As in nearly all European Union (EU) policy areas, scholars have turned to analysing the role of national parliaments, in addition to that of the European Parliament (EP), in trade politics. Yet, there is limited understanding of how the parliamentarians at the two levels interact. This article fills the gap by conceptualizing these interactions as a continuum ranging between cooperation, coexistence and competition. We use this continuum to explore multilevel party interactions in EU trade talks and show how cooperation compels politicization – national parliamentarians mainly interact with their European colleagues in salient matters. However, we argue that the impact of politicization on multilevel relations between parliamentarians in the EP and national parliaments is conditioned by party-level factors. Hence, we account for how and why politicization triggers multilevel party cooperation across parliaments in the EU through ideological orientation, government position and policy preferences and show how this takes place in the case of trade.

The EU's consistent policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been that Israel's presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip (prior to the 2005 disengagement) and the Golan Heights is subject to the laws of belligerent occupation, that any purported Israeli annexation is illegal and null and void, that Israel's settlements in the Territories are in breach of public international law and constitute a serious obstacle to peace, and that Israel and Palestine should settle their conflict on the basis of public international law and through the two-state solution. In recent years the EU attempted to concretize this policy through its trade and trade-related agreements with Israel, withholding the benefits of EU-Israeli co-operation from companies and research institutions based in the Territories or operating therein, as well as from products produced therein (the New Approach). Thus, from the EU perception, the New Approach towards the long-standing conflict and its reliance on international law may be seen as an instrument to reinforce internal and external legitimacy, buttress identity cohesiveness and as a manifestation of its more robust effectiveness. But this article seeks to conduct a more careful and balanced analysis of the New Approach and in doing so to reveal that the EU's (almost) exclusive focus on non-governmental entities, such as corporations situated in the Territories, and on Territories’ products, is misplaced in terms of public international law and effectiveness. The New Approach's deficiencies, in abstracto and in concreto, as evaluated in this article, are likely to prevent it from serving as a paradigm shift in EU-Israel relations.

This article explores the legalisation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union (EU) and its increasing use of sanctions. It argues that the breadth and depth of the numerous sanctions regimes in place shows that EU foreign policy is not merely an aspiration but produces law and legal processes which share similarities with those in the rest of the EU’s legal order. Further, the article examines the extent to which non-EU Member States in Europe have aligned themselves with EU sanctions. The argument is made that this is evidence not only of Europeanisation, but also crucially of a legalised foreign policy which has allowed Europe-wide, EU-led foreign policy to emerge.

In this article it is discussed how the European Union's use of treaty-making powers and other external relations competences has contributed to the establishment of human rights as customary international law and makes it more likely that democracy and modern concepts such as good governance, precaution and sustainable development, will also gain this status. A specific focus of attention is on the EU's vision of the aforementioned rights and principles as a limit to State sovereignty. It is shown that the EU promotes an interventionist approach, which allows for proportionate responses to violations of peremptory norms by or in sovereign States. Since this view is expressly subscribed by a vast number of the EU's treaty partners, the EU's vision of State sovereignty is becoming a significant element in the development of the international legal order.