The European Union and investment facilitation at the WTO

This chapter explores why the European Union (EU), which was not one of the original promoters of the Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) agenda in the World Trade Organization (WTO), has become one of its most vocal supporters. We argue that embracing investment facilitation serves EU strategic goals of reviving multilateralism, bringing the fractious US-China relation back into the fold of multilateral disciplines, and assert itself as a leader in the field of sustainable development. After first tracing the emergence of the investment facilitation agenda at the international level, we then highlight the puzzling character of the EU's embrace of the multilateral IFD agenda, before showing that changing institutional and (geo)political conditions provided the EU with a window of opportunity to act in 2017. In the last part, we briefly discuss the key elements shaping the EU's preferences in the contemporary IFD negotiations and as well as the factors shaping its capacity to become a rule-maker.