This chapter explores why the European Union (EU), which was not one of the original promoters of the Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) agenda in the World Trade Organization (WTO), has become one of its most vocal supporters. We argue that embracing investment facilitation serves EU strategic goals of reviving multilateralism, bringing the fractious US–China relation back into the fold of multilateral disciplines, and assert itself as a leader in the field of sustainable development. After first tracing the emergence of the investment facilitation agenda at the international level, we then highlight the puzzling character of the EU’s embrace of the multilateral IFD agenda, before showing that changing institutional and (geo)political conditions provided the EU with a window of opportunity to act in 2017. In the last part, we briefly discuss the key elements shaping the EU’s preferences in the contemporary IFD negotiations and as well as the factors shaping its capacity to become a rule-maker.

In this chapter, we provide a critical appraisal of the presumed correlation between investment migration and foreign direct investment. Could it be that investment migration is not as effective a form of FDI as has been presented to us? The devil is in the detail, as is always the case. However, it is clear, if we read between the lines in the official statements made about them, that many such programmes are not well designed to attract FDI – the British Tier 1 (Investor) visa could be an example.

This is a book about how processes of political representation work, whom they represent, and how they develop over time. We think of these as processes in which interests are formed, given a voice within organizations and polities, and influence the decisions of governments. As such, these processes are at the heart of how democracies are organized and governed. As Suzanne Berger has observed, “political representation involves both the organizations that link citizens to government and the political ideas and programs that structure how the world works.” Few processes are more important to the operation of democracy. Democratic governance is a system in which choices are made and compromises forged among competing interests, and the quality of a democracy is determined, in large measure, by how well the views of the people are represented by its governing institutions.

Appropriately, therefore, the study of representation has always been central to political science. How best to accomplish it has been a core question for theorists of democracy since the eighteenth-century debates of Edmund Burke and the authors of The Federalist Papers up to those that join contemporary analysts, such as Robert Dahl (1972), Bernard Manin (1977), and Pierre Rosanvallon (2011). This has never been an easy question to resolve because even the most democratic governments are imperfect mirrors for the views of the people (Pitkin 1984). Of more concern to us, however, are debates among empirical analysts of politics about how existing processes of representation work. How are interests formed? How do they acquire influence, and how are conflicts among them resolved?