TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has stirred passions like no other trade negotiation in recent history. Its supporters maintain that TTIP will produce spectacular growth and job creation; claims that are wholeheartedly rejected by its critics, who regard TTIP as a direct assault on workers' rights, health and safety standards and public services.

In this incisive analysis, Gabriel Siles-Brugge and Ferdi de Ville scrutinize the claims made by TTIP's cheerleaders and scaremongers to reveal a far more nuanced picture behind the headlines. TTIP will not provide an economic 'cure-all', nor will it destroy the European welfare state in one fell swoop. Thanks to unprecedented levels of protest and debate around TTIP, however, neoliberal trade negotiations are well and truly back in the spotlight. In this respect, TTIP could well prove to be a 'game-changer' - just not in the way imagined by its backers.

Ferdi De Ville is Assistant Professor in Politics at Ghent University

Gabriel Siles-Brugge is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester.

Auteur

Ferdi De Ville is Assistant Professor in Politics at Ghent University

Gabriel Siles-Brugge is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester.

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1
Growth and Jobs

Advocates of TTIP on both sides of the Atlantic are quick to paint the agreement as a massive contribution to 'growth and jobs'. Eliminating remaining barriers to transatlantic trade and investment flows is said to be a boon to businesses, workers and consumers alike. US President Barack Obama has said that TTIP can help support 'millions of good-paying American jobs' (White House 2013a), while UK Prime Minister David Cameron has gone as far as to say that TTIP's economic boost represents a 'once-in-a-generation prize' (cited in BBC News 2013). In the European context these claims have an added significance. With austerity de rigueur , TTIP is, in the words of the then EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, 'the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine' (De Gucht 2013b).

Partly anticipating the controversy that was to engulf the negotiations, EU trade policymakers explicitly recognised this (as well as 'setting global standards'; see chapter 2 ) as one of the key areas to push in their 'information' (read, public relations ) campaign surrounding TTIP. In order to support this 'growth and jobs' story, the European Commission contracted a series of econometric studies that intended to show the economic benefits of the agreement. The most significant of these predicted gains for the EU of 0.48 per cent of GDP annually and for the US of 0.39 per cent, and has featured prominently in the discourse of European and US political figures. Given the obvious political importance attached to them, what are we to make of these claims?

In this chapter we interrogate the 'growth and jobs' narrative, focusing in particular on the use of these economic models. We suggest that these serve not only to exaggerate the benefits of TTIP but also deliberately to downplay its potential social costs. As the economic sociologist Jens Beckert (2013a, 2013b) puts it, modelling can be conceived of as an 'exercise in managing fictional expectations'. The uncertainty inherent in modelling social outcomes, which are far more contingent than the calculations of economists, is shrouded from public view. In this vein, the models make unrealistic assumptions about the degree to which TTIP will be able to eliminate barriers to trade (especially given the, at best, mixed record of transatlantic cooperation so far), using biased data gleaned from surveys with business representatives. This, in turn, distracts from the potential costs of the agreement, which are far more difficult to quantify. This includes the social costs of macroeconomic adjustment (as jobs are likely to shift between industries) and the impact of potential deregulation on levels of social, environmental and public health protection. The models and the broader narrative they underpin are an important part of the wider 'politics' surrounding the negotiations, also shaping (as we will illustrate in subsequent chapters) the approach taken by negotiators to seeing regulation in narrow, economistic terms.
A way out of the crisis

In the EU, trade policy has become a central component of its response to the ongoing economic crisis. Facing reduced domestic demand and the realities of austerity, policymakers have argued two things. Firstly, that 'economic recovery will ... need to be consolidated by stronger links with the new global growth centres' and, secondly, that '[b]oosting trade is one of the few means to bolster economic growth without drawing on severely constrained public finances' (European Commission 2012: 4). Trade policy is being presented as one of the instruments to take Europe out of the crisis. In the words of the Commission again, it ' has never been more important for the European Union's economy ' (European Commission 2013e: 1, emphasis in the original).

EU leaders' public pronouncements on TTIP represent the culmination of this particular rhetoric. De

Contenu

• Acknowledgements

• List of tables and figures

• List of abbreviations

• Introduction

• 1 Growth and Jobs

• 2 Setting Global Standards

• 3 The Bottom Line: Cutting Red Tape

• 4 Challenging TTIP

• Conclusion: seizing the TTIP moment

• Notes

• References

• Index