ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the relationship between the government of trade at the scale of the European Union (EU) and that of industries. Many of the highly publicized concerns about these rules and norms not only centre on their content, but also on the legitimacy of the actors and arenas that set them. This concern extends in particular to representatives of the European Union (EU), and of its European Commission (EC) in particular who, over trade policy, are often perceived as acting technocratically and without mandates to neo-liberalize markets and industries. A functionalist account of the EU's government of trade 'pushes off' from two starting points: because the initial European Community was 'economic', it had to develop a trade policy early in its history, particularly via a common set of external tariffs; developing a common external trade policy was a means of increasing the efficiency and power of European actors within international trade negotiations.
