Militant opposition to free trade is not new. It first emerged on a significant scale in 1999, on the occasion of the Seattle protests around the WTO Ministerial Conference. At the time, European integration was not a primary target, and protesters were a minority with little hope of influencing the political agenda. Things have since changed: during the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), formally halted in late 2016 after trade-sceptic Donald Trump became President-elect, mobilisation against free trade and its alleged embrace by the EU was massive. The question naturally arose of the extent to which opposition to free trade has fuelled Eurosceptic populism, the advance of which in recent years has been consequential. This question obviously has important political and policy implications: an affirmative answer to it would recommend incisive measures to assuage people’s fears of unbridled free trade as an antidote to Euroscepticism.

This is one of three questions asked by Bogna Gawrońska-Nowak in her chapter, one of only two questions she openly answers, and the one she answers least originally, by simply summarising the existing evidence in the literature. As the author correctly emphasises, there are good theoretical reasons to answer in the affirmative – among them the interdependencies between the global and the local levels created by Global Value Chains (GVCs), the decline in the factor share of low-skilled labour as opposed to capital in GVCs for some European countries, and the decline of many traditional industrial districts, with consequent employment losses, under the impact of global competition. Changes in the distribution of trade gains unfavourable to low-skilled workers and the dislocation of industries and employment at the local level may have translated into higher support for populist parties.

However, the empirical evidence is mixed and we are still far from having established that opposition to free trade as such is driving populism, as opposed to grievances against a more complex bundle of phenomena with which free trade is commonly associated, such as globalisation, robotisation, immigration, economic openness and free markets in their broadest sense. In the populist discourse these elements are part of a package, so that the relative importance of each of them is not easy to ascertain: people’s stance on each of these phenomena may be influenced by its association with the rest.