This article will provide a comprehensive assessment of the engagement of the European Parliament (EP) with the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) parliamentarians, grounded in previous literature on EU-LAC inter-regional and inter-parliamentary relations and parliamentary documentation from the EP’s online database and Latin American repositories. First, it will identify the agency of political and technical actors involved in the EP-Latin America relations, unveiling some of the main motivations and narratives of European and LAC parliamentary actors to engage in inter-regional relations. Secondly, it highlights the key forms of interaction employed by Members of the European Parliament to dialogue with the region, with particular emphasis to Parliamentary Delegations for relations with LAC third countries/regions and the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (Eurolat). It will discuss whether EU-LAC inter-parliamentary relations over the past years have succeeded in increasing socialisation and norms-sharing dynamics of parliamentary actors from the two regions, aiming at developing collective positions over global and interregional pressing challenges. At the same time, it emphasises that in some occasions Eurolat enabled parliamentarians to voice divergent opinions regarding particular inter-regional issues. Moreover, it reflects upon the role and the potential of Eurolat to enhance the levels of legitimacy, effectiveness and durability of overall EU-LAC relations. Finally, it assesses whether Eurolat to some extent has contributed to overcome the asymmetric terms of the historical EU-LAC inter-regional relations.

Over the last decades, the number of countries applying competition law has increased dramatically. Today, there are about 120 different national jurisdictions of competition law. However, these national laws were not created ex nihilo. Rather, many countries have, in fact, imported and adapted existing Competition regulatory frameworks (CRF). Two CRF served as models for many countries in this regard: the US antitrust and the EU competition law. Both the FTC and the European Commission developed bilateral agreements and cooperation programs with third countries. Moreover, the convergence of national CRF is fostered at the international level by multilateral negotiations in institutions such as the OECD competition committee, International Competition Network, UNCTAD.

The attention of scholars in political science and law has focused on these processes of diffusion and convergence of competition policies around the world. Most, however, adopt an institutional approach, identifying and listing the various official programs developed to assess their impact and effectiveness. The result is a disembodied vision of these processes, without actors and focused solely on their institutional aspect.

By placing the focus on these actors, this paper helps to overcome an approach that views the dissemination of competition policies at the international level as the result of a discontinuous succession of programs or negotiations. It thus proposes to go beyond the defined temporality of the cooperation programs and negotiation rounds to understand the continuous work carried out by the actors in contact with these institutions. This exploratory paper suggests that political sociology can help to understand better the logics of the export/import and hybridization processes at stake with the international diffusion of CRFs.

The paper will focus on the case of Morocco, which introduced a new competition law in 2001. The export of the EU competition regulatory framework was part of the Euro-Mediterranean Agreement in 2000. Interestingly, Morocco also tries to export this competition regulatory framework in the region and was one of the funding members in 2012 of the Euro-Mediterranean Competition Forum. This paper will give a first insight of the actors involved in this process: European law firms settled in Morocco just after the adoption of the 2001 competition law. By doing so, the paper aims to shed a light on the political narratives and logics behind the export of EU competition policies.

This paper critically evaluates the geopolitical and financialized dynamics of EU-Africa relations, centring on the reformed European Financial Architecture for Development and the new post-Cotonou (EU-OACPS) Agreement. Due to China’s emergence as a rival development actor, the EU is leveraging private sector support to upscale its development finance and bridge its funding gap. This blending of neoliberal and geopolitical motivations might seem contradictory, but not when taking a postcolonial perspective. The EU-OACPS Agreement, supporting a chapter on ‘Investment’ and an ‘Annex II’ on the European Investment Bank, signals an intensified focus on ‘investment mobilization.’ This raises the question: “What does the EU-OACPS Agreement entail regarding ‘investments’ in/for Africa?”. Even more so, in the context of (1) geopolitization and (2) financialization, within EU development finance. The study adopts a dual-method approach, combining document analysis and elite interviews with policy-makers. Our analysis identifies three crucial developments in the EU-OACPS Agreement that provide insight into the evolution of investment provisions: (1) the budgetization of the European Development Fund, (2) the consolidation and expansion of blending facilities and guarantees, and (3) the reduced role of the European Investment Bank. This transformation signifies a shift from traditional “aid and trade” relationships to investment-centred collaboration.