Abstract
After more than 3 years of negotiations, talks between the EU and the USA for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have eventually been put on ice. While this is partly the result of the inherently difficult nature of the negotiations, traditional business-oriented explanations of EU trade policy have difficulties explaining this outcome. What is more, many commentators and political actors have attributed a large part of the standstill to civil society contestation, an unexpected player in terms of political power. An initially small group of civil society organizations has vigorously voiced their grievances and claims and, while doing so, has persuaded numerous other organizations, movements, and citizens to join this battle. In this chapter, we argue that insights from the literatures on “outside lobbying” and, especially, “politicization” are necessary to understand the origins, dynamics, and (possibly far-reaching) consequences of this broad contestation of TTIP.
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Notes
- 1.
The opposite is inside lobbying: direct attempts to influence policy by contacting and engaging with administrations or elected representatives.
- 2.
Studies on lobby strategies find that outside lobbying is practiced by business groups quite often as well.
- 3.
There is an ongoing debate in the literature whether politicization extends beyond these public debates, e.g., by including lobbying and public opinion.
- 4.
It could be argued however that the new spike in the debate on globalization has succeeded the debate on TTIP and not the other way around.
- 5.
The latent potentialities are therefore not confined to TTIP itself but can be traced back to the 1980s, which saw the first shifts toward broadening the trade agenda beyond tariff lines. A broader application of how the changing trade agenda is sowing the seeds for politicization is beyond the scope of the current chapter.
- 6.
Prominent members include Corporate Europe Observatory and ATTAC Germany, two of the most active organizations engaged with TTIP in general.
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Gheyle, N., De Ville, F. (2019). Outside Lobbying and the Politicization of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. In: Dialer, D., Richter, M. (eds) Lobbying in the European Union. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98800-9_24
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