Yes, indeed.
I will put it very directly. You cannot negotiate anything related to trade with any member state. It is not that you can start the negotiation and the commission will step in afterwards. It's that no member state has negotiating power in trade issues. They cannot even start a negotiation.
Of course, the other issue is that there are borderlines between what is trade and what is education, for example, which could be similar to services in some very specific cases, and then you would be in a sort of grey area. It's the same with environment--which is not exactly the same case--or agriculture. I mean, you might have some cases where you might have grey areas, and indeed there's strong cooperation between the commission and member states on these. But in terms of pure trade, what all of us understand as a trade agreement, there is nothing a member state can do on its own. It's just the commission that has the voice, and whatever a member state turned crazy--if you'll allow me to put it that way--would decide would be void. They don't have the power to negotiate. It's as easy as that.
The commission, of course, is not a completely independent body. The commission receives a negotiating mandate from member states, and that's a political game. We are among politicians here. The whole political game is what is the mandate the commission has received to negotiate, and our internal debate is whether the commission is going ahead of its mandate, beyond its mandate.
That, for example, was the claim of some member states in the Doha Round. That's internal European politics. But I can be transparent with you: some member states at certain moments said “Wait a second. We allowed the commission to go to negotiate with this particular agenda, and it is going beyond that, so it's acting ultra vires.”
If that were the case, of course, we would have a political and legal problem. I think it wasn't, but it was politics.