Bartl, M.

English

International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion online publications

UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)[Review of: F. De VBille, G. Siles-Brugge (2016) TTIP : The Truth about theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership]Bartl, M.Publication date2016Document VersionFinal published versionPublished inCommon Market Law ReviewLink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Bartl, M. (2016). [Review of: F. De VBille, G. Siles-Brugge (2016) TTIP : The Truth about theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership]. Common Market Law Review, 53(3), 847-849. http://www.kluwerlawonline.com/abstract.php?area=Journals&id=COLA2016073General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an opencontent license (like Creative Commons).Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, pleaselet the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the materialinaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letterto: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Youwill be contacted as soon as possible.Download date:09 Mar 2023Ferdi De Ville and Gabriel Siles-Brugge, TTIP: The Truth about the Transatlantic Trade andInvestment Partnership. Chichester: Wiley. 160 pages. ISBN: 978-1-5095-0102-1. GBP 45.The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is an exceptional trade agreement– for several reasons. First, this agreement aims to integrate deeply the two largest markets in theworld: the EU and the US. The economic benefits of integration should reach up to 120 billioneuros per party, at least according to the proponents of the agreement. Second, the TTIP is alsoexceptionally ambitious in terms of its scope – it encompasses a large number of industrysectors, public procurement issues, phyto-sanitary measures and technical regulations. Inaddition, the TTIP has a distinctive supranational ambition – in its “regulatory cooperation”chapter it aims to set up institutions that should eliminate future “non-tariff barriers to trade”.Finally, the TTIP has raised immense public interest and debate. It is perhaps the first time thatBook reviews 847a trade instrument has become the subject of widespread public debate, at least in Europe. Andit is certainly the first time that a trade agreement has brought onto the streets hundreds ofthousands of people, re-politicizing trade questions.The debate about the TTIP has been particularly polarized: the proponents of the agreementdeem it a matter of progress and internationalization, while the opponents suggest that the TTIPwill erode emergent democracy in the EU.This polarization reverberates in the legal debate.Themain question is whether the TTIP should be considered as “business as usual” in trade law orrather something politically novel, calling for special attention and concern. The stakes in thisdebate are high: the more “special” the TTIP is considered, the less deference is afforded totraditional actors (such as trade officials or diplomats) in trade negotiations.Trade lawyers tend to see the TTIP as one among many free trade agreements (FTAs), whichhave proliferated in recent years. Not unlike the TTIP, these FTAs (between the EU and, forinstance, South Korea or Singapore) are often broad in scope and frequently include some formof regulatory cooperation. Thus, while TTIP is perhaps more ambitious, it is not of “a differentkind”. On the other side of the legal spectrum, newcomers to the TTIP debate are the EuropeanUnion lawyers. These scholars raise a red flag: even if the TTIP is trade law’s “business asusual”, its legitimacy should not be taken for granted. They evaluate the TTIP from theperspective of the subjects of its potential authority, bottom-up so to speak, questioningparticularly the democratic implications of the supranational structures that the agreementwould create and operationalize.The excellent contribution of two political scientists De Ville and Silles-Brugge reviewedhere adds much to this conversation. The authors unpack three main assumptions from whichmuch of the ongoing debate sets out: the economic and geopolitical justification of the TTIP,the interaction of the TTIP agenda with the EU’s internal better regulation agenda and, finally,the democratization potential of the recent public mobilizationThe first two chapters explore the question “why TTIP?”, opening up the two majorjustifications of the project – economic and geopolitical. In an accessible analysis, the authorsfirst clarify the numbers behind the TTIP: how much are we going to gain economically? Arewe truly going to be 120 billion euros economically better off, and 540 euro better off per familyper year, as the Commission has claimed? De Ville and Silles-Brugge suggest that this willhardly be the case. The numbers are at best overly optimistic, at worst based on methodologieswhich have proved incorrect in previous attempts to predict the