Regulatory or Market Power Europe? EU Leadership Models for International Energy Governance

Abstract

With the second decade of the new millennium came a series of shocks to global politics that forced the EU to reconsider its liberal approach to international political economy. The increasingly assertive use of economic power by Russia and China, combined with the new US president’s challenge to international trading regimes and the British decision to leave the EU, means that the world confronting the EU in 2018 is quite different from the more benign international context of only half a decade earlier. This applies not least to the world of energy, where concerns about oil and gas supplies are increasingly linked to worries about Russia’s geopolitical agenda. This chapter explores the range of strategies available to the EU—from soft normative power to hard mercantilism—and concludes that, if the EU wishes to exercise any kind of international leadership in the energy sector, it must choose between assertive use of its regulatory power and more muscular use of its economic power.