ade and Development licies jchael Smith hapter Contents Introduction 253 • Institutions and policy-making: the Common Commercial Policy 254 • Institutions and policy making: development assistance policy 257 • The European Union's policy objectives in trade and development 260 t The European Union as a power through trade and development 262 I Conclusion 264 .eader's Guide This chapter focuses on the external economic relations of the European Union—the longest-estab-fehed area of collective European international policy-making and action—and specifically on trade and development policy. The chapter begins by examining institutions and policy-making for trade, in which the Commission plays a central role in initiating and conducting policy, and looks especially atthe Common Commercial Policy (CCP). It goes on to examine development policy—an area of mixed competence, in which policy responsibility is shared between the EU institutions and national governments. The chapter then proceeds to explore the substance and impact of EU trade and development policies, and to assess the linkages between the two areas. The conclusions draw attention to a number of tensions and contradictions in EU trade and development policy. troduction The European Union is unquestionably one of the krgest concentrations of economic power in the global arena. As can be seen from Table 17.1, the Union possesses 'assets' in the form of economic resources, human resources, and territory that put it at least on a par with the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and other leading economic actors, and well ahead of several of them. Equally, in trade, investment, and other 254 M'Chaei Smith Table 17.1 The European Union and its major rivals a the global political economy Population (m) Area (m knV) GDP (€ bn) Share of world trade (%) China 1,383 9.6 10.135 13,4 India 1,309 3.3 2,038 2.8 Japan 127 0.4 4,462 1.9 Russia 143 17.1 1,157 .8 United 323 9.8 16,776 15.0 States EU 28 510 4.3 4,824 16.8 Note. All figures for 2016. Source: DG Trade attDi//cc.curop£.eu/lrade/en/'. forms of international production and exchange, the EU can be seen as a potential economic superpower, not least because it constitutes the largest integrated market in the world. It is rich, it is stable, and it is skilled, and thus it inevitably occupies a prominent position in the handling of global economic issues. This fact of international economic life has only been underlined by the accession of the 13 new member states between 2004 and 2013 (see Chapter 18). Basic to the conversion of this economic potential into economic power and influence, as in so many other areas of EU policy-making, is the institutional context for the conduct of external economic policy. From the very outset in the 1950s, with the establishment of the customs union, the then European Economic Community (EEC) had to develop a Common Commercial Policy (CCP) with which to handle its relations with partners and rivals in the world economy. During the 1960s, the Community also initiated what was to become a wide-ranging and complex development assistance policy, primarily to manage relations with the ex-colonies of Community members. Each of these key areas of external economic policy presented the EU with distinct institutional problems and with distinct opportunities for the exertion of international influence. Not only this, but they have also developed in ways that are linked, both with each other and with the broader pursuit of the EU's international 'actorness'. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the areas of external economic policy, to link then, .* "tin With the institutions and policy-making processes th they generate within the EU, and to explore the w in which these create challenges and opportunities f the EU in the global arena. By doing this, the chapte will expose a number of areas in which there are te sions and contradictions within EU policies, as well as linkages between them; it will also enable us to evahj ate EU policies towards major partners and rivals in the global arena, and the extent to which the EU has been able to establish itself as a global economic power' through its trade and development policies Institutions and policy-making: the Common Commercial Policy The core of the European Union's external economic relations is the Common Commercial Policy (CCP). Established by the. Treaty of Rome, but not fully implemented until the late 1960s, the CCP is the means by which the EU manages the complex range of partnerships, negotiations, agreements, and disputes that emerge through the operation of the customs union and the Single Market (see Chapter 20). As we shall see, the definition of 'commercial policy' has broadened considerably since the initiation of the EEC, but it is important to understand the core principles and policy-making procedures of the CCP as the basis for understanding the whole of the Union's external economic policies. As established in the Treaty of Rome, the CCP was based on Article 113 of the Treaty—since amended to become Article 133 of the consolidated treaties in the late 1990s, and now Article 207 TFEU. Article 207 sets out not only the principles on which the CCP is to be pursued, but also the policy-making processes through which it is to be implemented. In terms of principles, as set out in Box 17.1, the CCP embodies not only a set of aims for the external policies of the Union, but also a set of far broader aims in relation to the operation of the world trade system. This key tension is at the heart of the successes registered and the difficulties encountered by the CCP, since it sets up a series of contradictions: is the EU to achieve the aim of prosperity and stability