The End of EU Financial Regulatory Internationalism?

This paper grapples with the issue of EU internationalism in the area of financial

regulation. After delineating between two dimensions of internationalism –

integrationism and transnationalism – we report on our comparative study of 10

regulatory areas, over time and with respect to the US and international soft law.

Our evidence suggests that compared to 2007, the EU and the US in 2014 had

become less integrationist – though they have done so in a highly coordinated

fashion; and the EU, contrary to its image as portrayed by EU officials and scholars,

had also become less transnationalist, in contrast to the US becoming slightly more.

Using insights from the Historical Institutionalist turn in International Relations, we

attribute the EU’s declining internationalism in large part to changes in the

international institutional context (namely, membership expansion of regulatory

bodies and post-crisis selection of standard setters). Contrary to a long scholarly

tradition depicting internationalism as part of the EU’s institutional and cultural

DNA, our analysis indicates that as changes in the international context made it

harder, the EU became less of a financial regulatory internationalist.