Trade and 'domestic' policies: the European mix

With increasing economic interdependence, policies and regulations that were once thought of as `domestic' become subject to international trade negotiation and rules. The EU has developed a sophisticated approach to balancing sovereignty and liberalization within the single market, and in recent years has also sought to apply some of the same approaches to the multilateral arena. But the EU is reaching the limits of its own approach internally and has seen great resistance to the explicit extension of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agenda into further regulatory spheres, notably at the WTO at the Cancun meeting. Yet the underlying problems remain. If the WTO cannot negotiate the balance between trade liberalization and regulatory autonomy, whether in food safety or services, there is a risk of excessive reliance being placed on the dispute settlement system, and further challenges to the legitimacy of the WTO.