for Europeans at the cost of international stability and development? Or Trade and Development Policies 255 ROX 171 THE COMMON COMMERCIAL POLICY The Common Commercial Policy shall be based on uniform "orinciples. particularly m regard to changes in tariff rates, v *he conclusion of tariff and trade agreements relating to ■ in oood< ind set y i os. and the commercial aspects m * irvtellertjal property foreign direct investment, the I jchie-yement ol uniformity in measures of" liberalization. I exp0rt polity and measures to protect trade such as those Lo [ taken r tht event of dumping or subsidies Thp common 1 commercial poiic. shall De cotidui ted in the context of the ■ pnncip'es and objectives of the Unions external action 2 The European Parliament and the Council, acting by ■means o' regulations in accordance with The ordinary legislative roceduie. shall adopt the measures I defining the t' imework foi implementing the common ■ commercial poky 3 Where agreements with one or more states or international organizations need to be negotiated . . the Commission shall make recommendations to the Council, which shall authorize the Commission to open the necessary negotiations The Commission shall conduct these negotiations in consultation with a special committee appointed by the Council to assist the Commission in this task and within the fiamework of such directives as the Council may issue to it. The Commission shall report regularly to the special committee and tc the European Parliament on the progress of negotiations. Source: Article 207 TFEU is it to privilege the aim of global prosperity and development at the expense of the EU's citizens and their welfare? The reality, of course, is that there is a complex balancing process for policy-makers as they utilize the instruments of the CCP. Essentially these instruments fall into two broad areas. The lirst deals with what might be called 'trade promotion': the activities that develop the EU's international activities and organize them around certain core practices. These instruments fall partly within the control of the EU itself, but are. also to be found in the broader global institutions and rules established in the world arena. Thus the EU has developed a complex range of trade and commercial agreements, cov ering almost every corner of the globe. Some of these are bilateral, with individual countries such as Russia or China; others are inter-regional, covering relations with groupings such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); others still are multilateral, with the prime example being the World Trade Organization (WTO). In all of these areas of trade promotion, the EU aims to establish stable partnerships and relationships, often with a set of formal rules, which enable trade to develop and diversify. A second set of CCP instruments is that relating to trade defence'. Here, the EU is concerned to counter perceived unfair trade practices by its key partners, such as the dumping of goods at unrealistically low prices on the EU market, the subsidization of goods, or the creation of barriers to EU exports. To support it in these areas, the Union has developed a battery of trade tools, including anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures, rules of origin, sanctions, and other punishments. But it does not exercise these powers in isolation; frequently, the Union works through the WTO to counter what are seen as unfair practices, using the WTO dispute settlement procedures to defend itself at the global level. Trade and partnership agreements also include procedures for dealing with trade disputes, as a matter of routine, and sometimes linkages arc made with other areas of external policy such as those on human rights and development assistance (see 'Institutions and policy-making: development assistance policy'). In the post-Lisbon Treaty context, the policy processes through which the CCP is implemented still make use of what historically was known as the 'Community method' (see Chapter 16). In practical terms, this means that the Commission has the power of initiative, conduct, and implementation of commercial policy agreements. In many cases, the Commission will propose 'negotiating directives' in which its negotiating mandate is set out; where this is the case, the Council has to approve the mandate as well as any changes in it, and the Commission is monitored by a special Council committee, the Trade Policy Committee of member state representatives. In other areas, the Commission has delegated powers to apply regulations (for example, in anti-dumping cases), subject to monitoring and approval by the 256 Michael Smith Council. The Commission has developed a sophisticated apparatus for the conduct of trade negotiations and the conduct of 'commercial diplomacy1 through the Union's delegations and specialist missions, such as that to the WTO in Geneva. It might be argued on this basis that, in this area, the EU has effectively displaced the national trade policies of the member states (in contrast to the position on foreign and security policy, in relation to which the member states remain supreme—see Chapter 19). As a result of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament has also been given a more active role in the CCP, especially in relation to the framework for trade policy-making and to the approval of trade agreements once they have been negotiated. As time has passed, the Union has also had to respond to the changing nature of world trade and exchange, and the CCP has been reshaped to reflect the key trends. In a number of instances, this has exposed the continuing tension between the national preferences of the member states and the European perspective of the