March 05, 2020 / By mobanmarket
A nine-day tour of Europe took the Japanese leader to Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the UK.Japan in limbo over trade talks
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, left Europe yesterday without a public promise from the European Union to continue talks on a large and far-reaching trade deal, but with the strong backing of some of the EU’s largest economies.
Negotiations on a trade deal began last April, but the EU’s member states inserted a review clause that stipulated that talks should conti-nue only if Japan showed convincing evidence within the first 12 months that it is prepared to remove significant trade barriers.
The latest round of talks ended in mid-April. Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, will today (8 May) give his assessment of Japan’s commitment. The European Commission is expected to send a written report to member states next week.
Abe’s nine-day tour of Europe, which culminated with a meeting in Brussels yesterday with the presidents of the European Council and Commission, took the Japanese leader to Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the UK. At each stop he secured support for the talks to continue. French car-makers were among the European businesses that lobbied hardest for the introduction of a one-year review clause.
Diplomats privately believe that it is highly unlikely that talks on a deal of this size could be called off in the midst of a global drive towards huge bilateral and regional trade agreements. The largest emerging deals are the EU’s ‘transatlantic trade and investment partnership’ with the United States and the ‘trans-pacific partnership’ between the US, Japan and another 11 states.
In addition to the review clauses, Japan’s talks with the EU are complicated by differences over whether to combine the trade deal with a political agreement. Japan believes that the political deal would gain greater strategic importance by being separated from the trade deal. An EU diplomat described the difference in positions as a matter of “legal linkages” between the two agreements.
Abe’s tour of Europe is part of a strategic push to harness the momentum created by his strong political mandate – he controls both chambers of the Japanese parliament – to promote economic growth and to increase Japan’s global influence. Abe, who has now visited 36 countries in 16 months, wants to increase the share of Japanese trade covered by free-trade agreements from 19% to 70% by 2018. At home, his economic liberalisation efforts are focused on agriculture, the electricity sector and pharmaceuticals.
Abe’s efforts to develop co-operation between Japan and the EU and NATO on international security were prominent on the agenda of his visit to Brussels, as was the crisis in Ukraine. Like the EU, Japan has suspended negotiations with Russia on some run-of-the-mill issues and has imposed sanctions on 23 Russians. Abe will return to Brussels in early June for a meeting of the G7 group of industrialised states, at which the Ukraine crisis is likely to feature prominently.
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