Brussels, Mercosur, and the Theatre of Control

embers of the European Parliament voted on January 21, 2026, to refer the EU–Mercosur file to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), asking the judges to test the agreement’s compatibility with the Treaties and, crucially, the strength of its legal basis. In the Brussels bubble, nerves immediately frayed. Trade policy remains one of the few areas where the single market still carries real weight globally and where the union of 27 can still credibly claim an unmistakable ‘European added value.’ Touch that lever, and the technocratic machine starts to wheeze.

The EU–Mercosur package is a ‘new generation’ mixed agreement. Its commercial chapters sit at the core of the EU’s exclusive competence, exercised by the Commission; its broader political provisions are shared and therefore also fall within member state competence. The architecture is convenient in a very Eurocratic Brussels culture: accelerate where you can, bypass where you want, and then promise provisional application so as not to ‘lose momentum.’ One is entitled to wonder whether this complexity blinded MEPs who wanted to bite but settled for barking.

And this is where Brussels has found its neat workaround and where the Luxembourg court provided the logic that makes it possible. Think of trade deals as a long train. Some carriages are ‘pure trade’: selling cars, machines, chemicals to third countries. Other carriages are ‘politics’: who decides disputes, how far rules reach, what powers member states keep, and how much of the ‘motherhood-and-apple-pie’ language of corporate responsibility is meant to be binding rather than decorative. The Court’s message in Opinion 2/15 (May 16, 2017) was, in essence, that the EU can drive the trade carriage alone, but if a deal begins to touch national competences in a meaningful way, the member states must be on board too.

So the Commission increasingly splits one big agreement into two papers: a fast ‘trade-only’ part it can roll out quickly, and a slower ‘mixed’ part that needs national ratifications across roughly forty parliamentary bodies once you count national and certain regional parliaments, including Wallonia. Legally, it looks tidy. Politically, it feels like sleight of hand. The fast train leaves the station while citizens and forty parliamentary entities are still looking for their tickets, and the sensitive questions are parked on a siding with a sign that reads: ‘we’ll deal with this later.’ Brussels’ Eurocratic bureaucracy learned how to move the deal forward even when the 27 member states have not truly agreed on the whole thing.