The politics of (environmental) international law in the proposal for a Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur and the European Union

Abstract

This research discusses the politics of international law from the inclusion of the environmental agenda in the different stages of the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur and the European Union to investigate whether there is conflict or complementarity between commercial and environmental interests. The discussion on structural bias, managerialism and indetermination of legal terms highlights the conflicting nature of the interests underlying the proposed Agreement and supports the hypothesis that there is a conflict of interests in the inclusion of the environmental agenda during the negotiations and also in the later stage, of interpretation of the proposed Agreement, while the Chapter on Trade and Sustainable Development, present in its basic text, would suggest complementarity of interests. This is an exploratory research, with a hypothetical-deductive approach and research techniques based on bibliographic review and document analysis.