Commission, thus raising questions about the extent to which the EU has really undermined the independence of national commercial policies. A key issue here is that of competence: in the Treaty of Rome and for a long time afterwards, the CCP was assumed to be about trade in manufactured goods, but the changing global economy has given a much more prominent role to trade in services (for example, aviation services or financial services) and to related questions such as that of 'intellectual property' (the trade in ideas, such as those embodied in computer software) or foreign investment. In order to cater for these changes, the scope of Article 113 and then 133 had to be expanded during the 1990s, and this was not always a simple process, because member states found reasons to resist the expansion of the Commission's role. The Lisbon Treaty effectively resolved these tensions, and the Union now has competence not only in trade in goods and services, but also in issues relating to intellectual property and foreign investment. In these areas, the Union's use of its new or expanded powers raises interesting questions—for example, the member states have a very wide range of existing bilateral investment treaties, and the EU's exercise of its post-Lisbon competences will entail the modification or elimination of such treaties (for example, in the Union's pursuit of a bilateral investment treaty with China, the negotiations for which started in 2014). Another area of tension vvhi h J existed from the earliest days of the European*1 ^ munity, reflects the linkage (or the gap] ^et ^ 'internal' EU policies and the Union's external*6511 tions. As internal integration reaches new are is inevitably found that these have external p0j'" consequences. Thus, in the early days of the Co"^ munity, the Common Agricultural Policy was recognized to be not only a policy about Wn went on within the Community, but also a about the regulation of food imports and thi policy pro- motion of exports, and so it has remained ever sin (see Chapter 24). More recently, the completion of the 'single European airline market' during the late 1990s raised questions about who was to negotiat with countries such as the USA about the regulation of international air routes. Only after a prolonged struggle was it agreed that the Community (and thus the Commission) could exercise this power A large number of other 'internal' policy areas, such as competition policy, environmental policy, and industrial policy, are inevitably linked to trade and the global economy, and this will continue to be an issue for the conduct of the CCP and related policies. This has been borne out by the recent negotiation of 'deep and comprehensive' free trade agreements between the EU and a range of significant partners. By 2016, the most ambitious of these, the negotiations between the EU and the United States for a wide-ranging Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), had provided a major case-study in the move from negotiations based on trade in goods to talks which were set to encompass a host of areas in both domestic and international commercial policy (see also Chapter 20). The advent of the Trump Administration in the USA effectively 'froze' the TTIP negotiations, and it was unclear in late 2017 whether they would be resuscitated. As a result of these trends and processes, the CCP has, in a sense, 'spread' to encompass new areas of external commercial policy, especially in the area of regulatory policy but also now in foreign investment and related areas. The EU has become engaged with a very large number of international institutions in the conduct of these policies and has developed a complex web of agreements with which to manage them. Not all of the EU's international economic policies fall into this framework, and wc will now turn to look at one of the most important of these— development policy. POINTS I Common Commercial Policy sets the framework for m- ernal coo''d|,vltinn ol EU commercial policies, as well I nncipl^ f°r [ht; ,nTerna't'onal activities: these Iwo ^Egmeflts can conflict and uc^tc- tensions I The key instruments of EU external commexial policies ^Egn be seen as those of "trade promotion' and 'trade I The\ need to be balanced and can come into I oe e',(-r ■ conflict I The key method of external commernal policy-making ■ kstill the "Community method givng a leading role to | the Commission one1 in it?, interplay wrth the Council I and now the European Parliament, but there is still a B residual role to* member states and - number of areas ■ demonstnie 'mixed competence'. I The changing nature of commercial policy on the global H level creates tensions between the internal development I of the integration process and the 'external' demands of I global institutions and trading partners or competitor. Institutions and policy-making: development assistance policy Historically, there has been pressure for the Community, and now the Union, to expand the scope of its international economic policies. Thus, from the 1960s onwards, there has been a continuing concern with development assistance policy, stimulated originally by the process of decolonization in the French empire. In contrast to the trade and commercial policy area, though, this area has never been subject to the full Community method and thus to the leading role of the Commission. As a result, it demonstrates distinctive patterns of institutions and policy-making. Starting in the early 1960s, a series of increasingly ambitious agreements between the EEC, its member states, and a growing range of ex-colonies created a unique system for the multilateral management of development assistance issues. Box 17.2 summarizes the key phases in this