The European Union's Trade Policy

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest trading entity and its Common Commercial Policy is one of the Union’s oldest and most integrated common policies. This paper first summarizes the evolution of the Common Commercial Policy by briefly recapitulating the milestones of the process of expanding legal competences from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Lisbon. It then introduces the goals of EU trade policy and the main actors involved. These actors interact through three types of decisionmaking processes: when the EU negotiates bior multilateral trade agreements, when it implements the Common Commercial Policy, and when it applies unilateral trade policy measures. Finally, the paper raises questions about the challenges that the EU’s trade policy faces with regard to policy coherence, a goal of external action that has been further strengthened by the Treaty of