Abstract
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) constitutes an attempt to improve job creation and boost the economies on both sides of the Atlantic by eliminating tariffs and reducing other trade barriers, including many regulatory differences. Economic benefits and standard-setting impacts notwithstanding, politics, and perceptions of acceptability, not economics, will determine the agreement’s fate, thus making constituency support necessary for treaty ratification. This chapter looks at how anti-TTIP civil society organizations have executed an extensive, often professionally structured, and highly influential mobilization against TTIP. Pan-European civil society organizations’ activities impacted public opinion across Europe, which in turn impacted governments’ positions, the Commission’s trade policies, and textual proposals for TTIP.
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Notes
- 1.
Much information in sections ‘Anti-TTIP Group Activities and Mobilization’ and ‘The Issues’ come from numerous discussions with representatives of CSOs, trade unions, business organizations, negotiators, and policy advisers to the Commission in 2014–2016. All were guaranteed anonymity.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
For a discussion of the origin of mobilization, as the dependent variable, see Gheyle (2016).
- 5.
The opposition to TTIP is strictly speaking a combination of pan-European and national organizations, but the StopTTIP umbrella alliance unifies hundreds of smaller groups, and many protests across Europe have been coordinated, as have some social media campaigns.
- 6.
Interview Brussels, May 2016.
- 7.
Interview Berlin, June 2016.
- 8.
Excluding the 31 pan-European organizations, the countries with the most vocal national groups are Germany (114), the UK (25), and Austria and France (each 15) (Bauer 2016b).
- 9.
Interview Brussels, May 2016.
- 10.
Google Trends reflect the number of searches for a term relative to the total number of searches over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers because the data is normalized on a scale from 0 to 100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point and multiplied by 100. Google has 90% of the European search engine market and a 65% browser share. Source: Statista.com (2016).
- 11.
Interview parliament, June 2015.
- 12.
- 13.
Interview, Brussels, May 2016.
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Eliasson, L.J. (2019). Transatlantic Trade Negotiatons, Civil Society Campaigns and Public Opinion. In: Dialer, D., Richter, M. (eds) Lobbying in the European Union. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98800-9_27
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