Yves Mény Annual Lecture | Global trade in transition | Professor Bernard Hoekman

Join Professor Bernard Hoekman for the 2025 Yves Mény Annual Lecture as he examines how shifting global trade dynamics and rising policy interventions are reshaping the way the European Union engages with the world, compelling the EU to broaden its trade and investment strategy by incorporating domain-specific plurilateral agreements.

The rules-based multilateral trade order is unravelling. Major economies –notably China and the United States, but also the European Union – increasingly resort to autonomously determined trade and industrial policy interventions, motivated by multiple objectives: geoeconomics, security, competitiveness, combating climate change, and defense of societal values.

American antipathy to using the World Trade Organization as a negotiation forum limits prospects for agreeing to new rules of the road on a multilateral basis. Instead, cooperation to manage the cross-border effects of industrial policy interventions will need to be among groups of countries, i.e., be plurilateral in nature. An implication is that the European Union needs to complement the centrality of trade agreements as the default approach to manage trade and investment relations by expanding its external economic toolkit to include issue- or domain-specific plurilateral agreements.

In this lecture, Bernard Hoekman will explore how these offer the prospect of more effectively exploiting complementarities across available policy instruments to attain specific objectives shared by the Union and its partner countries. The design and operationalisation of plurilateral agreements and their relationship with trade agreements is an important agenda for research.