process, especially the progression from the 'Yaounde system' to the 'Lome system', and then to the present 'Cotonou system' (each taking its name from the place where the agreements were finalized). It can be seen from this summary that the successive conventions have set progressively larger ambitions for the scope of the activities that they Trade and Development Policies 257 cover and also that they have covered an increasing number of partners. As a result, the 'Cotonou system' now covers well over half of all countries in the international system, including some of the very richest and a large number of the very poorest. The initiation of the Lome system in the 1970s was widely felt, especially by EC member states, to herald a revolution in development assistance policy by setting up an institutionalized partnership between the EEC and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. Processes were established to create and maintain a stable partnership, in which the ACP group would have its own collective voice, and to underpin the development of the poorest economies in the face of an unstable world economy. As time passed, however, there was criticism that the Lome framework was increasingly irrelevant to the development of a global economy. As a result, the Cotonou system places a much greater emphasis on what might be called 'bottom-up' processes of development, in which individual ACP countries or groups of them produced their own plans for sustainable development to be negotiated with the EU. The Cotonou system also contains markedly more in the way of what has come to be called 'conditionality'—in other words, provisions that make the granting of EU aid conditional on good governance, observance of human rights, and the introduction of market economics. As such, it parallels broader developments in the provision of aid on the global scale and the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, revised in 2015 as the Sustainable Development Goals). It has also been accompanied by special measures relating to the very poorest countries, especially the Union's 2001 'Everything but Arms' Regulation, which allows free access for all products-except those with a military use-from the 40 poorest countries. The Cotonou system is thus a part of a broader and comprehensive approach to development assistance and cooperation, based on an agreed European Consensus on Development, which in turn is an integral part of the EU's Global Strategy, adopted in 2016. The Global Strategy explicitly links development assistance with broader foreign policy and external economic policy goals. The EU's development assistance policies have thus had to respond to the changing nature of the global economy while taking account of new linkages (for example, between trade and development, environment and development, and so on), and to balance the needs of the developing countries against those of the 258 Michael Smith Trade and Development Policies 259 BOX I 7.2 KEY STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE EU'S RELATIONS WITH AFRI CARIBBEAN, AND PACIFIC (ACP) COUNTRIES 1963 firs? Yaounde Agreement (renewed 1969) Reciprocal preferential trade access between EEC member states and associated states (former colonies of member states) European Development Fund ]omt Council of Ministers, Joint Parliamentary Assembly, and Committee of Ambassadors 1974 Lome Convention (renewed 1979. 1984, 1990, and 1995) Includes former British colonies ACP group established, with Secretariat in Brussels ACP partners increase from 46 (I 974) to 68 (I 995) Non-reciprocal trade preferences Schemes to support ACP agricultural prices (System for the Stabilization of ACP and OCT Export Earnings, or STABEX, in I 979) and mineral export prices (System for the Promotion of Mineral Production and Exports, or MINEX, in 1984) 2000 Cotanou Agreement 20-year agreement (entered into force April 2003; revised in 2005, 20 I 0, and 20 I 5) 79 ACP partners (2017) Multilateral agreement to be supplemented by bilateral or minilateral economic partnership agreements (EPAs) by December 2007 (by the end of 201 7, all seven such EPAs were in different stages of development: some were fully in force, others were applied provisionally or as interim agreements and others were in the final stages of signature and ratification) I Conditionality; aid payments linked to democratic government and human rights provisions Viuir.e European Commission nup://er gUTQpa eu'eiiiopeaid/index_en him EU and its member states. The most acute tensions come in the area of agricultural policy: the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) does demonstrable damage to the economies of some of the poorest countries, by depressing commodity prices, preventing free access to the European market, and subsidizing EU exports. Here, again, we can see that external economic policy is closely connected to internal policy processes, and it is not always a profitable linkage (see Chapter 24). Central to the problems encountered by the EU's development assistance policies are two factors. The first is an internal institutional problem: the mixture of policy competences between the EU and its member states, and (in the post-Lisbon context) between the new array of EU institutions. For example, the post-Lisbon arrangements gave the European External Action Service responsibility for overall development strategy, while the financial and other resources needed to implement the strategy at the European level remained with the Commission and with DG DEVCO. The second is an external factor: the ways in which development assistance policies have become increasingly politicized in the contemporary global arena. In terms of the EU's