"Foreword" [2019] ELECD 2775; in Bosse-Platiere, Isabelle; Rapoport, Cecile (eds), "The Conclusion and Implementation of EU Free Trade Agreements" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) ix

Book Title: The Conclusion and Implementation of EU Free Trade Agreements

Editor(s): Bosse-Platière, Isabelle; Rapoport, Cécile

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section Title: Foreword

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

Foreword
Lucia Serena Rossi

This book aims at addressing the constitutional challenges arising from the
negotiation and implementation of the new-generation free trade agreements
concluded by the EU (`EUFTAs'). Along with the traditional but increasingly
relevant questions of mixity and the provisional application of EUFTAs, new
issues of constitutional significance emerging from the latest developments of
the common commercial policy are addressed, such as the level of transpar-
ency and democratic scrutiny and the development of new dispute settlement
mechanisms and their compatibility with Union law.
To this end, the theory and recent practice of EU trade policy are viewed
through the lens of the general principles of EU law, starting from the assump-
tion that they contribute to defining the essential characteristics of the Union
legal order, but they are also the source of its specificities vis-à-vis those of its
Members and contracting parties.
In the first part of the book, these general principles emerge as a `constitu-
tional skeleton' that gives form to the common commercial policy, allowing
the Union to pursue its objectives while facing the ambiguities of its legal
framework for the external action that the new free-trade approach has brought
out (Chapter 1).
The first principle to be taken into consideration, in this respect, is that of
conferral of powers. On the one hand, this principle underlies the so-called
ERTA doctrine of implied exclusivity and its latest application by the Court of
Justice in its Opinion 2/15 on the free ...