Governing cross-border data flows: Reconciling EU data protection and international trade law

The thesis explores how two important legal and policy objectives of the European Union (EU) can be reconciled and pursued simultaneously, namely, on the one hand, protecting the fundamental rights guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter) concerning privacy and personal data, and, on the other hand, maintaining and developing a binding rules-based global trading system to ensure appropriate access to foreign markets for EU businesses. This thesis demonstrates that there is a real clash between international trade and European data privacy law when it comes to the governance of cross-border flows of personal data. In order to resolve the tensions caused by this clash, this thesis proposes ways to ameliorate the situation from both ends (trade and personal data protection), specifically through reforms of both international trade and chapter V of the General Data Protection Regulation. To explain how such reforms could be effectuated, the thesis also looks at the role of discourse in the evolution of trade law in the last two decades. In doing so, the thesis compares the digital trade discourses currently advanced by the EU and the US in the course of negotiations of digital trade agreements (revolving around the issue of whether and to what extent restrictions on cross-border data flows amount to “digital protectionism”) and places those discourses in the broader story of the successive strategic redefinitions of “protectionism” that have accompanied shifts in trade governance from the inception of the multilateral trading system in 1947 till now