Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The European Integration Experience, 1945-1958
- 2 The Founding Fathers
- 3 The Marshall Plan and Western European Reconstruction
- 4 The Management of Markets: Business, Governments and Cartels in Post-war Europe
- 5 Europe’s First Constitution: The European Political Community, 1952-1954
- 6 Agricultural Pressure Groups and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy
- 7 ‘Thank You, M. Monnet; I’ll Take Care of That’: Some Counterfactual Reflections on Institutional Creation and the Origins of European Integration
- 8 The Dynamics of Policy Inertia: The UK’s Participation in and Withdrawal from the Spaak Negotiations
- 9 The European Integration Experience, 1958-1973
- 10 ‘An Act of Creative Leadership’: The End of the OEEC and the Birth of the OECD
- 11 The United Kingdom and the Free Trade Area: A Post Mortem
- 12 ‘Two Souls, One Thought’? The EEC, the USA and the Management of the International Monetary System
- 13 A Dismal Decade? European Integration in the 1970s
- 14 EFTA and European Integration, 1973-1994: Vindication or Marginalisation?
- 15 The Concentric Circles of the European Union’s Trade Regime, 1989 to the Present
- 16 Lessons from the Euro Experience
- 17 European Identities
- 18 The Landscape of European Studies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Publications of Richard T. Griffiths
15 - The Concentric Circles of the European Union’s Trade Regime, 1989 to the Present
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The European Integration Experience, 1945-1958
- 2 The Founding Fathers
- 3 The Marshall Plan and Western European Reconstruction
- 4 The Management of Markets: Business, Governments and Cartels in Post-war Europe
- 5 Europe’s First Constitution: The European Political Community, 1952-1954
- 6 Agricultural Pressure Groups and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy
- 7 ‘Thank You, M. Monnet; I’ll Take Care of That’: Some Counterfactual Reflections on Institutional Creation and the Origins of European Integration
- 8 The Dynamics of Policy Inertia: The UK’s Participation in and Withdrawal from the Spaak Negotiations
- 9 The European Integration Experience, 1958-1973
- 10 ‘An Act of Creative Leadership’: The End of the OEEC and the Birth of the OECD
- 11 The United Kingdom and the Free Trade Area: A Post Mortem
- 12 ‘Two Souls, One Thought’? The EEC, the USA and the Management of the International Monetary System
- 13 A Dismal Decade? European Integration in the 1970s
- 14 EFTA and European Integration, 1973-1994: Vindication or Marginalisation?
- 15 The Concentric Circles of the European Union’s Trade Regime, 1989 to the Present
- 16 Lessons from the Euro Experience
- 17 European Identities
- 18 The Landscape of European Studies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Publications of Richard T. Griffiths
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The European Union1 is undoubtedly the most successful regional trade agreement created in the post-war period. It is often cited as the inspiration for other regional trade experiments, I suspect usually by people at a loss for better openings for their speeches or articles. It has also attracted the adherence of neighbouring countries to the extent that its membership has grown from the original six countries in 1951 or 1957 (depending on the starting point chosen) to twenty-seven today and, in the process, has become the world's largest trading bloc. As such, it has been an attractive potential partner for countries seeking to intensify bilateral trading relations through preferential trade agreements.
This chapter examines the development of the EU's external trade policy since the end of the Cold War in 1989. One can view the various stages in the hierarchy of this trade policy as a series of concentric circles which starts with enlargement, the inclusion into the European Community itself and the full incorporation into its internal trade regime. The steps to full membership of the European Union have recently been preceded by a period of association, which confers limited free trade status (usually excluding agriculture) and which is accompanied by the financial and technical assistance to prepare countries for the institutional and legal demands of membership. This has also included demands for norm changes and the adoption of democratic structures. Association has not only been employed for candidate countries, but also for European countries that have opted not to apply for full membership. Although it is not explicitly stated, an eventual application for membership on their part would obviously be considered sympathetically. More recently, the EU has started using trade agreements with countries which it has no intention of admitting. This has been the case of its relation with former colonies and overseas territories which had been the beneficiaries of preferential trading for over thirty years but which, because of WTO rules, had to be converted to reciprocal free trade agreements, known as Partnership Agreements. Similarly, in an effort to stabilise the situation on its borders, the EU has started to construct a ring of free trade agreements, first among the Mediterranean countries and, later, it extended the strategy to cover neighbouring countries among the former states of the Soviet Union.
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- Information
- 'Thank you M. Monnet'Essays on the History of European Integration, pp. 309 - 328Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013