Examine TTIP's Real Potential – for Good or Bad
The current level of skepticism about cooperation with the United States allows pervasive assumptions to go unchecked when discussing issues of transatlantic cooperation, where they can at times obscure relevant facts. These issues should be considered in terms of actual facts, rather than anti-American assumptions. By Jörg Wolf and Matthew Skinner.
Better dialogue with the public is needed to move past inaccurate assumptions where possible, and also to identify those issues that are just too controversial to be included in a trade deal. If TTIP is ratified without addressing these concerns, it could damage the "image" of transatlantic cooperation and endanger European-American cooperation on other issues in the future by guilt of association.
European, and specifically German, attitudes towards the United States have become increasingly negative, as several Review 2014 commentators have already noted.
Joachim Krause wrote that "transatlantic relations are at an all-time low, and significant erosion of the alliance can no longer be ruled out." And Timothy Garton Ash expressed "concern about attitudes towards the United States that one finds in parts of German public opinion and published opinion."
Of course there are clear reasons for this; the US has damaged its image with the Iraq war and Guantanamo, and more recently with the coming to light of the magnitude and nature of NSA surveillance. However, these attitudes and a certain level of deep-rooted Anti-Americanism sometimes infect other dialogues with some irrationality and unexamined assumptions that, if properly examined within those contexts, might be dismissed as irrelevant or false.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is currently being negotiated between the US and EU, is one example of such spill-over effects.
The Atlantische Initiative e.V. endeavors to bring a little bit more reason, rationality and geostrategic thinking into the TTIP discourse. Our open think tank atlantic-community.org provides a platform for both critics and supporters to debate with each other about the merits and risks of TTIP in a thoughtful and constructive fashion. With more than 8,000 members from around the world we engage primarily the next generation of decision makers and opinion shapers and hope to revitalize the transatlantic relationship, renew trust and the spirit of cooperation.
To see how the TTIP debate is tainted by mistrust towards America, it is worthwhile to examine the way that regulation is discussed in relation to TTIP. Unfortunately, the debate on this topic often carries the implicit assumption that 'regulatory harmonization', a primary goal of the negotiations, implies the existence of qualitatively different regulations in the US and the EU.
In turn, it is assumed that the regulations coming from across the Atlantic are the less safe ones, which TTIP will inevitably force on the European market. However, all of this belies the fact that regulations can be different without being more or less safe, and thus that harmonization does not necessarily equate to downgrading European standards to be in line with American ones.
Two of our members have noted exactly this, citing the example of seatbelt regulations in the two trade areas. In the US, seatbelt regulations are based on trials that use unbelted crash test dummies, whereas in the EU the corresponding regulations are based on trials using belted ones. As a result, airbags in the US must be larger and inflate more forcefully.
Additionally, it should be obvious that American regulations are not necessarily less safe across all cases. A case in point was given by another author who wrote that, as a result of the financial crisis, US regulations for the banking sector have become stricter than those in the EU. This fact contradicts the image that many US critics have, and could be used to promote TTIP in Germany. These two cases demonstrate that harmonization has the potential to be neutral or even positive in terms of qualitative effects on German and European regulations.
Much TTIP criticism is based more on skepticism about the US and gut reaction than anything else. Chlorine rinsed chickens (Chlorhühnchen as they are sometimes referred to in Germany) have become an icon of the debate, and it seems to have less to do with the body of research available regarding their safety for consumption than it has to do with the face value revulsion that the combination of chlorine and meat offers to the imagination.
This, combined with the fact that Europe is presumed to be safer in general, based on the precautionary principle for consumer standards, and the conflation of the American food industry with big time corporate interests such as Monsanto, gives people a quick and unexamined conclusion to which they can jump: chlorine chicken (as a proxy for American food) is dangerous and will be forced on the European market as a result of TTIP.
None of this is to claim categorically that TTIP will do no harm to the overall safety of regulations in the EU (or the US for that matter). Rather it is to say that mistrust towards all things American restricts the German public's ability to fully consider the situation and in consequence affects their lawmakers' room for maneuver. TTIP has the potential to strengthen the EU and US economies, revitalize the transatlantic partnership and take charge in standard setting worldwide.
Therefore, it at least merits a deep discussion in which assumptions and prejudices are cleared away in favor of facts. This goes, by the way, for claims about the said potential benefits of TTIP as well. These claims need to be scrutinized as much as the claims about negative impacts. This is one of the goals of the Atlantische Initiative's project "TTIP: Myths vs. Reality" at atlantic-community.org.
Better dialogue with the public is needed to move past inaccurate assumptions where possible, and also to identify those issues that are just too controversial to be included in a trade deal.
Proponents should also keep in mind the emotionality of certain consumer issues: If TTIP is ratified without addressing these concerns, it could damage the "image" of transatlantic cooperation and endanger European-American cooperation on other issues in the future by guilt of association.
