Description
Under its newly published Indo-Pacific Outlook, European Union (EU) is pivoting its strategic focus to Southeast Asia. However, EU's strategic pragmatism and value-based principles inevitably clash in free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations between EU and ASEAN countries. On the one hand, EU is striving for strengthening its strategic influence and position in the Indo-Pacific region by negotiating more free trade agreements. On the other hand, EU, priding itself as a global normative power, has been the pioneering actor of promoting its high environmental sustainability standards in FTA with ASEAN countries with mixed environmental sustainability issues like palm oil production and deforestation. There is still ample space in current literatures for delving deeper into the conditionality in FTAs, in particular the part concerned with environmental sustainability. Thus, with the cases of EU-Indonesia Free Trade Agreement Negotiations, this paper will explore how EU pursues the balance of normative principles and pragmatism in the design of environmental sustainability standards in the FTAs with ASEAN countries. This paper will address a cutting-edge question in International Political Economy: explaining the growing efforts to impose policy conditionality around normative issues like environmental protection as part of trade treaties.
