An Assessment of EU Policy-Making and the Uruguay Round with Special Reference to Agriculture

Abstract

The Uruguay Round agriculture negotiations took their distinctive place in the history of the GATT as undoubtedly the most challenging bargains, bearing in mind the long-stalemated confrontation between the world's major traders. During these negotiations, as in the previous rounds since its first partaking in GATT negotiations, the European Community was represented by its Commission, as the sole negotiator acting on behalf of the member states and using the Community's exclusive competence arising from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Given the sensitive and politicised nature of agriculture, internal tensions between the Commission and the Council of Ministers/member states, and within the Commission itself, on the one hand, and external pressures from the Community's trading partners, especially the United States, on the other, made the Commission's negotiating task enormously difficult. However, the Commission used its entrepreneurship which enabled it to reconcile extensive demands of the US and other states, at the international level, with the strong resistance to any comprehensive CAP reform among Community's agriculture circles and the member states, at the internal level. In doing so, the Commission benefited largely from its presence at both negotiating tables to strengthen its bargaining position by playing external and internal pressures against each other. This paper therefore deals with this twofold strategy and its outcomes, by applying Putnam's two-level games model to this particular case. In this context, after giving brief information about the Commission's place in the Community's external trade policy-making, in the first section, it looks into the two-level games model and its propositions about international negotiations. In the third section, it applies the propositions of Putnam's model to the dual strategy pursued by the Commission during the progress of the Uruguay Round negotiations on agriculture.