On the EU foreign economic policy role in multilateral contexts: Perceptual dynamics and policy responses in the World Bank

From the oft-quoted ‘capabilities-expectation gap’ (Hill 1993; 1998) to the findings advanced in recent studies on the Others’ views of the EU’s role in foreign economic negotiations (Elgström 2006), it seems undisputable that the Union’s action in the area of external economic policy has attracted much scholarly attention, as a benchmark for comparison with the area of foreign and security policies, or as a contested field in its own right, providing at times clear evidence against fears of resurgent intergovernmental dynamics, only to be recalled in other instances as an area where fragmentation and free-riding dynamics are always an option. While the academic interest on the EU’s role in multilateral political and economic settings such as the UN, the WTO and the IMF has successfully grown from earlier investigations, insights on the dynamics between the Union and the World Bank in the area of development policies seem to be still a missing piece in the literature. The paper is therefore a first attempt to fill this gap . Part of a broader research project on the relations between the EU and the World Bank, it deepens the investigation on the EU foreign policy roles in the area of development, within the setting of multilateral lending at the World Bank. While still a work-in-progress, it is hoped that this research will help to further advance the knowledge of composite aspects of foreign policy role, performance and impact of the EU. The emphasis on both role conception and expectation, coupled with preliminary data on performance, suggests the possibility of testing and refinement of the existing analytical frameworks on the EU foreign policy.