DÜNYA İLİŞKİLERİNDE AVRUPA BİRLİĞİ

A common commercial policy towards third countries (in the form of a customs union) was included in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC).

After Brexit, the UK’s external tariffs would be lower than the EU’s. Such a policy would be in line with the UK’s self-image of being more liberal in foreign trade issues than the rest of the EU.

Intra-regional foreign trade between “the original six” (West Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) amounted to about 25 per cent of their total foreign trade turnover in the mid-1950s.

One important reason why the EU’s proportion of internal trade relative to total foreign trade has stagnated and declined in recent decades is that a large part of the growth in world trade has taken place outside of Europe, which implies that there has been an incentive for the EU to look beyond the union’s borders. In particular, foreign trade with Asia in general and China in particular has expanded.

Services have traditionally been subject to multilateral regulations to a lesser extent than the manufacturing sector. This might be because the production and trade of services are, by nature, more “invisible” and “elusive”, making them more complicated to measure, describe and regulate. A significant part of service production is built into commodity production in the shape of research, product development, design, distribution and marketing.

In advanced economies, the proportion of the economically active population involved in services is usually around 75–80 per cent.

One example of success at the multilateral level was the 2015 renewal of the “Information Technology Agreement” (ITA) in which a holistic approach is taken to hardware and software in the IT area. In other words, the ITA combines trade in goods with trade in services.

Some countries are typical “home countries” for FDI (i.e. the bulk of the FDI flows have been directed outward through companies’ own internationalization processes). Other countries are typical “host countries” (i.e. a large part of the FDI flows has been directed inward owing to the launch of production by foreign companies in these markets).

The broader, more open and more “inclusive” trade agreements become, the more they seem to be criticized for opacity and for their lack of consideration of climate issues, food safety, responsible entrepreneurship and protection against foreign companies’ profit interests. Likewise, the more transparent the EU Commission has become by, for instance, publishing negotiation mandates and revealing proposals and reports from negotiation rounds, the louder the criticism has been over the lack of transparency.

The four EFTA members (Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Iceland), which together account for 11 per cent of the EU’s external foreign trade in goods, are already deeply integrated in the EU, although through different arrangements.