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omberg 1999:97) for being competitive in international arena. The first remarkable empirical case in this regard was the Uruguay Round of the GATT: the ‘’Blair House’’ (ibid.) events of 1993 started with the Commission’s wishes to actualize the role of the EU as a major trading power. This Round’s most successful outcome was the decision on the liberalization of the Multi Fiber Arrangement - a regime that was an impediment for to import their textile and clothing products from developing countries – as of 1995, and this process ended on 2006, quite recently. According to Peterson (1999, p.113) the rationale behind for gradually starting the dismantle of all controls on textiles trade was that the EU as the world’s largest textiles and clothing importer ceased protecting the European producers from competition just in the 30 % labor intensive industry. Moreover, General Affairs Council adopted the Council Proposal on ‘’Everything But Arms’’ in February 2001 (Jürgen et al.2008:270) granting duty-free access to imports of all products from 49 LDCs, except arms and ammunitions, without any quantitative restrictions, as an amendment to the EU’s ‘’Generalized System of Preferences’’ (GSP) trade arrangement through which the EU provides preferential access to the EU market to 176 developing countries and territories (European Commission, GSP web-site).

These cases indicate that the EU MS, have ‘’calculated the utility’’ (Schimmelfennig in Wiener&Diez 2004:77) of the indicated trade policy actions and chosen them to maximize their utilities, empowering the Commission. Applying Pollack, I argue that the increasing returns of the external trade policy liberalization have generated incentives both for the EU Commission and the MS to get ‘’locked-in’’ the existing path (Pollack in Wiener&Diez 2004:140).

In the next section, in order to analyze these ‘’constant returns to scale’’, I use the comparative advantage theories of Ricardo and Hecksher-Ohlin in explaining the reason behind the EU’s active engagement in the global trade liberalization under WTO, particularly the Doha Development Agenda (DDA).

PART III :: EU’s Active Engagement in Global Trade liberalization: Rationales

The aim of this section is to illustrate how and why the EU as an economic giant quite actively plays a leading role in the global trade liberalization under WTO. To do this, I firstly draw the overall picture of the EU’s international trade, match the empirical data with the EU’s Hecksher-Ohlin path, and indicate the political objective of the engagement. Following these analyses I touch upon the EU’s role in current DDA negotiations and show how such a role serves for the mentioned objective. All these discussions conduce toward the argument that the EU is realistically liberal: EU uses its power in international trade as a tool to gradually become a global power in its own right, in other words, it exercises ‘’power in & through trade’’ (Meuiner & Nicolaidis 2006:906).

The EU is the largest importer (World Trade Report 2009) and largest exporter (The World Factbook, CIA) of goods and services, accounting for 20% of global imports and exports (Europa: Gateway to the EU: External Trade), and also the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP according to the IMF (World Economic Outlook Database). Having concentrated on the manufacturing sector (machinery, chemicals, other manufacturing goo