The End of EU Financial Regulatory Internationalism?

Introduction: This paper grapples with the issue of EU internationalism in the area of financial regulation. It first delineates between two dimensions of internationalism – integrationism and multilateralism – noting that since 2007 it is increasingly difficult to be internationalist in both senses. After discussing policymakers’ confidence in EU internationalism as well as scholarly debates, we report on our own comparative study of nine regulatory areas, over time and with respect to the US and international soft law. Our findings suggest that compared to 2007 the EU and the US have become less integrationist – though they have done so in a coordinated fashion, at least through 2011, but less so afterwards; and the EU, contrary to its image as portrayed by EU officials, has also become less multilateralist, notably after 2010, in contrast to a US pattern of relative stability. The explanatory sections of the paper thus focus on the inflection point between 2010 and 2011, preceded by high levels of Transatlantic coordination and followed by a decline of EU multilateralist behavior. We attribute both to a combination of three interrelated causal variables: public salience; UK-­‐Continental relations; and the distance between EU preferences and transnational soft law. We provide empirical evidence in support of all three