The new trade deals and the mobilisation of civil society organizations: comparing EU and US responses

Abstract

This paper examines mobilisation of civil society organizations (CSOs), focusing primarily on the highly-contested politics engendered by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), by posing the question, ‘how can we account for strong opposition to TTIP in the EU, while being nearly non-existent in the US?’ It is argued that European CSO opposition to TTIP and mobilisation of European public opinion against TTIP can be traced to the European Commission’s employment of myths – specifically a green, social, and humanitarian Europe in a process of ‘othering’ to build a sense of European national identity. Salient issues in transatlantic trade and regulatory capacity both factor into CSO opposition, themselves also a function of myth making, but also a product of the EU’s governance system. It will be difficult for the EU to accommodate and appease such oppositional groups because of perceptions among many Europeans that Americans tolerate lower regulatory protections.

Keywords:

• Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
• Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures
• trade agreements
• regulatory cooperation
• civil society organizations
• political myths

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. She would also like to thank the other contributors to this volume for their comments, especially Christilla Roederer-Rynning, Finn Laursen, and Alaisdair Young. Naturally any errors or omissions are the author’s responsibility.

Notes

1. For less optimistic view of past EU-US transatlantic cooperation, see De Ville and Siles-Brügge (2015) and Pollack and Schaffer (2001).

2. Briefing reports, news articles, and websites of the following EU CSOs – Attac, Corporate Europe Observatory, European Economic Bureau, Food and Water Europe, Friends of the Earth Europe, Greenpeace Netherlands; US CSOs – Friends of the Earth US, Greenpeace USA, Public Interest, Sierra Club. All of these CSOs oppose ISDS and advocate for openness in TTIP negotiations (including making publically available draft negotiating texts, country submissions, and consultations with stakeholder groups).