The New Politics of Trade: Lessons from TTIP (Comparative Political Economy) - Softcover

Alasdair R. Young

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911116754 ISBN 13: 9781911116752

Verlag: Edinburgh University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The negotiation of international trade agreements has become the issue of the moment. With Brexit, a change in administration in the United States, a fragile economic recovery in the Eurozone and China facing a slowdown in its growth, nothing is more critical to the future global economy than the terms of trade between its largest economic blocs. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is Europe's most controversial trade agreement ever. Aimed at reducing regulatory barriers between the United States and the EU, it was expected to be fairly straightforward given strong business support on both sides of the Atlantic. It has not been so. The negotiations have dragged on far longer than anticipated and now look set to fail altogether. Yet the process of its negotiation, the terms of the potential agreement and its sticking points provide valuable lessons for policy-makers and academics tasked to bring future trade deals and arrangements to successful conclusions.

Alasdair Young offers a penetrating analysis of the complexities of the TTIP negotiations and explores why they have proved so difficult to conclude, what motivates the different parties concerned and what implications there are for politics and policy. Young throws light on the limits of the transatlantic cooperation and the processes of globalization and teases out the implications for the UK in its post-Brexit trade negotiations and for other nations now facing a more protectionist stance from the United States.

Contents Foreword by Erik Jones 1. Misplaced optimism 2. The transatlantic economy: interpenetrated not integrated 3. TTIP s ambition in context 4. Cooperation: Transatlantic business alliances 5. Contestation: The politicization of trade policy 6. Herding cats: Intra- and inter-governmental coordination 7. Brexit and Trump: Body blows to TTIP 8. Lessons from TTIP

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alasdair R. Young is Professor of International Affairs and Co-Director of the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The New Politics of Trade

Lessons from TTIP

By Alasdair R. Young

Agenda Publishing

Copyright © 2017 Alasdair R. Young
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-911116-75-2

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Foreword by Erik Jones, ix, 
Abbreviations, xiii, 
1 Misplaced optimism, 1, 
2 The transatlantic economy: Interpenetrated not integrated, 17, 
3 TTIP's ambition in context, 29, 
4 Cooperation: Transatlantic business alliances, 53, 
5 Contestation: The politicization of trade policy, 67, 
6 Herding cats: Intra- and intergovernmental coordination, 93, 
7 Brexit and Trump: Body blows to TTIP, 111, 
8 Lessons from TTIP, 123, 
References, 137, 
Index, 155, 

CHAPTER 1

Misplaced optimism

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations aspired to integrate the world's two largest economies – the United States and the European Union (EU) – and bridge the world's most valuable and complex economic relationship. Their emphasis on mitigating the adverse trade effects of domestic policies made them also substantively the most ambitious trade negotiations the world has yet seen.

When the negotiations were launched in June 2013, expectations were high for the swift conclusion of an ambitious agreement. United States Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman famously declared that he expected the negotiation to be concluded on "one tank of gas". European officials suggested that a deal by the end of 2014 was doable.

The case for the agreement was strong. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic promoted it as a means of spurring on economic recovery in the wake of the global financial crisis; of responding to the rise of China, both by setting standards that would de facto become global standards and by boosting the competitiveness of US and European firms; and, subsequently, of bolstering the transatlantic alliance in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine (De Gucht 2015: xvii; Froman 2014: 114–15). Despite these motivations, the negotiations dragged, and no end was in sight even before the twin blows of the UK's vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump's election as president of the United States. As I argue in Chapter 7, these events spelled the end of TTIP, at least in its current form. This short book explains why optimism was initially so high, and why it turned out to be misplaced. It also highlights the implications for future trade negotiations.

The initial optimism about the prospects of TTIP reflected the broad support for the agreement among transnational business interests and high-level political support, particularly in Europe. Not only did firms on both sides of the Atlantic favour an agreement, in many cases they agreed on the terms they wanted to see. There was thus an unprecedented degree of cooperation among business interests behind the agreement. In addition, labour unions were not particularly opposed to the deal. Thus, to the trade officials in charge of the negotiations, the political winds looked remarkably favourable and set fair for a swift and ambitious agreement.

The negotiations, however, ran into two distinct political headwinds. One was an unprecedented level of engagement by non-traditional trade actors – consumer and environmental groups and even citizens. This new pattern of contestation was particularly pronounced in Europe. Opposition was fuelled by concerns that TTIP would force the parties to weaken rules that delivered valued social objectives, such as product safety and environmental protection, and constrain their ability to adopt such rules in the future. The opposition to TTIP, therefore, was a particular manifestation of the broader anti-globalization sentiments evident in the 2016 US presidential election and the UK's vote to leave the EU.

The other headwind, which was stronger in the US, was the challenge of coordination. Addressing the adverse trade effects of domestic rules, as TTIP aspired to do, requires the engagement and coordination of those government officials, at all levels, who make the rules. In the context of TTIP, this meant regulators and subcentral governments: US states, EU member states and their own internal substate governments. Many of these actors have priorities other than trade liberalization and have proved loath to compromise on them in order to achieve that end. In different ways, these headwinds greatly constrained the capacity of the US and the EU to make the difficult concessions necessary to deliver an ambitious agreement, even before Brexit and Trump's election.

Although the TTIP negotiations as such are almost certainly over, they remain highly relevant. The issues that they sought to address, and the politics associated with them, will not go away and will remain relevant for future trade negotiations, not least those impending between the UK and the EU. Transatlantic regulatory cooperation remains alive and well, with us and EU regulators concluding agreements on pharmaceuticals, insurance and citrus fruit, even after the core negotiations were "frozen". The European Commission (2015d: 3) has also undertaken to increase the transparency of all future trade negotiations in the wake of opposition to TTIP. In addition, the EU has incorporated the investment court system (ICS) for dealing with complaints from foreign investors, which it proposed to address public opposition to TTIP, into its agreements with Canada and Vietnam and it intends to multilateralize that system (Commission 2017b: 15). Whatever the fate of the TTIP negotiations, therefore, they have had enduring implications.

The rest of this chapter lays the groundwork for the volume. It puts the TTIP negotiations in context with respect to other such trade agreements, before briefly introducing the key trade policy-making actors and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. It also addresses why the negotiations were launched when they were.

TTIP: First among preferential trade agreements

The aim of the TTIP negotiations is to conclude a reciprocal agreement between the EU and the US that would improve how they treat each other's firms and products. As such, it is an example of a preferential trade agreement (PTA); PTAs are also sometimes called free trade agreements (FTAs) or regional trade agreements (RTAs). The number of PTAs in force in the world has climbed steadily since 2007. By mid-2016, there were 267 in force around the world (WTO 2016). The EU and the US are active participants in concluding such agreements, but for the most part they have not pursued them with their major economic partners.

Partially in response to its struggles to shape the agenda of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the EU started to emphasize market access through bilateral agreements in 2006. One key element of the EU's strategy was to pay more attention to non-tariff barriers to trade, such as regulations, that impede trade as a side effect of realizing other policy objectives (Commission 2007: 3). A second change in tactics was that the EU intended to focus on economically significant partners. This represented a departure from its existing trade agreements, which had been concluded, primarily for political reasons, with the former colonies of the EU's member states or with countries in the EU's "neighbourhood" (Messerlin 2001). This new impetus ultimately led to agreements with Canada, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam (see Table 1.1).

In 2010, the EU (Commission 2010a: 3) announced a "renewed"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1911116754
• ISBN 13: 9781911116752
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland