Revisiting the European Convention: The origins of the EP veto over international commercial treaties

Abstract

The European Parliament had long tried and failed to gain a substantive role in the Common Commercial Policy. The Treaty of Lisbon brought a breakthrough for the EP by giving it a veto over international trade treaties. The rule change originated at the Constitutional Convention. While it is generally accepted that the Convention was steered by a desire to make the EU more legitimate, it is argued here that the rule change resulted from the complex agency of MEPs that participated at the Convention, who simultaneously appealed to ill-informed national participants’ sense of appropriateness and employed obfuscation tactics. The piece also makes a concerted effort to develop process tracing as a transparent and powerful tool for single case research. The evidence used to update our confidence in the causal mechanism is presented and evaluated in a structured manner in the appendix.