The Lisbon Treaty and the Commission's Appointment

This paper looks at EU trade policy and more specifically at the negotiating mandate the Council must grant the Commission to start trade negotiations. The negotiating mandate is a set of directives that impose limits to the proposals the Commission can make. As such the mandate is legally binding and defendable in a court of justice. However, authors such as Kerremans (2004b) and Damro (2007) also point out a different way of looking at the mandate by arguing that it sets out the maximum concessions the Council is willing to make during trade talks and that the mandate can thus be considered a signaling device. In this paper I analyze this proposed second role of the negotiating mandate in EU trade policy making by decoupling the two perspectives on the negotiating mandate.The results of the model show that when individual Council members can communicate with the Commission, there exists a signaling equilibrium in which the Commission complies with the mandate