Trade policy is one of the most established and institutionalized areas of cooperation in the European Union. As a result of the large size of its market and its importance in world trade, the EU is also widely considered to be a major trade power.  Contributing to that view has been the increasing ambition of the EU’s trade policy.  This greater ambition was first evident in it active efforts to shape the agenda for the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations.  Subsequently, particularly since 2010, the EU’s ambition has been evident in it seeking to conclude ‘deep’ preferential trade agreements with economically important countries, with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the United States representing the apogee of that ambition.  Both in the Doha Round and in the TTIP negotiations, the EU’s vaunted ambitions have produced little.  The papers in this panel explore the impediments to translating the EU’s undoubted latent power into results.  In different ways, they highlight the importance of the EU’s internal coherence (or lack thereof) as a key feature that undermines the EU’s negotiating effectiveness.