What really bothers me, as citizen of an european country, why is it possible to have secret deals? If I don't know about such deals how can I call my representative to oppose them? Or encourage them to take the deal if it's a good one.
AFAIK, TTIP was leaked and that's the only way european citizens knew about it.
Why is it legal? Because all I see is corporations trying to make a sweet deal with governments, and the loosing side is always the people.
That's the only incentive I see to make deals secret.
There are no secret trade deals. What there are is closed-door trade negotiations, because it's impossible to get anything done if every time you open your mouth you have street protests from the industries you're considering removing protectionist measures from.
A trade deal has to be negotiated, and your position as a negotiator improves when you and the other side know that you can follow through on any commitment you make.
Therefore it follows that anyone who can negotiate from a position of secrecy or absolute power (dictatorship) is in a better position to achieve his goals during a negotiation.
You might laugh at this but I believe this is exactly how the EU commission thinks about this. Maybe they will try later again in a more dictatorial manner since secrecy has failed, who knows.
The other extreme would be that you negotiate from a position where you are constantly attacked by NGOs and your own people, which certainly doesn't help with creating trust that you can follow through on anything you sign. You can certainly place your signature on a document but it means nothing because you can't execute.
This was actually a problem during the Cold War crisis between JFK and the Soviet leaders. The Soviets were hard to convince that JFK could follow through because he was so heavily opposed by his senior military staff. They actually believed that there was a real possibility that JFK would be disposed by a military coup so they thought a war between the Soviet Union and the US was imminent and acted accordingly.
> European Union ministers today admitted that a giant EU-US trade deal is dead in its current form, with drastic change needed to salvage any hope of a deal going ahead.
The devil, as always, is in the fine print - a cynic might read that to mean "TTIP has gotten such a bad reputation we would rather wait a few more years so the public forgets all about it, then try again."
In fact, I am tempted to quote Lovecraft here, except that a few years hardly count as "eternal".
They have realized that multinational corporations can screw the citizens of the EU just as well through CETA, which is about to get ratified on October 27.
Offtopic, but does anyone else find Lovecraft too over-the-top? I know that many people like him, but it gets tiresome that everything is nameless, frightful, indescribable, hideous, hellish, monstrous, indescribable, etc. He's not very subtle at all with his descriptions, even a house that was previously established as super creepy gets an "abominable" when referring to it.
I found him so over the top that I wanted to confirm my hunch experimentally, and made a list of the 150 most prominent words in his opus. It is unsurprising:
An optimist might read that to mean "Europeans found out that trade deals can be a lot better than what TTIP offered. Such as CETA which the EU is about to close with Canada".
"Despite the rumours and assertions by several Member States that TTIP is dead, the fight for safeguarding citizens’ rights and freedoms via so-called “trade agreements” is far from over ... Greenpeace Netherlands has released another batch of crucial and worrying documents ... EU privacy and data protection standards are endangered and diminished in 6 out of the 9 analysed documents ... Exceptions for “essential security interests” are a Damocles sword over every single part of the agreement ... TiSA can limit the access and transfer of software source code."
> Under a similar trade deal the government of Ecuador was ordered to pay German oil company Occidental $2.3 billion for, apparently legally, terminating a contract.
No. Occidental is a US company, the trade deal was US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty ("BIT"):
Such kind of penalties are planned by TTIP too, and I don't see the major EU leaders rejecting that approach.
Also, don't forget there's at least CETA and TISA, and CETA is to be signed very soon. More demonstrations are needed if EU citizens want to attempt to affect anything!
So the US negotiators don't want to concede anything. So then one questions what they had in mind to convince the EU negotiators to go on with the deal...
US elites got used to a very sweet state of things in transatlantic relations post-1989, and it got even better after 9/11. Steamrolling Europeans was almost too easy, because Euroelites had been fully co-opted by the American way.
Unfortunately, 13 years of unpopular wars have taken their toll. There are now two generations of politically-active Europeans who were not invested in the Cold War, and see the US fundamentally as a big bully. Couple that with tight economic times (which, many feel, have been foisted upon us by reckless American finance), waves of unwanted migrants generated by US foreign policy, and the self-inflicted loss of influence of "Airstrip One" Britain over EU matters, and you have a situation where US negotiators likely found themselves surprised by European pushback on all sorts of topics.
It's also due to the US elections. The same thing happened last time. Negotiations will come back under a new name - and probably a slightly different scope and form, after the new administration has been designated.
Yup. Obama is sliding into lame-duck territory, with a Congress that won't agree with him on anything. Chances of successfully sliding anything in before January are not good, and then it will be a more-or-less different regime involved.
The issue people are failing to see, is that usually, countries are negotiating against each other, for their own perceived interest. The much valued "rule of law" only applies within countries, not internationally. There are no "international law" for trade.
So it's a murky situation from the beginning. I think the TTIP is an attempt to have a common ground to end up with something instead of nothing. Of course there are huge interests at stake here, and I want to be the devil's advocate for once to try and understand the real philosophy of the treaty without the cynicism and a more strategic view in mind.
> So it's a murky situation from the beginning. I think the TTIP is an attempt to have a common ground to end up with something instead of nothing.
That's the standard rationalization we've been fed form EU comission as well. But when that "something" means that we give up on our EU consumer protection laws to benefit american corporate profits it's actively harmful and against the values of people actually living in EU.
[+] [-] erhardm|9 years ago|reply
AFAIK, TTIP was leaked and that's the only way european citizens knew about it.
Why is it legal? Because all I see is corporations trying to make a sweet deal with governments, and the loosing side is always the people.
That's the only incentive I see to make deals secret.
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DominikR|9 years ago|reply
Therefore it follows that anyone who can negotiate from a position of secrecy or absolute power (dictatorship) is in a better position to achieve his goals during a negotiation.
You might laugh at this but I believe this is exactly how the EU commission thinks about this. Maybe they will try later again in a more dictatorial manner since secrecy has failed, who knows.
The other extreme would be that you negotiate from a position where you are constantly attacked by NGOs and your own people, which certainly doesn't help with creating trust that you can follow through on anything you sign. You can certainly place your signature on a document but it means nothing because you can't execute.
This was actually a problem during the Cold War crisis between JFK and the Soviet leaders. The Soviets were hard to convince that JFK could follow through because he was so heavily opposed by his senior military staff. They actually believed that there was a real possibility that JFK would be disposed by a military coup so they thought a war between the Soviet Union and the US was imminent and acted accordingly.
[+] [-] sehr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|9 years ago|reply
Indeed. That alone, makes me not want to even take a look at the text and dismiss it right away as negative for the vast amounts of the population.
[+] [-] krylon|9 years ago|reply
The devil, as always, is in the fine print - a cynic might read that to mean "TTIP has gotten such a bad reputation we would rather wait a few more years so the public forgets all about it, then try again."
In fact, I am tempted to quote Lovecraft here, except that a few years hardly count as "eternal".
[+] [-] pipio21|9 years ago|reply
I am not against any trade deals, but against this particular deal with those particular conditions because of some particular reasons.
[+] [-] singularity2001|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|9 years ago|reply
I found him so over the top that I wanted to confirm my hunch experimentally, and made a list of the 150 most prominent words in his opus. It is unsurprising:
https://i.imgur.com/pUUzFCJ.png
[+] [-] jpfr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerique|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam4ritan|9 years ago|reply
A lot of the stuff that was in there got reused in TTIP.
[+] [-] walterbell|9 years ago|reply
"Despite the rumours and assertions by several Member States that TTIP is dead, the fight for safeguarding citizens’ rights and freedoms via so-called “trade agreements” is far from over ... Greenpeace Netherlands has released another batch of crucial and worrying documents ... EU privacy and data protection standards are endangered and diminished in 6 out of the 9 analysed documents ... Exceptions for “essential security interests” are a Damocles sword over every single part of the agreement ... TiSA can limit the access and transfer of software source code."
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply
No. Occidental is a US company, the trade deal was US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty ("BIT"):
http://kluwerarbitrationblog.com/2012/12/19/icsids-largest-a...
Such kind of penalties are planned by TTIP too, and I don't see the major EU leaders rejecting that approach.
Also, don't forget there's at least CETA and TISA, and CETA is to be signed very soon. More demonstrations are needed if EU citizens want to attempt to affect anything!
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ttip-ceta-tisa-trade-dea...
[+] [-] lumberjack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, 13 years of unpopular wars have taken their toll. There are now two generations of politically-active Europeans who were not invested in the Cold War, and see the US fundamentally as a big bully. Couple that with tight economic times (which, many feel, have been foisted upon us by reckless American finance), waves of unwanted migrants generated by US foreign policy, and the self-inflicted loss of influence of "Airstrip One" Britain over EU matters, and you have a situation where US negotiators likely found themselves surprised by European pushback on all sorts of topics.
[+] [-] soufron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|9 years ago|reply
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-...
[+] [-] mynameislegion|9 years ago|reply
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-...
[+] [-] wanderr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|9 years ago|reply
So it's a murky situation from the beginning. I think the TTIP is an attempt to have a common ground to end up with something instead of nothing. Of course there are huge interests at stake here, and I want to be the devil's advocate for once to try and understand the real philosophy of the treaty without the cynicism and a more strategic view in mind.
[+] [-] izacus|9 years ago|reply
That's the standard rationalization we've been fed form EU comission as well. But when that "something" means that we give up on our EU consumer protection laws to benefit american corporate profits it's actively harmful and against the values of people actually living in EU.
[+] [-] sztwiorok|9 years ago|reply
I am sure that most people like me do not have a clue about what is ttip
[+] [-] walterbell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply