ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the long-term participation of the EU towards far-reaching services liberalisation in the World Trade Organization (WTO) throughout the 2000s. The focus lies more particularly on services of general interest (public utilities and services), an area that epitomises the EU’s contradictions caught between the willingness to protect its social model and the search for profitable services markets abroad for its competitive firms. It is argued that the EU’s participation is constrained not only by legal constraints, but also by contentious politics triggered by the possible impact of liberalisation on public services. On the one hand, to further liberalisation, the European Commission was able to deal with the opaque and interconnected WTO and EU regulations. On the other hand, it had to slow down the pace of this further liberalisation, to be responsive to significant protest and accusations of duplicity both at the global and European levels. The far-reaching level of liberalisation achieved within the Single Market has allowed the Commission to remain strongly committed to the deepening of services liberalisation in the long run, but it is acting in the shadow of possible politicisation and conflict.
