So, in a bid to salvage what’s left of the €1.6 trillion transatlantic trade relationship, the EU is placing its bet on modest progress. If TTIP wasn’t possible when negotiators were more or less pulling in the same direction 10 years ago, it’s even less viable now.
“TTIP was already very hard to do at the time when we were actually negotiating it, even if at that point both sides shared common objectives,” said Ignacio García Bercero, who was then the EU’s chief negotiator for the deal.
“It became very clear that it was going to become extremely hard to find a way to reach an agreement that the European Union would have been able to present as being balanced. And that was in totally different circumstances than the ones that we are having today,” he said.
Doomed deal
Puffed by its proponents as the biggest bilateral trade agreement ever, TTIP initially seemed straightforward, such were the huge potential economic benefits for both sides. Then-trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said it would put up to an additional €545 in the pockets of European families every year.
But a political backlash over the secrecy of the talks as well as worries over environmental, health and labor standards eventually doomed the agreement.
An obscure arbitration scheme, known as the investor-to-state dispute settlement mechanism, heightened tensions because it was seen as giving disproportionate power to multinationals in challenging European rules.
