Passive European Union Influence
This chapter traces the European Union’s passive influence in the establishment of the Mercosur Permanent Review Tribunal in 2004. This is an useful case to study passive EU influence because the Tribunal’s establishment constitutes an unlikely case from the perspective of existing explanations of dispute settlement design and it is representative of a statistical association presented in Chapter 4. Through a detailed process tracing exercise that reconstructs the institutional preferences and strategies of national governments and the process of international bargaining on the basis of primary documents, interviews with policy-makers and secondary sources, it shows how the European Union, through its passive influence on the institutional preferences of Uruguay, the bloc’s smallest member state, shaped the design of the Tribunal. In the absence of passive EU influence, the chapter concludes, the Tribunal would have been less institutionalized.