Abstract
The norm of free trade, and an open trading system, is central to the European Union. Yet, the EU’s promotion of free trade is not without internal criticism. Primarily, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the USA, and to an extent, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, were strongly politicized. The authors argue that TTIP, in particular, was a special case. Modern trade agreements include negotiations on rules and regulations (deep integration), and civil society organizations (CSOs) employed effective lobbying techniques, framing strategies, and social media campaigns to raise public salience, awaken negative European perceptions of the USA, and promote mobilization against TTIP. This combination made the negotiations different from any other. EU trade negotiations with Japan were largely uncontroversial, and CETA only became salient when investor protection provisions in TTIP were also linked to CETA. As the chapter explains, while the EU still deems the promotion of free trade to be a fundamental norm, it has changed some of its standardized procedures and regulations on trade in response to intra-European opposition to TTIP.
We are grateful to Pol Morillas for feedback provided at a workshop on May 31, 2019 at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies, and to the editors, Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués, Esther Barbé, and Martijn Vlaskamp, for their feedback and suggestions.
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Notes
- 1.
By politicization, we mean an “increase in polarization of opinions, interests, or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of policy formulation” (de Wilde, 2011: 260).
- 2.
CSOs were previously divided on international trade. Rejectionists saw globalization as a threat to sovereignty, and any public policy goal, and revisionists believed their goals could be achieved by globally upgraded rules (Hopewell, 2015).
- 3.
Vogel and Kagan (2004) argue that increased globalization can lead to a race to the top on standards.
- 4.
Interview, TABC representative, May 2016.
- 5.
Interviews with Commission advisers and business representatives in Brussels and Berlin, in April and June 2016, indicated that the Commission was surprised and disappointed by the lack of support it received from Member States.
- 6.
Interview, Berlin, June, 2016.
- 7.
Interview Brussels, May 2016.
- 8.
See Footnote 7.
- 9.
Interview, CSO representative, Brussels, May, 2016.
- 10.
Interview, CSO and labor union officials, Brussels, May, 2016.
- 11.
Interview, Brussels, May, 2016. Hübner et al. (2017, p. 850) explain that while “the EU was planning ahead for potential accountability issues in Canada, by involving the provinces, it was unaware about the potential accountability issues it could face in its own negotiation process.”
- 12.
Informal discussion with Commission representative, Antwerp, May, 2018.
- 13.
There is also research showing that enhanced transparency in trade negotiations may have the paradoxical consequence of shifting decision-making processes to informal networks and practices; in trade negotiations, more transparency may lead to more secrecy (Heldt, 2019).
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Eliasson, L.J., Garcia-Duran, P. (2020). Norm Contestation in Modern Trade Agreements: Was the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership a “One-off”?. In: Johansson-Nogués, E., Vlaskamp, M., Barbé, E. (eds) European Union Contested. Norm Research in International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33238-9_9
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