Saturday, April 16, 2016
Ormandy East (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
The distinctly ambitious regulatory harmonization agenda and its unmatched ambition to create “a transatlantic market” rather than merely reduce existing trade barriers make the TTIP negotiations stand out amongst its peers. The sheer size of the economies involved, the geo-strategic calculations argued, the political discourse mobilized, and the projected impact on existing production networks and value chains all see the TTIP lumped together with other mega-FTA deals. However, the open-ended nature of the TTIP, its focus on regulatory convergence and standard setting (rather than harmonization and mutual recognition) and the peculiarities of the European Common Market and its status as a Regulatory Power, all conspire to make the TTIP negotiations relatively distinctive. As a result existing models, institutional provisions and political expectations have proven ill-suited to predict and manage the mounting challenges and facing the TTIP. This paper argues that a strengthening of the TTIP’s resilience to criticism requires a small Copernican revolution in the way the negotiations are conceived of. Rather than emphasizing its merits in terms of geo-strategic balancing, regulatory agenda-setting and normative power projection; a more accurate narrative would stress TTIP’s role in terms of geo-strategic agenda-setting, regulatory balancing and normative protection. To test this hypothesis the paper will though process-tracing and elite interviews compare the anticipated impact of the TTIP with those of other bilateral FTA deals involving the EU; notably with regards to its international (1) agenda-setting, (2) regulatory, power and (3) market power
