Regulating Trade in Services in the EU and the WTO: Trust, Distrust and Economic Integration by Ioannis Lianos & Okeoghene Odudu

Author:Ioannis Lianos & Okeoghene Odudu
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Foreign & International Law, Specialties, Law, Education & Reference, Military
ISBN: 9781107008649
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-22T18:30:00+00:00

Cambridge Books Online

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/

Regulating Trade in Services in the EU and the WTO

Trust, Distrust and Economic Integration

Edited by Ioannis Lianos, Okeoghene Odudu

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022118

Online ISBN: 9781139022118

Hardback ISBN: 9781107008649

Chapter

7 - Trusting the Poles? Mark 2 pp. 263-298

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022118.011

Cambridge University Press

7

Trusting the Poles? Mark 2: towards a regulatory

peace theory in a world of mutual recognition

k a l y p s o n i c o l a Ï dis*

1.

Introduction

There are all kinds of regulatory wars out there. Some wars pit ‘regulatory

cultures’ against one another; others pit free traders against consumer

protectors and all the variants of liberal, statist, technocratic or paternalistic

approaches; others still confront low against high standards systems – in

their race to the bottom (or the top) anything goes. And, in Europe of

course, wars may pit Polish plumbers against local (imaginary) compet-

itors. True, regulatory wars (or competition) may serve as useful

selection mechanisms. But, as the 2008–11 financial crisis has amply

demonstrated, there is little doubt that at least some lulls of regulatory

peace would serve the greater good.

By ‘regulatory peace’ I mean a stable state of cooperation among

regulators from different jurisdictions (usually countries), where ‘reg-

ulators’ stand for standards-setters in general, from legislators to agen-

cies, standards organizations or accreditors. ‘A stable state of

cooperation’ needs to be defined, as this does not of course mean

harmony, but rather the existence of mechanisms to manage the

unavoidable mix of convergent and divergent interests between these

actors, mechanisms which allow them to pursue the public good in their

own jurisdiction while minimizing negative externalities for outsiders,

that is refraining from engaging in regulatory behaviour aimed at

* This chapter was first presented in Cambridge at the Modern Law Review conference,

1 July 2009. I thank the participants for greatly stimulating discussions and Ioannis

Lianos for his further input. The paper includes and builds on an earlier publication,

‘Trusting the Poles? Constructing Europe through Mutual Recognition’, Journal of

European Public Policy 15 (5) (2007) 682–98.

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264

k a l y p s o n i c o l a Ï d i s

undermining the other side. For the purpose of this enquiry, the exter-

nalities in question stem from the movement of goods and services

across borders. In a loose analogy to what is referred to in international

relations (IR) as ‘democratic peace theory’ (DPT), we need to ask what

are the factors that make regulatory peace more likely both as character-

istics of individual jurisdictions and as attributes of the interactions

between them. This is obviously a very ambitious endeavour, which

would need to draw on the many strands of the burgeoning literature on

domestic and transnational regulation as it relates to the free movement

of goods and services across borders.1

Clearly, a ‘regulatory peace theory’ (RPT), if we choose to call it that,

could only claim a loose analogy to its broader macro-political fore-

bearer, DPT, as discussed briefly in the later part of this chapter.

Nevertheless, I hope that this might prove a fruitful way to revisit some

earlier analysis on the trade/regulation nexus.2 I have argued in the past

that a

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