A Europe and the World Special Series.

The aim of this special series is to understand the perspectives of a number of EU partners as well as bodies outside the European Union. With the EU’s international ambitions clearly spelled out in the current treaty provisions (such as Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU), it has increasingly become important to assess to what extent the Union’s internal development facilitates or perhaps hampers the attainment of its external objectives. The question of how the European Union and its external action is viewed from the ‘outside’ is hardly ever raised in EU legal scholarship.  Yet, as the European Union’s external action continues to expand and evolve, ever more questions about how such practice fits within the state-centric system of international law emerge. Some practices in the EU’s external action have been criticised as examples of ‘European exceptionalism’, in which the EU receives various exceptions from its international partners.  The use of disconnection clauses in international agreements; the EU’s insistence that the autonomy of the EU legal order be preserved in dispute settlement bodies; the practice of concluding mixed agreements; among others, have raised concerns for the EU’s external partners. The EU’s external relations have also been criticised in terms of failing to live up to the values the EU seeks to promote externally, such as the EU’s record in the field of human rights or migration policy. The EU’s external action has also attracted certain criticism from international lawyers who have pointed to fields of EU action may violate international law. 

Publication date: From April 2021 - June 2022. 

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Guest Editor

Dr Jed Odermatt, The City Law School, City, University of London, UK.
Prof Ramses A. Wessel, European and Economic Law Department, Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, Netherlands.

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Article list 

Research article

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