Drowning protection in the multilateral bath: WTO judicialisation and European agriculture in the Doha round

The existing literature on the EU’s participation in the agricultural negotiations of the Doha Round assumes that EU policy-makers develop autonomous preferences in favour of liberalising agricultural trade, thus going against the preferences of the agricultural sector. This article challenges this view and argues that WTO judicialization – the strenghtened enforcement of rules introduced with the creation of the WTO – affects the domestic politics of trade in WTO members. My key contention is that WTO judicialization confronts societal interests and public authorities with legal vulnerability, and that this elicits a willingness to cooperate with other WTO members and thus pre-empt foreign challenges to domestic policies. Empirically, the article shows that negotiations centered on offsetting the potentially disruptive effects of foreign legal challenges to EU farm policies.