Description
The European Union’s (EU) trade policy is undergoing a profound transformation, increasingly shaped by the interplay of economic liberalisation, sustainability, and security objectives. This evolving "trade-sustainability-security triangle" is (re)configuring the ideational foundations of EU trade policy. This article investigates how the relative weight of these logics has changed over time, both broadly and in relation to specific trade partners. We draw on a novel dataset of more than 2,000 press releases from the Directorate-General for Trade (1975–2025), analysed with the support of a large language model (LLM). Our findings reveal that EU trade policy is in flux: increasingly tied to security and sustainability concerns, while the traditional emphasis on free trade has been downgraded and economic development has disappeared from official discourse. As a result of this diversification, the EU’s overall trade policy orientation becomes more complex or ‘messy’, with new trade-offs, but also possible alignments, emerging between liberalisation, sustainability, and security means and objectives. This article advances debates on the politicisation of trade in a geoeconomic and planetary context, offering new insights into how the EU strives to balance its economic, sustainability, and strategic priorities amid a volatile global landscape.
