Between communicative action and strategic action: the Article 113 Committee¹and the negotiations on the WTO Basic Telecommunications Services Agreement

This article argues that Habermas’s concept of communicative action significantly adds to our understanding of EU negotiations concerning the WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications Services. Accounts of bargaining and strategic action alone leave us in the dark about important parts of these negotiations. Building on existing work, the paper suggests how the concept can be made operationalizable for empirical research. The most important step in this direction has been a further specification of the conditions conducive to communicative action. Important conditions that have been identified are: a strongly shared ‘lifeworld’ amongst negotiators, uncertainty and lack of knowledge, technical or cognitively complex issues, the presence of persuasive individuals and low levels of politicization. By contributing to the conditions and mechanisms of actors’ preference and (norm) change, the article adds to the debate on socialization. As the concept of communicative action advanced our understanding of international negotiations, it should generally contribute to our comprehension of EU negotiations: an important precondition for communicative action, the existence of a shared lifeworld is particularly well developed in the EU, given its dense patterns of institutionalization and socialization.