by Werner Hager and Matthieu Choblet
a contribution to „The Transatlantic Colossus – Global contributions to broaden the debate on the EU-US free trade agreement“
Abstract
TAFTA | TTIP negotiations are taking place in the context of what could be a new era of free trade. Both the EU and the US have bolstered their efforts to conclude bilateral free trade agreements all over the world in the last years. Simultaneously however, the EU and the US have sometimes experienced discord, with US-politicians increasingly turning their attention towards the Asia Pacific region and Europeans being seemingly preoccupied with themselves. Atlanticists have perceived this as a weakening of the transatlantic relationship, a critique which has sometimes been made with regards to European integration more generally. To be sure: a politically stable and economically dynamic Europe has always been in the interest of US international politics. Nonetheless European integration has sometimes been described as contrary but not complementary to the ideals of Atlanticists. The euro was notably set up as an alternative leading currency. With TAFTA | TTIP, trade would be diverted from the intra-European area towards more EU-US trade, thus weakening the relative importance of trade within the common market. We argue that TAFTA | TTIP is a project which would lead to a relative decline of traditional European integration to the benefit of transatlantic integration.
INTRODUCTION: A NEW ERA OF FREE TRADE
TAFTA | TTIP negotiations are taking place in the context of what could be a new era of free trade. With the multilateral Doha Development Round being manifestly stuck, both the EU and the US have recently bolstered their efforts to conclude bilateral free trade agreements all over the world (Dadush 2013). These attempts are currently culminating in the project of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This project can be traced back to a series of agreements in the 1990s that lost some impetus in the meantime (Siebert 2013). The idea was reinvigorated when Germany took over the EU-presidency in 2007. German Chancellor Angela Merkel seized the opportunity to revive the transatlantic project by setting up the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) (Techau 2013). Its members are both government agencies, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, and private pressure groups, such as Businesseurope and the Bertelsmann Foundation. The TEC has been doing the preliminary work for the joint High Level Working Group (HLWG), which ultimately laid the foundations for the current negotiations (European Commission 2013b, 5; US Department of State, 2013). In this essay we argue that the TAFTA | TTIP may turn out to be against the interest of European integration. This is not because Atlanticism and European integration are necessarily contradictory, but because the predicted outcomes of this particular project will lessen the importance of intra-European trade. However intra-European trade has increasingly become the ‘raison-d’être’ of European integration, which is consequently under threat.
„TAFTA | TTIP: New Dawn for Atlanticists, Sunset for old Europe?“ weiterlesen
