Splitting EU Trade and Investment Agreements: Not So Fast

Last week, I posted about the EU splitting up its trade and investment agreements, with the EU - Singapore agreements separated out into a trade part and an investment protection apart. But it seems that the EU is taking a different approach in its updated, and almost completed, agreement with Mexico. This is from the European Commission's explanation of the agreement:

The trade agreement with Mexico is part of a wider Global Agreement, which covers areas for which both the EU and EU Member States are responsible not just the EU.  This means it is a so-called ‘mixed agreement’ as opposed to an ‘EU only’ agreement.

Once the negotiations have ended, as a 'mixed' agreement, it must then be approved by:

As Colin Brown explained to me on twitter, because the original EU - Mexico trade agreement was a broad Association Agreement, and thus required member state ratification, the updated agreement follows the same model. What we could see in this case, then, is the provisional application of the trade parts, with later member state votes on other parts. So it's still kind of a split, but not the formal one we saw with EU - Singapore.