The EU is the biggest market in the world, but its politics is all about divvying up the enormous amount of money on hand, rather than about anything else, "a supersize Switzerland," as Simon Hix of the London School of Economics put it.

The adoption of a Development Agenda in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in October 2007 provides developing countries with a rare and unprecedented opportunity to reshape the international intellectual property system in a way that would better advance their interests. This paper, released on the eve of the 2008 General Assembly of WIPO in Geneva on September 22-30, argues that developing countries can improve their influence in international negotiations around intellectual property by coordinating their efforts and building coalitions. Establishment of such Intellectual Property Coalitions for Development (IPC4D) could reduce the push by the European Community and the United States to ratchet up global intellectual property standards in the face of opposition from many developing countries. If successful, such efforts could enlarge the policy space that these countries need for the development of their intellectual property, trade and public health policies.

The European Union's (EU) drawn-out trade negotiations with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) could result in the first region-to-region free trade agreement. The EU's motives for advancing interregional negotiations with the GCC have not been primarily focused on creating trade, which is argued to be relatively limited for the EU. Instead, the EU's motives for continuing negotiations with the GCC are explained by the EU's geopolitical and ideational interests and to a lesser extent by interest group influences. We do not find, however, strong evidence of EU bureaucratic motives to negotiate with the GCC. Based on these findings, this paper suggests that the recent reawakening of EU-GCC negotiations can be explained by the relative increase in the geopolitical importance of the Gulf.

In recent years, the bipolar multilateral trading system of the post-war years has given way to a multipolar alternative. Although many specifics have yet to be determined, some contours of this new trade policy landscape are coming into focus and in this short paper I examine their implications for the European Union's external commercial policy. Particular attention is given to both the state of business-government relations and the propensity to liberalize under the auspices of reciprocal trade agreements by Brazil, India and China - the potential new poles of the world trading system. I consider the likely consequences of these developments, plus factors internal to both the European Union and the United States, for the possible content of future multilateral trade initiatives.