William Phelen. 2015. In place of inter-state retaliation: The European Union’s rejection of WTO-style trade sanctions (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Excerpt

William Phelen raises an interesting question in his new book: Why and how did European Union (EU) governments manage to create an international legal system that precludes inter-state retaliation? Phelen aims to be provocatively iconoclastic in answering this question, setting aside what most people see as most distinct about the European Union, namely the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) construction of a federal legal order via its transformation of the Treaty of Rome into a constitutional charter. Phelen insists “that the European Union’s most distinctive features as an international trade organization consisted of its rejection of inter-state countermeasures and the three most common forms of trade remedies (anti-dumping, countervailing duties and industrial safeguard mechanisms)” (94, emphasis added). …