The European Union in the World Trade Organization

The European Union (EU) is one of the most prominent members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This means that the common commercial policy has to comply with the rules of this multilateral trade organization - rules that the EU subscribes to and most of which it has actively helped crafting. This chapter provides an overview of the EU’s role in the WTO. It first presents the main components of the world trade regime and the WTO in particular. The WTO is simultaneously a forum for intergovernmental trade negotiations, a set of commitments to trade liberalization that its members have entered into and an organization ensuring the enforcement of those commitments through its dispute settlement mechanism. The chapter looks at how the EU has co-shaped the multilateral trade regime and discusses the EU’s role both as defendant and complainant in the WTO dispute settlement mechanism.