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The European Union (EU)-Turkey customs union (CU) has led to a significant level of integration between a non-member country and the EU and therefore represents an example of external differentiated integration. Turkey's relations with the EU, until recently, have been largely motivated by its membership objective. However, Turkey's membership prospects have recently been diminishing, due both to mutual estrangement because of Turkey's ever-deteriorating performance on EU-mandated reforms and the current difficulties challenging European integration. Under these circumstances, concerns regarding structural problems and conjunctural challenges have forced both parties to revise the CU. This study aims to explain how the parties should revise it to tackle the challenges posed by current economic relations. It argues that building broader and deeper economic integration with a certain degree of collective policy-making capacity will be crucial for furthering relations, which may thereby contribute to Turkey's accession process in a longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU and the US are at the origin of most international institutions and rules for both trade and finance, and both have long exported their preferred policies to the rest of the world. Today, this hegemonic position is increasingly challenged by the rise of new centres of economic power such as China, India and Brazil. This introductory article introduces the 'supply-anddemand model of regulatory power' guiding this Special Issue and, drawing on the latter's contributions, illustrates the interplay between EU/US regulatory outreach and emerging economies' domestic politics in explaining the embracement or rejection of EU/US traderelated agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that labor and social movements should repoliticize the transnationalization of capital in production and finance. The neoliberal era has demonstrated the power asymmetry between global capital and national labor. It seems that academics, trade unions, and progressive politicians have accepted this upscaling of capital to the global level as an irreversible fact that cannot be challenged. This article claims that progressive labor and social movements should, first, repoliticize the power of global capital and, second, try to scale down capital. The article studies three cases from the European Union to examine whether trade unions are trying to repoliticize, and succeeding in repoliticizing, global capital's power. It is concluded that repoliticizing and challenging the power of transnational capital is not impossible, but not easy either, and that trade unions need to focus more on these struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The United States is currently negotiating two massive regional economic agreements, one with 11 Asian and Pacific Rim countries and the other with the 28-member European Union. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) herald a substantial shift in US foreign economic policy as Washington turns its focus from the stalemated Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations and scattered bilateral trade agreements to ‘mega-regional’ trade diplomacy. As the only party to both negotiations, Washington seeks to leverage issues in one to advance its interests in the other, while reinvigorating US global leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]