Multilateralizing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

This article analyzes opportunities for negotiators to promote multilateralization within transatlantic trade and investment partnership. The TTIP has two ambitious and complimentary, primary strategic objectives. The first is economic – primarily a question of streamlining trade by increasing regulatory coordination between the EU and U.S. The second is multilateralization of trade – to fold the results into a model set of trade standards that the Atlantic partners can use to encourage and pressure new progress in integrating and liberalizing global trade. While the first objective is underway, negotiators are giving the second objective short shrift. To uncover the opportunities to do more within TTIP, I contrast what is discoverable of the TTIP negotiations with the failed WTO multilateral Doha Round, innovations regulatory coordination and rule of origin, principles borrowed from theories of international relations, and examples from existing, successfully expanded plurilateral trade blocks.