Marchetti, Juan A.; Mavroidis, Petros C. --- "From Reluctant Participant to Key Player: EU and the Negotiation of the GATS" [2011] ELECD 771; in Govaere, Inge; Quick, Reinhard; Bronckers, Marco (eds), "Trade and Competition Law in the EU and Beyond" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Trade and Competition Law in the EU and Beyond

Editor(s): Govaere, Inge; Quick, Reinhard; Bronckers, Marco

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857935663

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: From Reluctant Participant to Key Player: EU and the Negotiation of the GATS

Author(s): Marchetti, Juan A.; Mavroidis, Petros C.

Number of pages: 48

Extract:

4. From reluctant participant to key
player: EU and the negotiation of
the GATS*
Juan A. Marchetti and Petros C. Mavroidis

The EU did not enthusiastically endorse the requests for a new trade round
in the 1980s. Having decided that it did not want to dismantle its controver-
sial Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), it feared that aggressive attitude
in other areas would provoke requests to do so. Its original position
underwent substantive change following pressure by, inter alia, its services
lobby and the awareness of gains in various other fields of economic
activity. It emerged as one of the key players in drafting the GATS and can
legitimately claim property rights for many a GATS institution.


4.1 THE GATS: NO INSTANT HIT

The thesis that we advance could be summarized as follows:

+ The services negotiation and the GATS architecture are very much
the product of those Uruguay Round participants that had elaborate
(or relatively speaking, the most elaborate) domestic regulations for


* We had to turn for help to a number of people when preparing this study. It is
no exaggeration to state that our work would be highly incomplete (as it probably
still is) without their help: Eyal Benvenisti, Americo Beviglia-Zampetti, Tomer
Broude, Theofanis Christoforou, John Croome, Panayotis Delimatsis, Bart De
Meester, Dorothy Dwoskin, Murray Gibbs, David Hartridge, Rob Howse, Doug
Irwin, Felipe Jaramillo, Mario Kakabadse, Abdel-Hamid Mamdouh, Aaditya
Mattoo, Andre Sapir, David Palmeter, Federico Ortino, John Richardson, Gary
Sampson, Jonathan Scheele, Dick Self, Harsha Singh, Vassilis ...