ABSTRACT
At the G8 summit on 17 June 2013 the leaders of the EU and the United States launched talks for a TTIP agreement, described by British prime minister and G8 chair, David Cameron, as the ‘biggest bilateral trade deal in history’ that would reinforce the two transatlantic partners as the ‘backbone of the world economy’ (quoted in Financial Times 18 June 2013). The first round of negotiations began in July 2013 in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Eurasian continent, negotiators for a TPP agreement, itself launched at an APEC summit in November 2011, continued with their twentieth round of negotiations in Ottawa, Canada in July 2014. According to the US Trade Representative’s official website, TPP ‘will enhance trade and investment among the partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development and support the creation and retention of jobs’.1 With the launching and declaratory posturing of the TTIP negotiations, the US ‘pivot’, or rebalancing, towards Asia, in which the TPP was seen as the economic dimension, would seem to be in the process of being accompanied by a ‘(re)pivot’ or ‘(re)rebalancing’ towards Europe. This chapter aims to contextualize and analyse movement and drivers towards a TPP and TTIP within broader developments: the proliferation of bilateral, monolateral and (to a much lesser extent) inter-regional PTAs. Over 300 PTAs exist worldwide, with the Asia-Pacific region experiencing the largest increase in such agreements over the last decade or so. Indeed bilateral and monolateral PTAs have become the main means of advancing Asian (and Asia-Pacific) regional integration. Within Asia and the Pacific the United States has been a major actor in initiating PTAs through agreements with Singapore, Australia and Korea as well as several Latin Amer ican countries. As for the EU in East Asia, the EU has ratified PTAs with South Korea and Singapore, is continuing negotiations with India as well as Malaysia and Thailand and has held five rounds of negotiations with Japan. However, none of these agreements can be seen in isolation for, as Meunier and Morin (forthcoming) argue, they emerge and
evolve within an existing dense regime of complicated, overlapping arrangements. Indeed, according to these authors, over the last decade or so this complex regime has expanded not only institutionally but also thematically and geographically. The chapter is structured in the following way. First, having outlined our conceptual framework, we examine the drivers behind the exponential growth of PTAs, which we suggest are hybrid forms of asymmetrical bilateralism and interregionalism. Second, we enter into our case studies by providing a comparative analysis of the processes involved in establishing the TPP and the TTIP. Last, we draw from these two cases to suggest that there are two unique and, so far, largely unnoticed, drivers in these processes. These are, on the one hand, a desire for hegemonic norm-or rule-setting designed to constrain exogenous actors. On the other hand, it is argued on the basis of comparison that the double pivoting conducted by the United States demonstrates a securitization of economic relations in the Asia-Pacific and an ‘economization’ of security across the Atlantic. In the latter case, the EU joins with the United States in seeking to impose global norms or rules designed to maintain a continued global preeminence in the face of a rising China.
