ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) has greatly benefited from multilateral trade liberalization in the past. As an open economy, the Union naturally continues to take a strong interest in furthering free trade also after the demise in 2005 of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha Round. Since then the world has experienced a shift from multilateral trade agreements towards bilateral and regional arrangements. The EU, too, which has traditionally championed multilateral trade agreements in global trade, negotiated through the WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), has, initially reluctantly, come to embrace an increasing number of bilateral and regional trade agreements. It has come to adopt a more active policy of negotiating bilateral trade deals, guided by economic objectives rather than by political affinities and objectives,1 and, with tariff barriers already relatively low among WTO members, embarked on a new generation of international agreements. In most cases, and given the absence of any one-size-fits-all trade agreement, the EU negotiates comprehensive (i.e. deep) free trade agreements (FTAs) with third countries.
