ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the range of European Union’s (EU’s) internal policies, i.e. those which apply chiefly to its member states rather than the rest of the world. Although it is not always possible clearly to separate the internal from the external in terms of the nature of a public policy – as the very existence of the EU makes clear – this is a conventional way of categorising policy competences heuristically. I adopt the categorisation here, but the reader should bear in mind that the distinction between internal and external is at best fuzzy: to give two examples which are explored in more detail below, the single market was established for reasons of both internal and external policy, and the EU’s environment policy has been developed with a similarly complex rationale.
