The European communities as an actor in international society

In this article I evaluate the powers of the institutions of the European Communities, in particular the Commission, and those of the machinery for Political Cooperation (the so-called Davignon framework) as reflected in members' relations with the outside world. In the wide range of the Communities' external relations there were, through the 1970's and early 1980's, a number of illustrations of what might seem to have been actor-behaviour : the Communities appeared to be acting as a unit in international trade negotiations (the Tokyo Round),1 in conferences on North-South economic relations (the Conference on Economic International Co-operation in Paris, 1976-1977), and in East-West negotiations such as those at Helsinki in 1973-1975 ;2 and Member States produced joint initiatives, for instance, in relation to the Middle East crisis — as when they asserted, in 1980, that the Palestine Liberation Organisation should be a party to all settlements in that area — and in response to the more recent crisis in Poland.