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Introduction
Trade policy is among the most prominent policies to be placed under supranational competence from the very beginning of the European Community (EC). Since the adoption of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the EC possessed an external personality and held the authority to elaborate, negotiate and enforce trade relations with the rest of the world.1 While there has been considerable controversy as to whether the EU represents a 'power' in the fields associated to traditional 'power politics' (Gordon, 1998; Ginsberg, 1999), it has long been acknowledged that it has indeed acquired such status in the field of international trade. The EU exercises substantial leverage on international trade politics, because its economy and share of global imports affect its trading and investment partners, and also because the EU seeks to wield influence by the use of commercial instruments (Meunier and Nicolaïdis, 2006).
Despite its institutional prominence and empirical relevance, EU trade policy attracts comparatively little scholarly attention. In comparison with the huge and detailed literature focusing on US trade policy, the EU trade policy literature remains underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically (Dür, 2006; Dür and Zimmermann, 2007). Single case studies on the most visible negotiating processes and analyses covering few trade sectors, particularly agriculture, have long dominated the field. Only in the past two decades has the importance of EU trade policy been reflected in a number of theoretically as well as empirically ambitious studies, which we will review in this piece.
Although relatively little time has passed since we can talk of an EU trade policy literature, this body of works has been remarkably quick in connecting to the comparative politics, international relations and international political economy literatures, showing that studying the European Union does not necessarily mean casting oneself away from broader political science debates. All too often studies on the EU adopt a sui-generis approach that tends to isolate them from mainstream political science. This is an understandable and arguably even useful tendency. As the EU political system has some institutional features that are unique, it should come as no surprise that much attention is devoted to try and make sense of it. The downside to the tendency of going for peculiar features however is that this has led...