The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) An Insight into its Transatlantic Relations and Global Context. ZEI Discussion Paper C238 2016

Abstract

From the Introduction. In his famous essay Cuore Tedesco, Italian political scientist Angelo Bolaffi claims that after the birth of today’s global world we are experiencing a “pluralization of the West”1. In particular Bolaffi defines two moments that have contributed to distancing Europe from the United States, paving the way to what Alberto Martinelli calls “two variants of Western modernity”2. The first moment was the reunification between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. German reunification ended “the long road West”, according to the definition given by Heinrich August Winkler3. The second moment was the second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Germany, together with France, for the first time strongly opposed the old ally. Revealing a rift in the transatlantic relations, which inspired German philosopher Jürgen Habermas to talk about the “divided West”4. Many analysts believe that this was not the culmination, but rather the initiation of a profound crisis in the relationship between the United States of America and the European Union and that this situation is now destined to last. However, after almost a decade of remarked skepticism, in which the concept of “division” has been the stronger trend than “cohesion”, European Union and United States decided to finally launch in 2013 the official negotiations for the most important free trade agreement, in economic and geopolitical terms in the history of both, namely the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)