BOOK REVIEW
Freedom Anu Bradford’s The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford University Press, 2020) has become one of the most influential accounts of regulatory globalization in contemporary international political economy. The book advances a powerful thesis: that the European Union exercises global influence not primarily through coercion or traditional geopolitical instruments such as tariffs or sanctions, but through the externalization of its regulatory standards via market mechanisms. By demonstrating how firms voluntarily adopt European Union rules in order to maintain access to its vast consumer market, Bradford reframes regulation itself as a form of structural power in global governance.1 Her framework has reshaped debates on how legal systems influence global economic order beyond traditional notions of sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction.
Bradford explains this regulatory diffusion through a combination of market size, regulatory capacity, preference for stringent standards, and the non-divisibility of global production processes. Together, these conditions enable European rules to travel beyond the Union’s borders without formal enforcement, producing what she describes as a de facto globalization of EU law.2 Firms often find it inefficient to maintain multiple regulatory standards across jurisdictions and instead internalize the most stringent available framework, frequently that of the European Union. The Brussels Effect therefore operates not through compulsion, but through regulatory gravity.
Bradford’s core contribution lies in shifting attention away from traditional instruments of geopolitical influence toward law as a mechanism of structural economic power. Rather than relying on extraterritorial enforcement or bilateral pressure, the European Union shapes global market behavior through regulatory standard-setting. From competition law and chemical safety to data protection under the General Data Protection Regulation,3 European rules have influenced corporate practices worldwide. Smaller economies in particular often mirror EU regulations domestically to reduce compliance costs and maintain market access. In this sense, the Brussels Effect operates through incentives rather than coercion, enhancing both its legitimacy and durability within a rules-based international order.
Yet the global political economy in which The Brussels Effect was formulated is no longer the same environment in which it now operates. As regulatory conflicts intensify across digital governance, climate policy, and trade regulation, the question is no longer whether the European Union can shape global rules, but whether this model of regulatory influence can remain stable in a multipolar economic order increasingly defined by emerging regulatory centers with market power of their own.
India illustrates how the Brussels Effect weakens when regulatory influence encounters markets capable of exercising counter-gravity of their own. Unlike smaller economies structurally dependent on access to European markets, India represents one of the world’s fastest-growing large consumer economies with expanding manufacturing capacity and increasing influence across global supply chains. For firms operating in India, access to the Indian market is not merely complementary to access to Europe; it is often equally indispensable. As a result, regulatory convergence with European standards becomes a strategic choice rather than an economic necessity. This shift reflects a broader transformation in which Global South regulatory actors increasingly participate not merely as rule-takers but as rule-shapers within evolving architectures of global economic governance.
These limitations are particularly visible in the digital economy. The European Union’s attempt to extend GDPR-aligned norms through trade negotiations reflects a governance model centered on privacy protection and individual rights. India, by contrast, seeks to balance privacy regulation with domestic innovation, platform governance, and technological self-reliance. In this context, data governance is not simply a compliance issue but a strategic economic resource. Resistance to strict regulatory convergence therefore reflects policy autonomy rather than regulatory fragmentation.
China’s digital governance model and the United States’ platform-driven regulatory ecosystem further illustrate the emergence of competing regulatory centers capable of shaping global standards independently of Europe. These developments suggest that regulatory globalization increasingly reflects interaction among multiple rule-producing jurisdictions rather than unilateral diffusion from a single dominant regulatory actor.
These developments also resonate with emerging scholarship that identifies multiple regulatory diffusion pathways operating alongside the Brussels Effect. Earlier work on the “California Effect” demonstrated how large subnational markets can export stringent regulatory standards through supply-chain pressure, while more recent discussions of a possible “Beijing Effect” suggest that state-led technological governance models may shape regulatory environments across parts of the developing world. Taken together, these alternative diffusion frameworks indicate that contemporary regulatory globalization is no longer structured around a single dominant rule-exporting jurisdiction, but increasingly reflects interaction among competing regulatory centers with distinct institutional priorities and development trajectories.4
Climate regulation further complicates the picture. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism,5 designed to prevent carbon leakage and support climate transition goals, effectively extends European environmental compliance costs to foreign producers seeking access to EU markets. For developing economies such as India, the central concern is not climate ambition itself but distributive fairness. Without credible pathways for transition finance and technology transfer, instruments such as CBAM risk being perceived less as cooperative environmental governance tools and more as instruments of regulatory unilateralism embedded within environmental trade policy.
These developments do not diminish the importance of Bradford’s framework. Rather, they highlight the conditions under which the Brussels Effect operates most effectively, namely when structural asymmetries exist between regulatory exporters and regulatory recipients. As emerging economies accumulate market size, institutional capacity, and technological capability, regulatory diffusion increasingly reflects negotiation rather than automatic alignment within a plural and contested architecture of global economic governance.6 This shift reflects a broader transition from hierarchical regulatory globalization toward negotiated forms of transnational rulemaking across multiple centers of economic authority. Recent scholarship on regulatory pluralism similarly suggests that global standard-setting is becoming more interactive and contested than earlier models of regulatory globalization assumed.7 This emerging literature reflects a broader shift in international economic law scholarship toward understanding regulatory authority as distributed rather than centralized within a single dominant jurisdiction.
Bradford’s framework therefore remains indispensable not because it fully explains contemporary regulatory globalization, but because it provides the conceptual foundation from which its present transformations can be understood. The Brussels Effect continues to operate, but increasingly within a negotiated regulatory landscape shaped by emerging economies whose market power allows them not merely to receive standards, but to shape them. In this sense, The Brussels Effect remains a foundational contribution to understanding regulatory power in global governance even as the multipolar structure of the contemporary international economy reveals the evolving limits of its reach.
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Footnotes
1. Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford Univ. Press 2020).
2. Id. at 23–54.
3. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 Apr. 2016 on the Protection of Natural Persons with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data, 2016 O.J. (L 119) 1.
4. Daniel Kelemen & David Vogel, Trading Places: The Role of the United States and the European Union in International Environmental Politics, 43 Comp. Pol. Stud. 427 (2010).
5. Regulation (EU) 2023/956 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 May 2023 Establishing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, 2023 O.J. (L 130) 52.
6. Gregory Shaffer & Henry Gao, A New Chinese Economic Order?, 23 J. Int’l Econ. L. 607 (2020).
7. See also Nico Krisch, The Decay of Consent: International Law in an Age of Global Public Goods, 108 Am. J. Int’l L. 1 (2014).