ABSTRACT
Bilateral trade and investment negotiations, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are often analysed with metaphors borrowed from mechanics, like ‘building blocks’, ‘stumbling stones’, ‘parallel tracks’, ‘hub and spoke’, ‘gravity models’, ‘ratchet effect’, ‘domino theory’, ‘bicycle theory’ etc. These mechanical metaphors are not just nice figures of speech. As heuristic devices, they powerfully – and perhaps insidiously – structure our thinking. They imply that trade and investment agreements are created independently from one another and that their internal composition remains stable until they fall apart under exogenous pressure. These assumptions are useful if one is aiming to isolate variables, attribute causality and predict impacts. But are these mechanical metaphors at all accurate in the first place?
