Japan sets sights on EU trade deal in 2015
EU capitals are still undecided on whether to continue EU-Japan talks.
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, today said that he hopes that Japan and the European Union will be able to strike a free-trade deal by the end of 2015.
Abe was speaking at a summit with the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council and at the end of a nine-day tour of Europe.
Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council’s president, also called for “speedy” negotiations, while the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said that the benefits of a deal could be “considerable”.
Van Rompuy’s and Barroso’s backing for a deal was complicated by ongoing uncertainty about whether the EU’s 28 member states will allow negotiations to proceed.
EU member states allowed the European Commission to begin talks last April only on condition that progress would be reviewed after 12 months, warning Japan that they would halt talks if Japan failed to demonstrate its willingness to remove barriers to trade. The EU’s main concerns relate to Japanese regulations, including restrictions on foreign bids for government contracts.
Japan believes that it has demonstrated a willingness to dismantle obstacles to trade. Both sides talk of wanting a new-generation trade agreement that removes ‘behind-the-border’ barriers – such as regulation – and helps to set standards for future global agreements.
The European commissioner for trade, Karel De Gucht, will give his assessment to EU trade ministers tomorrow (8 May). The Commission should next week complete a written review of the five rounds of talks, officials say.
Barroso said that, if talks are allowed to continue, negotiators should raise their sights. “For this agreement to be truly transformational, we need to inject a high level of ambition across the board,” he said.
Privately, officials and diplomats express near-certainty that the EU’s national governments will allow talks to continue, expressing disbelief that leaders could turn their backs on the potential benefits of a deal between two of the world’s four largest economies and undermine the drive by large Western economies to strike huge regional and bilateral trade deals.
The EU is currently negotiating a transatlantic agreement with the United States. Japan and the US are two of 12 countries that are in the closing stages of agreeing a trans-Pacific deal. Both the EU and Japan are pursuing a large number of other bilateral agreements, part of a global trend that has developed because of difficulties striking global agreements through the World Trade Organization.
Both Abe and the EU emphasised that the relationship extends beyond trade, to geopolitics and a growing security partnership. The security co-operation has been most visible in Japan’s efforts, with the EU, NATO, the US and other countries, to reduce piracy off the Horn of Africa and in the Gulf of Aden.
While in Brussels, Abe also met the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
In addition to trade and security co-operation, Japanese diplomats say that Abe’s trip to Europe was also intended to push three other objectives. Abe wants to boost collaboration between the G7 group of industrialised states, and also to strengthen cultural links and raise international attention to the role of women in economic development and in the security sector.
Abe’s focus on women in part reflects Japan’s domestic challenge in bringing more women into the workforce to inject dynamism into its long-sluggish economy.
Abe will be in Brussels again in early June for a G7 summit that could be dominated by the crisis in Ukraine. Japan has joined other G7 countries – the US, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Canada – in imposing sanctions on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea.