“It’s been a very productive week,” said EU official Ignacio García Bercero in July 2013, after the first round of negotiations between the United States and the European Union over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). At the time, the deal was supposed to be the largest bilateral trade agreement in history. But TTIP never materialized, and it has long since been abandoned. Today, twelve years later, the political climate that made such a deal conceivable feels like a distant memory.
In August, Donald Trump and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen struck a “truce” in Scotland to scale back US tariffs on European imports. The deal set a new 15 percent baseline tariff on most EU goods, coupled with EU commitments to buy American fossil fuels, invest in US strategic sectors, and scrap any counter-tariff measures and trade barriers for American products entering the European market.
While the agreement is still preliminary and many details remain unsettled, it already represents a visible setback for an economy whose largest export market is the United States. Compared to the pre-Trump status quo, the deal cements a turn away from trade liberalization and toward protectionism in the transatlantic partnership.
How did Europe and the United States go from negotiating the most comprehensive free trade deal in history to embracing protectionism in little more than a decade? While it is tempting to attribute this new opening simply to Trump’s return to the White House, recent events unfold against the backdrop of deeper structural tensions.
…
Auteur: Jan Boguslawski
