Chapter 1 presents the main mission of the book: that of scrutinizing the EU’s new legal instruments aimed at strengthening the enforcement of EU’s trade rights and ensuring a level playing field for domestic and foreign undertakings in light of EU’s international commitments and its multilateralist stance, but also against relevant constitutional constraints. It introduces the reader to the EU’s most recent Trade Policy Review and the tensions that it might trigger with external and internal legal limits. It also sets what led the EU to the adoption of this new trade policy, explaining the roots, causes, and the context for the new more robust approach. The chapter also informs about the doctrinal legal methodology, explaining the main rules of interpretation of international and EU law used throughout the book. Finally, the Introduction presents the structure of the book and provides a brief overview of the following chapters.

As EU’s Renewed Trade Policy seeks to combine its multilateralist stance with a more autonomous approach, this chapter presents the external and internal constraints that the EU should take into account in order to succeed in its endeavor. Chapter 3 argues that EU’s pledge to multilateralism becomes important not only in view of its importance for EU’s credibility in external relations but also because it is enshrined in its constitutional norms. Accordingly, the chapter briefly delves into the question of the relationship between EU and international law, the importance of respecting the latter, including from an internal constitutional perspective, and the internal and external consequences of international law breaches by EU law. It focuses on the constitutional justification of the EU’s obligation to respect its international law commitments, as well as the CJEU case law on this question, especially on the potential restriction posed by the Autonomy of the EU legal order. The chapter also briefly identifies pertinent WTO, EU FTAs, and general international law rules that could act as external restraints, and explains how the mere existence of EU legislation might violate them.

Chapter 2 analyses the evolution of the EU Trade Policy and how it reached the new focus on stronger enforcement of EU’s trade rights and ensuring a level playing field in trade, i.e. more assertively representing EU interests. Thus, it depicts how initially EU Trade Policy was mainly focused on multilateralism in the WTO context, then shifted to combining multilateralism with active bilateralism by signing deep and comprehensive FTAs, and finally adopted the reviewed trade policy based on ’open strategic autonomy’ model seeking a more assertive trade policy, which is also presented in more detail herein. It also explores the drivers that instigated this reorientation of trade policy, in particular the crisis of trade multilateralism, the rising nationalism, the systemic challenges posed by the Chinese exceptionalism, as well as digitisation, climate change, and COVID-19.