The European Community commercial policy

The European Community (the correct legal term in trade matters, hereafter EC) is still a recent and ongoing process. Fifty years is a short time span for such an endeavour (Annex I lists the 17 Treaties that have formed its legal basis).3 It is strictly an economic process because a straight forward political unification of Europe was out of reach, then, now, and for the decades to come. This ambiguous relation between economics and politics explains why the EC commercial policy often received the status of a foreign policy instrument. This was the case in the EC relation with former colonies (during the 1960s), developing countries (the 1970s), the Central European countries formerly in the Soviet sphere (the 1990s), and neighbours or emerging economies (the 2000s)