The Limits of the Brussels Effect in a Multipolar World: Why EU Regulatory Power Meets Resistance from Emerging Economies

This review critically engages with Anu Bradford’s The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (2020), a foundational contribution to scholarship on regulatory globalization and the externalization of European Union legal standards. Bradford’s central claim, that the European Union exercises global influence through market-driven regulatory diffusion rather than traditional coercive instruments has reshaped understandings of how legal authority operates in contemporary international economic governance. This review argues that while the Brussels Effect remains a powerful explanatory framework, its operation is increasingly conditioned by structural shifts in the global political economy marked by the rise of large emerging regulatory actors. Focusing particularly on India’s expanding market capacity and strategic regulatory autonomy, the review demonstrates how regulatory convergence with European standards now reflects negotiation rather than automatic alignment. Developments in digital governance, climate-linked trade regulation such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and competing regulatory approaches emerging from the United States and China further illustrate the transition from unilateral regulatory diffusion toward a more plural architecture of global rulemaking. The review concludes that Bradford’s framework remains indispensable for understanding contemporary regulatory power, but its future relevance lies in explaining how regulatory influence adapts within an increasingly multipolar and contested global economic order.