gains and losses of tradeintegration (as in the case of NAFTA).More recently, even the Commission seems to have backed away from these numbers as ajustification of the TTIP. In fact, it has turned to the second rationale – the geopoliticaljustification – which now has the upper hand in the official narrative. In the second chapter,thus, the authors ask whether the TTIP has the potential to make the contracting parties “globalstandard setters”, as the Commission believes, thus winning the race against rapidly risingeconomies such as China or India. According to the authors, however, the TTIP will notautomatically deliver such an optimistic outcome. TTIP global standards are likely to emergemainly through the technique of regulatory harmonization. Yet this seems to be the leastplausible scenario, given both the previous attempts at transatlantic cooperation and the currentinstitutional constraints. On the other hand, “mutual recognition” or “conformity testing”,which are other methods of regulatory convergence, have little or no capacity to set such globalstandards. In fact, the authors suggest that the agreement may even reduce such capacity, inparticular of the “normative power Europe”, if mutual recognition is to gain ground.In the third chapter the authors turn to the deeper political reasons and ideologicalunderpinnings of the TTIP project. They focus, in particular, on the link between the TTIPregulatory cooperation, which aims to eliminate “behind the border barriers to trade”, and theEU internal better regulation agenda, which is concerned with cutting “red tape” (unnecessaryor inefficient regulation). While normatively in tune, the two agendas have already taken theirtoll on the threshold of regulatory standards in the EU. For instance, the authors argue that adelay in the Commission’s regulatory proposal for action against endocrine disruptingCML Rev. 2016848 Book reviewschemicals in pesticides, or the modification of the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive, can be ascribedto the confluence of the TTIP and Better Regulation agenda.While the authors express concern that the TTIP’s institutions may become yet anotherinstance of de-politicized rule-making, in the fourth chapter they explore the democraticpotential of the public mobilization that arose in the wake of the TTIP negotiations. The authorssuggest that trade law and policy have thus far been dominated by a specific set of neoclassicaleconomic assumptions, which have idealized the operation of the (international) market anddownplayed its drawbacks and distributional consequences. The authors suggest, however, thatpolitical mobilization may motivate the redirection of public resources, thus far invested intoTTIP negotiations, into economically more robust and perhaps socially more responsiblepurposes – ranging from combating tax evasion to economic inequality and climate change.What specific contribution do De Ville and Silles-Brugge make to the legal debate? Theirbook speaks directly to the question of “stakes” in the TTIP negotiation process. First, theauthors present the epistemic weaknesses of EU trade law and policy. They show that some ofthe core economic and geopolitical assumptions, on which EU trade law and policy rest, do notstand up to sustained scrutiny. Second, the authors outline two main democratic challenges. Arising number of people view EU trade law and policy as undemocratic, out of touch withsocio-economic reality, and as perpetuating and reinforcing injustices that it was in factsupposed to contain. At the same time, the TTIP seems to be instrumentalized to advancecertain domestic agendas by moving them even further away from public scrutiny – thus“locking in” many measures that the European public would have had difficulty swallowing inthe domestic legislative and regulatory process.Ultimately, the seriousness of the problems that haunt EU trade policy require a largeinstitutional overhaul: this field cannot be left any longer to those who have run the show so far.In fact, the whole question whether the TTIP is “business as usual” or of a “different kind” islargely beyond the point. Even if the TTIP was “business as usual”, we may have gone a step toofar in market integration beyond the State - without taking seriously the democratic challengesthat such integration poses. A new institutional imagination and new participants to the debateare necessary if we are to respond successfully to the recent democratic challenge. De Ville andSilles-Brugge urge us to seize that opportunity.Marija BartlAmsterdamBook reviews 849

[Review of: F. De VBille, G. Siles-Brugge (2016) TTIP : The Truth about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership]

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[Review of: F. De VBille, G. Siles-Brugge (2016) TTIP : The Truth about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership]

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