Creeping Intergovernmentalism in the EU’s Common Commercial Policy

The EU’s Commercial Policy (CCP) has largely developed according to the dynamics of the ‘community method’, which translates into a tendency for Member State governments to delegate competences to the European Commission to pursue commonly agreed upon goals. On the other hand, recent scholarship on new intergovernmentalism posits that European integration is mainly driven by Member State deliberations and consensus, side-lining the supranational institutions. This scholarship, however, either omits the discussion of the CCP or assumes that the CCP develops according to the community method. This paper challenges this assumption in light of the recent contestation of the EU’s post-Lisbon competences over investment protection by anti-investment societal groups and Member States alike. We argue that there is a well-discernible intergovernmentalist creep at play. This finding challenges the dominant perception in the Europeanization literature that there can be no institutional disintegration of already highly integrated policy fields.