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national policies are avoided and the Union’s unity is maintained (Peterson & Bomberg 1996:96), particularly in accordance with the uniform principles of the CCP. On the other side, it requires immense debates on the trade policy (negotiating position) recommendations of the Commission to the Council before the Commission is authorized by the Council on QMV: free trader and trade protectionist MS clash over the negotiation points. Heavy discussions within both the Council and Committee of Article 133 take place before such an authorization. Conducting negotiations and hence rotating the trade interests of the whole 27 MS become quite challenging because everytime a trade policy decision is taken the divisions between the Adam Smith-inspired British and Colbertiste French emerge. The Committee of Article 133 helps the MS and Commission interactions to adjust diverse negotiation points. Following this process, comes the adoption by the Council, of the negotiated international trade agreement. Acting in accordance with the Treaty rule, the Council takes decisions on negotiated international trade agreements by QMV in the areas under the EU’s exclusive competence. But here lies a dichotomy, in the parlance of Peterson: on one hand, ‘’few major agreements are concluded without consensus on the Council’’ and on the other, QMV in its turn encourages concessions and compromises over these agreements (Peterson & Bomberg 1999:91). So this is the way how the MS reach common negotiating positions in the conclusion of international trade agreements. But added to this is the matter of politicization: if particular trade issues are politicized, then the QMV takes the lead. For example, liberalization of agriculture originates two divisions within the EU: first, protectionist southern MS headed by France especially because the French farms ‘’export agriculture products which far outnumber any other EU country, and it is the only European country to be fully self dependent with regard to food production’’ (Economy Watch web-site, France Agriculture), and to this protectionist club joins Austria, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain; on the other hand, free trader bloc of Germany, UK, Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries. Another side of the coin is that the pre-Lisbon Treaty has been fruitful for the victory of the free trade path, in the sense that the EU has been ‘’effective when technocrats were in control’’ (Woolcock & Hodge in Wallace & Wallace 1996:303). Hanson (1998, p.81) particularly argues that the EU trade policy liberalization is largely the result of changes in the institutional context of trade policy-making. It means that by delegating the trade policy making to the EU level and trade policy negotiations to the Commission, the MS have consciously chosen to constrain the range of possible policy options available to them and effectively locked-in a liberal trade policy (Nicolaidis quoted in Simon 2005:403). In other words, when the ‘’MS security interests diverge, external trade policy preferences also diverge’’ and thus MS have allowed supranational institutions and common policies in the field of external trade policies. I argue that this ‘’rationally chosen historical lock-in’’ in the free trade path mainly started in the 1990s, with the transformation of wider international framework with the GATT and later on WTO enhancing liberalization worldwide, and after trade policy became a ‘’high politics’’ (Peterson&B