Cutting It: European Integration, Trade Regimes, and the Reconfiguration of East–Central European Apparel Production

Since the late 1980s the European apparel sector has witnessed a dramatic transformation. Driven by increasing costs in Western Europe, major Western apparel retailers and buyers have expanded their contracting of production into lower cost regions of ‘postcommunist’ Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. One consequence of these changes is a burgeoning of apparel producers in peripheral European and North African regions, locked into supply relations with Western buyers. Equally apparent is a dramatic growth in apparel trade between the European Union (EU) and the countries of East–Central Europe (ECE). For much of the 1990s these processes were driven by outward processing trade arrangements between EU countries and applicant states in ECE, along with the EU customs union with Turkey. Further liberalization of trade regimes during the 1990s removed these outward processing customs arrangements, but outward-processing forms of assembly production continue. The authors chart these transformations, and signal one part of the emerging architecture of trade relations between the EU and ECE after 1989. They explore the trade regulation changes that have provided a context for outsourcing and examine the different strategies of EU retailers and manufacturers in the governance of pan-European apparel production and trade.