If the EU cannot do trade, what can it do?

IN HAPPIER days for the European Union the arcana of international trade policy were a matter for harmless eccentrics, while the intricacies of Belgium’s constitutional arrangements were reserved strictly for masochists. Not in today’s Europe, where crises strike in the most unexpected places. Behold the fiasco of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada. Last-minute stonewalling by the Socialist-led parliament of Wallonia, the French-speaking bit of Belgium, meant that Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, had to hold off visiting Brussels for a summit on October 27th to sign the trade and investment deal which has been seven years in the making. As The Economist went to press the federal government had succeeded in winning the Walloons round. Thus did a regional parliament representing 3.6m people nearly thwart the will of governments representing 545m.

The debacle has many fathers. Wallonia’s Socialists, out of national office for the first time in decades, are troubled by fringe leftists and keen for attention. The Flemish, their richer (and more trade-friendly) partners in Belgium’s awkward federal construction, have long pushed for decentralisation that has now come back to bite them. The European Commission, which negotiates foreign trade on behalf of EU governments, should have foreseen that a “next-generation” deal such as CETA, replete with special courts for investors and complex provisions on the mutual recognition of standards, would attract next-generation opposition.