Projecting EU Regimes Abroad: The EU Data Protection Directive as Global Standard.

The paper aims to understand under what conditions the EU can set an international standard. It details the 1995 EU Data Privacy Directive and the reaction of the United States to it. The Directive has now become the de facto international privacy regime, binding US companies that do business with Europe. It thus becomes the first global standard that the US has been impacted by without having had input into its content. Given that the EU aspires to a greater role in transnational governance (White Paper on European Governance, 2001), what were the important factors necessary for the EU's success in this issue? This paper analyzes three different hypotheses that exist in the literature: 1) US government officials readjusting their views about the need for a comprehensive privacy policy after "communicative action" with the EU, 2) the successful threat of EU market exclusion backed up by the "shield" of the WTO exemption for privacy, and 3) US domestic interest groups trying to use the EU directive (gaiatsu) to accomplish a domestic agenda that they could not push through alone because of US domestic preference aggregation failure. The paper finds support for the third interpretation of the EU's success. For this reason, there may not be many other areas in which the EU can successfully project its regime preferences internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]