The Member States of the European Union have created an internal market where movement of goods, services, persons and capital should be as easy across borders as it is within a single Member State. This is achieved by Treaty Articles which prohibit restrictions on free movement and discrimination, and by harmonisation. The process of harmonisation is complex and contested because it goes to the heart of how much power the EU has, and how much uniformity between Member States is required. The creation of common standards, although done by legislation, is a technocratic process in which it is sometimes claimed that non-scientific interests such as culture and identity are not adequately represented. As well as this, a well-functioning internal market has side-effects, such as regulatory competition, which put pressure on national standards and may undermine national preferences.

This chapter gives an overview of EU policy-making, outlining what types of policy the EU makes, in which areas it is important and in which areas it plays a smaller role, and how the EU’s policy-making role has evolved over the past decades. In doing so, it sketches the broader picture within which the subsequent chapters on agenda-setting, decision-making and implementation of EU policies can be placed. The text seeks to give students a firm grasp of the broader patterns of EU policy-making, while providing examples of specific policies in order to make more tangible what EU policies look like. After outlining the varying involvement of the EU in different policy areas, the chapter provides an overview of both the expenditure and the revenue side of EU budgetary policies. This is followed by a discussion of EU regulatory policies, both in relation to the internal market and beyond. After this general introduction, the chapter zooms in on the development of two policy areas in which EU policy-making has shown important developments over the past decades: Economic and Monetary Union and foreign policy.

This part gives an overview of the core legal disciplines of the SPS and TBT Agreements, the transparency obligations and related practices that have developed, as well as the provisions enabling regulatory dialogue and co-operation. It demonstrates that the legal and institutional disciplines of the SPS and TBT Agreements set the ground for a Member-driven implementation process. Because the substantive obligations remain part of ‘incomplete contracts’ with limited information necessary for their operation, the transparency obligations and related committee practices enable regulatory dialogue as a way for Members to work together towards the most appropriate domestic measures. Ultimately, the robust transparency framework of the Agreements places the Members as guardians of legality of each others’ domestic regulations and allows them to cooperate to ensure effective implementation.

This chapter presents the core disciplines under the SPS and TBT Agreements, highlighting how they set requirements for regulators to balance their own public policy objectives with the WTO objectives of trade liberalisation. Such ‘balancing’ requirements result in obligations for regulators to ‘rationalise’ their domestic regulations in order to ensure their quality. This balancing is inherent to all measures under the scope of the SPS and TBT Agreements and stands out in the obligations not to discriminate and to adopt only measures that are necessary and/or based on scientific evidence. Ultimately, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight that transparency and related regulatory dialogue is fundamental to help both regulating Members and complaining parties in determining the consistency of domestic regulation with WTO SPS and TBT Agreements.