COMPETITIVE LIBERALISATION AND THE 'GLOBAL EUROPE' SERVICES AND INVESTMENT AGENDA: LOCATING THE COMMERCIAL DRIVERS OF THE EU-ACP ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENTS.

For much of the last decade the EU has been involved in protracted and controversial negotiations with the ACP group of countries with the aim of establishing a series of 'WTO-compatible' Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In this paper, we locate the EPAs within the context of the wider shift in EU trade policy towards bilateralism. In doing so, we eschew much of the existing literature within EU Studies and, instead, turn to recent work in IPE emphasising the 'domestic-societal' and 'systemic' drivers of preferential liberalisation. Recent strands of this literature have drawn particular attention to the prominence of the so-called 'Singapore Issues' in driving developed countries to compete for preferential access in developing country markets. Although neither domestic-societal nor systemic pressures are sufficient to explain the EPAs - or indeed EU trade policy more generally - drawing attention to the above features allows us to account for why they have gone beyond the original remit of 'WTO compatibility' and why aspects of the emerging agreements bear close similarity to the EU's supposedly more commercially-oriented bilateral agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]