institutional make-up, development assistance policy remains an area of 'mixed competence in which policies proposed and implemented at the EU level coexist with national policies for international development. Thus, although the EU claims to be the world's largest donor of development aid, the majority of that figure consists of aid given by member states as part of their national programmes (see Table 17.2). The complex programmes that have evolved at the European level are also, unlike the CCP, the result of a complex division of powers between the European institutions and the national (Tij |72 f ■' net bilateral and multilateral < -jrnent assistance (ODA), 2015 EU total (EU DAC members + EU institutions) US Japan 30,986 9,203 Source: OECD Development Assistance Committee, httDAWw.oecd.org/. Wore: OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members only governments represented in the Council. As a result, the Commission and the Union cannot claim to speak with one exclusive voice in this area, although their policies and initiatives have had considerable influence on the ways in which development assistance is targeted and allocated. Agreements such as the Lome and Cotonou conventions are mixed agreements, and the Council collectively and the member states individually have the power to ratify or not to ratify them. As with trade policy, this is also an area in which the European Parliament has a stronger and more assertive voice after the Lisbon Treaty. The major institutional innovations made by the Treaty lie elsewhere, however— namely, as noted above the establishment of the new European External Action Service (EEAS), and the reshaping of the Commission's services into the Directorate-General for Development and Cooperation (DG DEVCO), which created significant uncertainties about who controls the policy framework and (perhaps most importantly) the funding for development assistance programmes. For several years after the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, there remained areas of tension and competition in these policy domains. In addition to the problems created by internal institutional factors, EU development assistance policies have to contend with the fact that issues of economic and social development have become intensely politicized within the global arena. This means that aid is not simply an economic matter; it has become linked to problems of human rights, of good governance, and of statehood in the less developed countries, and the EU has had to develop mechanisms to deal with this. There has been an increasing tendency to concentrate the EU's development assistance policies, especially through the EuropeAid development office and now through DG DEVCO, and to link them with the operation of agencies such as the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO). Since the end of the Cold War, there has also been a series of conflicts, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, in which the EU has played a key role in coor-diirating reconstruction and post-conflict economic assistance; more recently, conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere have created major challenges in terms of reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and the management of major movements of refugees. As a result, the EU's development assistance policies have moved away from their primary focus on the ACP countries and a far wider range of recipients has been identified. Among these, post-communist regimes and those involved in conflict form a key focus, as 260 Michael Smith do the poorest countries, which as noted above are granted additional concessions in terms of free access to the European market for their goods. Development assistance policy thus represents a long-established, yet continually changing, focus in the EU's external economic relations. EU development assistance, as an area of mixed competences and challenges associated with political change and conflict, is also increasingly subject to processes of po-liticizarion and securitization, some of which create major tensions. Not only this, but the relationship between EU development assistance policies and trade policies, as noted at several points in this chapter, is also a complex and often contested one. KEY POINTS • Development assistance is a key area of 'mixed competence in EU external relations Thus the EU has potentially important influence, but also has to contend with complex Interna! policy processes and international demands ■ Development assistance policy is an area with a long history and one in which the EU can claim global leadership; but there are tensions between the EUs policy framework, global rules, and the needs of developing countries. • Key problems m development assistance include those caused by the emergence of new issues, such as those concerning the environment or human rights, and the increasing politicization of the area. There is an actual or potential tension between the EU's development assistance priorities and those expressed in its broader trade and commercial policies The European Union's policy objectives in trade and development As noted, the European Union is nothing if not explicit about many of its external economic policy objectives. The tone was initially set by the provisions of Article 113 of the Treaty of Rome, in which the Common Commercial Policy (CCP) is established according to explicit principles, applying not only to the EEC and then to the EU, but also to the broader management of international commercial relations. Perhaps significantly, this set of principles ha J been absorbed within the general principles and"0* jectives of the EU's external action (see Box under 'Institutions and