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An early version of this article was presented at a conference at the University of Ferrara in February 2015, and thanks go to Pietro Franzina and the other organizers of and participants in that conference, and to Piet Eeckhout and Joanne Scott for comments on a later draft.
I.
INTRODUCTION
In the European Union, private international law has almost exclusively been developed through the adoption of internal acts (particularly EU Regulations) in the pursuit of internal goals (principally, enhancing the efficient functioning of the internal market, and more recently and broadly the construction of an area of freedom, security and justice).1This article analyses the policy options open to the EU in terms of the 'external' dimension of private international law, looking at the potential role of private international law in EU external relations. While it is focused entirely on EU private international law, the methods examined are not necessarily unique to private international law or the EU, and thus this article also presents a case study of the range of legal techniques which can be used by international actors to project policies extraterritorially. There are, however, two main justifications for providing this analysis in relation to EU private international law in particular, which correspond with two distinct aspects of the analysis presented in this article.
First, in Opinion 1/13, a Grand Chamber decision issued on 14 October 2014, the European Court of Justice confirmed that the European Union has exclusive external competence in the field of private international law, at least in subject areas in which the EU has exercised internal competence. While this Opinion related specifically to civil aspects of international child abduction, the logic of the Opinion is (as argued in section II below) just as (if not more) forcefully applicable in the general field of civil and commercial disputes covered by the Brussels I Regulation (in relation to jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments) and the Rome I and II Regulations (in relation to choice of law in contractual and non-contractual obligations). If it is accepted that the EU has a broad exclusive external competence in this field, the next question which arises is: what (if anything) should the EU do with this competence? Should the EU...