The Atlantic – A Bridge Too Far? TTIP’s Provenance, Prospects and Pitfalls

This collective EU Diplomacy Paper on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which the United States and the European Union (EU) are currently negotiating, consists of condensed versions of a Master’s thesis and three shorter essays written by students of the EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies programme at the College of Europe. The contributions reflect the state of play in April 2015.

The introduction by Jonatan Thompson asks whether TTIP’s ambition to create a single market spanning the Atlantic might, given the gaps in interests and mounting political contestation, turn out be ‘a bridge too far’ for the negotiators.

Richard Cuntz argues in his contribution that the official justification for TTIP put forward by its European proponents, boosting prosperity through greater trade and investment, seems rather unconvincing on its own. TTIP covers a large range of issues that do not bear directly on transatlantic trade and seem rather intended to forge a template for the rest of the world. The renewal of geo-economic and political ties with the US is seen as a means to mitigate Europe’s relative global decline. Hence, European support for TTIP can partly be traced to particular economic interests, but also to the larger political and economic crisis gripping the EU.
Frances Ainley applies Putnam’s well-known ‘two-level games’ approach to the current TTIP talks, focusing on investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS). While ISDS is a ‘must-have’ for U.S. negotiators, on the EU side a strong anti-globalisation movement coupled with ‘reverberation’ from recent court cases and German domestic politics complicate, and could derail, TTIP negotiations as a whole.

Andrea Chiarello analyses another controversial issue in the transatlantic trade negotiations: Geographical Indications (GIs). While GIs are a key European interest in the TTIP negotiations and in the EU’s broader agricultural trade policy, U.S. agricultural policy and exports are based on generic products and a system of trademarks. The tensions arising over agriculture in TTIP negotiations can be traced to economic interests as well as diverging philosophies of agricultural production and intellectual property regulation. However, he argues that with pragmatism on both sides, a compromise on the contentious issue of GIs could be within reach.

Ueli Staeger’s contribution examines the European side of the TTIP negotiations through the ‘two-level game’ and ‘principal-agent’ approaches. It argues that the European domestic level is characterised by a game of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’, or ‘lobbying’ and ‘ratifying’, principals; second, the actors acting as ‘fictional principals’ capitalise on TTIP’s politicisation to reinforce their structural role in EU policy-making by overstretching the legal competences through a democratisation and transparency discourse.

• Primary Source

College of Europe: The EU’s Human Rights Promotion in China and Myanmar: Trading Rights for Might? [PDF] https://www.coleurope.eu/sites/default/files/research-paper/edp_5_2014_borreschmidt.pdf

ESO: Key Source: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) http://www.europeansources.info/record/transatlantic-trade-and-investment-partnership-ttip/

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