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ade liberalization.

PART II :: Internal Catalysts of EU External Trade Policy

The main reason for depicting the trade policy decision making in this section is that without an internal analysis of this process it would be hard to describe the EU’s stance in international trade. Therefore, I firstly examine the institutional contexts of the process, and then advance towards the main argument within the confines of the rational-choice institutionalism with an element of the historical institutionalism. Such an analysis will conduce towards the argument that the institutional settlement of the EU MS diverging domestic trade interests is one of the reasons of the EU’s observed active stance in the global trade liberalization besides the factors of global pressures. It should be noted that I use the pre-Lisbon legal framework, when I quote certain articles.

What is the root for an EU common external trade policy? According to Peterson & Bomberg, (1999, pp.91), the EU as a customs union must be a single entity in global trade or the internal market cannot function; hence the EUETP is built on two girders: Common External Tariff, a common tax applied to all foreign products entering the EU market, and Common Commercial Policy (CCP), which obliges the MS to negotiate and sign deals with non-EU states. Attainment of all the MS agreements on specific trade policy matters must be challenging and it directly relates to how the legal framework lets the EU institutions tackle with the diverging trade policy preferences of the MS and towards what it leads to in the global scene. I argue that the EU MS governments in the Council rationally choose to represent their trade policy interests internationally via the Commission. Thus Article 133 of TEU (currently TFEU Article 207) makes trade policymaking and decision taking under the exclusive EU competence: “the Commission shall submit Proposals to the Council for implementing the common commercial policy…and where agreements with one or more States or international organizations need to be negotiated, the Commission shall make recommendations to the Council, which shall authorize the Commission to open the necessary negotiations’’ and ‘’the Commission shall conduct these negotiations in consultation with a special committee appointed by the Council…’’. Quite obviously, it gives both the Commission and Council the power. On one side, the Commission proposes certain trade policies as a proposal considering also the interests of interest groups, NGOs (Woolcock 2000:380), and other big European multinational corporations. Take the example of the establishment of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) in 1983, which was realized with the pressure of the European big business elite: this is an elite forum from within which the leaders of this big businesses work out a common and cohesive strategy that is then propagated through the European institutions, in particular the European Commission (Apeldoorn in Stubbs & Underhill 2006:308). At the same time, this factor also urges the governments in the Council to take into account the pressures of their country-specific MNCs’ interests and this paves the way for majoritarian free trade inclinations in the Council. But this may not be a full picture. Apparently, there is an institutional clash over the settlement of important trade interests: the rationale of the Commission is often that highly protectionist