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Focuses on early efforts in the 1960s and 1970s by the European Community to address trade barriers through the harmonization of national regulatory policies and practices. The push for harmonization of national policies in Europe was driven by the understanding that, without regulatory intervention at the regional level, there would be no single market and that trade conflicts would escalate. This chapter illustrates the tremendous difficulties that this (old approach) policy of harmonization encountered, despite a strong legal basis in the treaty to eliminate disparities in national regulatory systems. Since this policy reflected a regulatory mismatch, as the instruments chosen were ill‐suited to dealing with the problem, the chapter concludes by focusing on how political and economic constraints forced the EU to undertake regulatory reform to achieve a better match between its policy objective and outcomes.

A trade mark can only fulfil its function as a guarantee of origin if it is exclusive. The trade mark owner must be able to prevent other undertakings from using, in the territory in which he owns the mark, an identical or confusingly similar trade mark (‘a conflicting mark’) in relation to identical or similar goods or services. At the national level, trade mark conflicts have traditionally been resolved on the basis of seniority: the earlier mark prevails over the more recent one. Registration systems have simplified matters considerably. Undertakings register their trade marks, whenever possible, and so gain official recognition of their exclusive rights. Registration constitutes universal notice of the existence of the exclusive right, and serves as a basis for preventing other undertakings from using or registering conflicting trade marks.

Under European trade mark law, protection is only acquired through registration (Article 6 EUTMR; Article 1 TMD). Whether the mark is actually used or not is of no relevance at this stage: neither is it a requirement for protection, nor does it grant a substantive right under the European Union Trade Mark Regulation (EUTMR) or the Trade Mark Directive (TMD). However, such protection may follow from national law. Member States are free to grant use-based trade mark protection within their jurisdiction, and in a number of them—Austria, Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries, and, in the form of passing off, the United Kingdom—such protection is available under terms that may differ from country to country. The specificities of the legal regime applying to such signs are independent from the provisions in the TMD.

This chapter begins with the successful inversion of United States slave traders' network of communication and transportation. In November 1841, a group of at least nineteen enslaved African American men held aboard the brig Creole violently captured control of the ship and forced the crew to chart a course for Nassau, Bahamas. There, with the aid of black Bahamians and British colonial officials, they gained freedom along with all but five of their enslaved shipmates. White contemporaries tended to view the Creole “incident” in terms of its contribution to an international trade conflict between the United States and Great Britain. The revolt, however, is important for what it illustrates about how enslaved African Americans worked to acquire, disseminate, and apply geographic and geopolitical knowledge and information—what the text refers to here as geopolitical literacy—and what that might mean for their broader Afro-American consciousness.

Chapter 10 analyzes the issue of whether China would fall into the Thucydides trap, which is defined here as a situation where the US causes China to stop expanding as an economic power. Before the Trump administration, China was navigating steadily to grow beyond the middle-income trap (MIT), building its China-led global value chain (GVC) and localizing formerly imported goods into domestic production. However, it suddenly faced another trap, of Thucydides, because of the US measures for containing the further rise of China as a superpower. China will not collapse unless the US dares to wage an all-out war by taking drastic measures across various fronts of confrontation. The sudden emergence of this new trap disrupted the China-led GVC formed around Asia, which still relies on the West for key high-technology goods. Such disruption would have further repercussions on the prospect of China’s growth beyond the MIT because China must now reallocate resources away from economic competitiveness and “Made in China 2025” to socio-economic stabilization and job creation. China remains a developmental state. Its Asian neighbors have gone through their path of political democratization, but China now faces the challenge of crossing this unknown territory. This situation may be a more challenging trap compared with the MIT and the Thucydides trap. Thus, China now faces triple traps.