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ABSTRACT
This article aims to deconstruct the concept of transparency in trade policymaking and analyse its consequences on the redistribution of power among stakeholders. To do so, it examines the presidency of Barack Obama (2009–2016), who repeatedly promised to make transparency one of its central governing principles. The study relies on policy analysis of legislative reform, executive orders, and recent trade agreements as well as discursive analysis of government sources. It reveals that while transparency has gained traction in the trade sphere, it can have diverging meanings and even opposite effects. By providing greater information to the public, transparency mechanisms can foster inclusiveness and democratic accountability to the benefit of civil society actors. However, transparency rules also have exclusionary effects that can not only shut out non-state actors but also constrain democratically elected governments under the logic of free market expansion. Under the Obama administration, efforts to bring greater accountability to the trade policy process mostly failed, while the transparency narrative was instrumentalised to pursue national economic objectives and impose greater market disciplines on America’s trading partners. Evidence shows that the prevalence of exclusionary forms of transparency over inclusive mechanisms persisted under the Trump presidency.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Jan Orbie, Jamal Shahin, Lotte Drieghe, Diana Potjomkina, Stéphane Paquin, Ferdi DeVille, Sooyeon Kim, Susan Aaronson, the editors of the special section, Gabriel Siles-Brügge and Louise Dalingwater, and the three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. This work was supported by a European research grant from the Institut des Amériques.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For instance, transparency featured prominently in the 2017 State of the Union (European Commission, Citation2017).
2 ‘A trade that is transparent and inclusive’ was also an important focus of the early 2018 debate on the UK’s post-Brexit trade strategy (Department of International Trade & The Rt Hon Liam Fox, Citation2018).
3 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched its progressive trade agenda as ‘open and transparent, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with civil society and a broad range of stakeholders.’ (Champagne, Citation2017).
4 These debates included, most notably, the controversies surrounding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in North America, the debates on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in Europe and the United States, as well as the Seattle protests against the WTO.
5 The author would like to thank Reviewer 1 for raising this point, whose apt phrasing inspired this sentence.
6 "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman’ (Brandeis, Citation1914).
7 In James Madison’s famous words: ‘A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.’ Cited in Florini (Citation2007, p. 7).
8 This paragraph borrows from Ginsberg et al. (Citation2012), Schauer (Citation2014, p. 812-3) and Lichtblau (Citation2010).
9 Anonymous interview, April 29, 2019; anonymous interview, April 30, 2019.
10 According to the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which codified rules for establishing government advisory bodies only two years before the creation of the TACs system (1974 Trade Act) advisory committees are required to be ‘fairly balanced in terms of point of view represented and the functions to be performed by the committee.’ For more information on the impact of the TAC system on policymaking, see Darves & Dreiling (Citation2002) and Velut (Citation2016).
11 For instance, George W. Bush instrumentalised the events of 9.11 to push for trade liberalisation at both regional and multilateral levels (with less success in the latter case).
12 Textual analysis by Allee and Lugg (Citation2016) revealed that the language of TPP drew heavily on previous US FTAs. The ten trade agreements whose language most closely matched the TPP were all US FTAs.
13 The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade offers an annotated list of the suspended provisions in TPP: https://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/in-force/cptpp/outcomes-documents/Pages/cptpp-suspensions-explained.
14 Anonymous interview by phone, April 18, 2019.
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Jean-Baptiste Velut
Jean-Baptiste Velut is Associate Professor in American Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University of Paris His research focuses on the American political economy, US and European trade policies and globalization debates in the United States. His recent publications include Understanding Mega Trade Deals: The Political and Economic Governance of New Cross-Regionalism (Routledge, 2018) co-edited with L. Dalingwater, V. Boullet & V. Peyronel. He is currently writing a book on the politics of fairness in US trade policymaking. He regularly conducts impact assessments as an external expert for the London School of Economics' consulting branch, LSE Consulting, contributing to both social and environmental analysis of trade policies.