Member states’ interests and the common commercial policy

Abstract

The importance of the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) within the EU is considerable not only in economic and trade policy terms but also in terms of the role it played in the evolution of the EU legal order. It provided an early example for what is essentially supranational policy-making and it also served, as driven by the debates surrounding the Court of Justice’s case law in the 1970s, as a “laboratory” for determining the allocation of competences between the Community and the Member States. The exclusive EU competence established for the CCP in that process had major implications for Member State trade interests as well as their trade policy autonomy. These developments in the real world were, however, largely ignored by legal scholarship just as the question of how the emerging legal framework had shaped the role of the Member States in designing and delivering the CCP. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore this analytical perspective and determine on that basis the limits of the discretion that is still available in this policy domain for the Member States. We will investigate, in particular, the ability of the Member States to promote and represent their trade interests in the current legal framework and the concrete restrictions that follow from the relevant provisions on EU law, those regulating CCP objectives and principles, the nature and scope and competences, the exceptions from the CCP and some of the procedural rules.