policy-making: the Com Commercial Policy'). This has been backed up 0°n the years by an extremely wide-ranging and sophj^ ticated series of trade agreements with a wide r of partners, which go into great derail about the prjyj leges and concessions to be given to specific partners This can be seen as establishing an elaborate hierarchv or 'pyramid of privilege', in which the EU manages and adjusts its relations to individual partners. From time to time, this set of arrangements raises questions about exactly how particular partners should be dealt with: for example, in the case of China, the EU hashad to change its approach as the country has developed economically, and as it has increasingly become inn;, grated into the global economy through membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international bodies. Likewise, commercial relationships with Russia have been significantly affected by the conflicts of the past few years in Ukraine and elsewhere, which have also led to the imposition of economic sanctions by the Union. At the same time, the. EU has to balance its external obligations against the internal needs of the member states and of European producers and consumers. We have already noted that the Common Agricultural Policy provides extensive safeguards (often said to be discriminatory) for EU farmers, but this is often at the expense of consumers whose food bills are higher because of the protectionism built into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Likewise, during 2005-06, there was a major crisis in trade between the EU and China because of a surge of Chinese textile and clothing exports; this led to the imposition of quotas on Chinese products, but this in turn brought howls of anguish from EU retailers who had ordered products from China only to see them prevented from entering the European market (see Box 17.3). A similar dispute arose in 2011 about Chinese exports of solar panels to the EU: an eventual agreement was reached, but not before the conflicring interests of EU manufacturers and insrallers or consumers of solar energy systems had been exposed. A large number of the disputes between the EU and the United States (which, between them, still account for a significant proportion of disputes brought before the WTO) have been exacerbated by the lobbying of 0 oct I agr« bqX 17.3 EU-CHINA TRADE DISPUTES: no the early 2000s. the rapid growth of Chinese exports " tec), challenging situation foi the EU (as it did for other . r ^porters -uch t< the USAr In particular, the phasing f the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), an international jnent that allowed importers to impose quotas if they threatened with a m h ?e ol cheap impor-s lec to a ma|Or [^crease ir Chinese pencil ation 01" the European market for cheap tex,,le' :lor"ini*- 1 he ^U was laced *vrth a dilemma: [ tneonehanc the renaming European textile producers, concentrated m southern member states such as Italy, Portugal, one Git'C'Ce demandec protection, on trie nth?, fhand not the n (Temper slales Willi rapidly grow .g markets 1 for cheap ~-sb<» i ■ ind othei products tell the heat from their I consume' and ' etaii ' 'bbies. The Commission was faced with IL a|most impossible rhoire whether to live up to its internal oral obligations and '.h_i= offend powerful internal Ipoups. o' to impose lestnettons anc thus potentially renege ton its international commitments The climax of the problem preached n 2005 when frantic negotiations produced a Trade and Developrrent Policies 261 TEXTILES, SOLAR PANELS. AND STEEL set of compromise agreements based on voluntary restraints by China, whilst shiploads of clothing products were trapped in European poi ts. The compromise agreements expired in 2007-08 without an immediate renewal of the crisis— perhaps because of the European economic slowdown and slackening of demand More recently a dispute with China over the alleged dumping of solar panels raised many of the same issues: European solar panel manufacturers complained about the prices at which Chinese products were imported into the EU. but installers and consumers were equally adamant in support of continued imports. Again, a compromise agreement was made, in 2012-1 1 which saw some restraints on Chinese exports but no punitive EU measures In contrast, the rase of Chinese steel exports to the EU r aised a more traditional type of trade dispute in 2014-15. with the EU imposing antr-dumpng measures and EU member state governments concerned with the protection ot employment and strategic industries' threatened by a surge of imports producer groups both in the EU and the USA, which has created political problems around disputes that might, in earlier times, have been managed in a technocratic manner by officials and experts. The net result of these cross-cutting tensions and pressures is a complicated picture in which the EU professes its commitment to the global management of trade issues, but often acts as though it wishes to pursue its own interests in a unilateral manner. Some of the same sorts of tensions emerge in relation to development assistance: the EU trumpets its commitment to international development and claims to be a pioneer of new types of development assistance policy, but there is always a balance to be struck between the broader international aims, those of the EU as a collective, and those of individual member states. This is institutionalized in the EU, thanks to the mixed nature of the institutional framework and the need to get agreement from the member states on major policy initiatives, and also reflecLs a number of powerful historical and cultural forces arising from the history of the European empires. In recent years, the EU's leading role