ABSTRACT
Following the EU’s enlargements in 2004, 2007 and 2013, the Internal Market is now – in population terms at least – the world’s largest single trading bloc (overtaking NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Association), comprising the USA, Canada and Mexico). Moreover, the Internal Market is much more than a free trade area (which characteristically only seeks to remove trade barriers between its Member States). There is also a common policy on the imposition of Customs duties both internally and externally (known as a Customs union), and a whole series of rules promoting the free movement of persons, services and capital as well as goods. NAFTA is essentially a free trade area, as is EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) which the UK helped form in the late 1950s as a ‘rival’ organisation to what was then the EEC. EFTA still exists, although the only surviving members are Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein (all of whom are members of the European Economic Area (EEA)) and Switzerland. The purpose of the EEA was to allow those European states who were not committed to full EU membership to obtain some of the benefits of the Internal Market.
