, using the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, concluding new agreements on established templates, entering commitments not to weaponize trade, and opening new forums, of which the CPTPP–EU process is potentially the most consequential.

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